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  When Qinshihuang died, the empire disintegrated. Ji became part of a revived Kingdom of Yan. Irrigators tapped the Yongding and Gaoliang rivers to the city’s north and farming flourished. Ji grew famed again for the excellence of its fruit, dates and chestnuts as well as its sericulture and the sweetness of its wells. But by the fourth century BCE corruption, along with rebellion, banditry, nomadic raids and a plague of locusts, reduced this prosperous city to a burned-out and depopulated wasteland. Ji’s fortunes rose and fell numerous times over the next two centuries until, in 581, the Sui dynasty managed to unify China once more.

  Monument to Three Millennia of Urban History at Guang’anmen.

  The Sui made Ji part of an administrative prefecture they called Youzhou. The new regime press-ganged more than a million men to continue the work of building the Great Walls as well as roads, granaries and supply lines for their armies. Five million more achieved the monumental feat of digging the Grand Canal that connected the Yellow, Yangtze, Qiantang and Huai rivers, linking Ji directly with the wealthy southern city of Hangzhou. Ji grew secure and prosperous once more. Its population soared to 100,000. And yet the continuing pressures of corvée labour and high taxes in all parts of the empire pushed people once more into poverty, banditry and rebellion. In 624 the Sui fell and the golden age of the Tang dynasty began.

  The Tang, which had its capital in today’s Xi’an, turned Youzhou into a military base from which to mount expeditions against the increasingly belligerent northern tribes. Buddhism was not unknown in China before the Tang and the first Chinese translations of Buddhist texts had appeared four centuries earlier. But the legendary pilgrimage of the monk Xuanzang, who travelled the Silk Road to India, returning with 22 horses laden with scriptures, icons and other Buddhist miscellany (an odyssey immortalized in the novel Journey to the West, on which the popular ‘Monkey’ stories are based), led to its popularization. Fittingly, Beijing’s earliest Buddhist temple dates from this time. It was called the Minzhong (Mourning the Loyal) Temple, in honour of soldiers fallen in the northern campaigns, specifically that against the Korean kingdom of Goguryeo. An ornamental stone pillar just south of the Fayuan (Source of the Law) Temple, in Beijing’s Xuanwu District, marks the site of the original buildings of the Minzhong Temple. These had been destroyed, over the course of centuries, by war, fire and earthquakes. Another Beijing Buddhist temple with antecedents in the Tang is the Wofo (Reclining Buddha) Temple in the Western Hills. Beijing’s largest temple devoted to China’s native philosophy-cum-religion of Daoism (sometimes spelled Taoism in English), Baiyun Guan (White Cloud Temple), also dates back to this era.

  Even the glorious Tang eventually fell into the trap of misrule and rebellion. In the century and a half between 763 and 934, Youzhou changed hands 28 times. If King Zhao is ancient Beijing’s most fondly recalled ruler, its most hated dates to this time. The Tang warlord Liu Rengong (r. 895–914) forced his subjects to trade in their copper coins for ones of iron and clay, conscripted every man between the ages of 15 and 70 into his army, and even banned the importation of tea from the south so that people had to buy the inferior local herb over which he enjoyed a monopoly. His own son overthrew him and another warlord killed them both.

  In 938 the Buddhist Khitan people, who ultimately vanquished the Tang, took the city. Related to the Mongols, the Khitans readily assimilated people of other ethnicities into their ranks. While preserving aspects of their own culture such as male–female egalitarianism, they happily adopted useful aspects of Chinese culture and governance. Having grown strong and rich controlling trade along the Silk Road, they were so well known among nations that even today, the Russians use the word kitaitsy to mean Chinese. Cathay, medieval Europe’s name for China, is a variant of Khitay. Declaring the founding of the Greater Liao (Boundless) dynasty in 947, the Khitans renamed the city Nanjing, or ‘southern capital’ – which, from the perspective of people from the far north, it was. Although Nanjing was only one of the Liao’s five capitals, it was the largest and most populous.

  But the Liao hadn’t managed to conquer all of China. In 979, the rival southern-based Song dynasty dispatched an army of 300,000 northwards to take the city. The brave and capable Liao Empress Dowager Xiao Chuo commanded the Khitan army that drove back the Song; she eventually enforced a treaty that heralded a century of peace. Xiao Chuo’s considerable legacy also included the introduction of civil service examinations, a ban on the murder of slaves and significant tax reform.

  Monument marking the original site of the Minzhong Temple.

  Buddhist monk in ‘mobile’ meditation at Fayuan Temple

  GOOD FAITH

  The Daoists tell the story of a (most likely apocryphal) meeting between Confucius (551–479 BCE) and the founder of philosophical Daoism, Lao Zi (dates uncertain – probably lived sometime between 604 and 471 BCE). Confucius began to explain his ideas, which centre on the notion of moral governance from the state down through to the family. Interrupting, Lao Zi told him to get to the point. Confucius replied: ‘goodness and duty’. Were these, Lao Zi asked, ‘qualities natural to man’? Confucius said they were. If man learned to follow the natural course, or Dao, Lao Zi replied, ‘you will no longer need to go round laboriously advertising goodness and duty, like the town-crier with his drum, seeking for news of a lost child.’

  No self-respecting Daoist would work for government, but no self-respecting Confucian would give up trying for the job. Confucianism has informed the philosophy and rituals of governance in China from ancient times; even the Communists embrace it today. Beijing’s stately Confucian Temple, which dates back to the time of Khubilai Khan, is the second-largest in the country after that found in Confucius’s home town of Qufu in Shandong province. Beijing’s largest and most ancient Daoist temple, the sublime Baiyun Guan (White Cloud Temple), meanwhile, is home to China’s Daoism Association and a few dozen blue-robed, top-knotted monks.

  Historically, the majority of Beijing’s temples have been Buddhist, including, as in the case of the Lama Temple, the Tibetan-Mongolian variant known as Lamaism. The city’s biggest mosque, on Niu Jie in the city’s southwest, dates back to 996 CE, and its earliest Nestorian Christian monument to the fourteenth century. In Maoist times, all religions were condemned as ‘superstition’ (except worship of Mao himself). Today, anything goes – except cults with anti-Communist overtones (Falun Gong), religions aligned with a foreign power (Roman Catholicism), ‘unregistered’ churches and evangelicals, for atheists have the right to practise their non-beliefs without harassment.

  In 1012 the Liao renamed the city again, calling it Yanjing (Capital of Swallows). Another cycle of prosperity began and its people prayed for the good times to continue at a growing number of Buddhist temples. One, the Tianning, featured a 60-m-tall brick pagoda that even now stands sentinel in the city’s southwest, just north of Guang’anmen. A Muslim community settled in the neighbourhood of what is still called Niu Jie (Ox Street), building a mosque that, many times redeveloped, serves the community to this day.

  Prayers couldn’t stop the Jurchens, however, another ambitious northern tribe. For a while, the Jurchens paid tribute to the Liao. But legend has it that in 1112, when the Liao emperor demanded the Jurchen chieftain Aguta dance for his entertainment, he refused. When Aguta galloped up to the walls of Yanjing at the head of his army, the citizens threw open the gates rather than endure a siege. In 1115, Aguta declared himself emperor of the new Jin (Gold) dynasty. Just over a decade later, the Jurchens rode south and burned most of the towns in the southeast of China to the ground.

  The Jurchens renamed Yanjing Zhongdu (Central Capital), and made it the seat of their empire in 1153. They expanded the walled city to about 5 km in circumference and banished some 30,000 potentially rebellious households to the south of the city walls.

  In 1179 Aguta’s grandson, the Shizong emperor, bequeathed to the city one of its most beloved features: its lakes, outside what were then the city walls to the northeast. He had an
island constructed in the centre of Taiye Pond (today’s Beihai, or North Lake) and called it Qionghua Dao (known in English as Hortensia Isle). There he built what became his favourite xinggong, ‘detached palace’, or palace away from the palace. Like the Khitans, the Jurchens acquired some Chinese cultural tastes; in the case of the Shizong emperor, for the unusually shaped and weathered stones in formations called jiashan, ‘artificial mountains’, that are a trademark of Chinese garden design. When Shizong sacked the Song capital of Kaifeng, he had his troops souvenir the Song emperor’s considerable collection. These found a permanent home on Hortensia Isle. Later emperors of the Jin grew so fond of the detached palace on Hortensia Isle that they stayed there from March through to August every year.

  Detail of the Marco Polo Bridge today.

  Shizong was also enamoured of Xiang Shan (Fragrant Mountain) and Yuquan Shan (Jade Spring Mountain) to the city’s northwest, building pleasances and temples in the hills. He constructed the famous ‘water garden’, Diaoyutai (Fishing Terrace), south of the marshlands of Haidian. As the population grew, hydrologists built on the foundations of the Sui irrigation works, tapping the Jade Spring and other new sources of water for farmland. The Jin engineers also constructed the magnificent marble bridge spanning the Lugou River that’s known in English today as the Marco Polo Bridge.

  Genghis Khan, born Temujin (1162–1227).

  In April 1214, less than 100 years after the Jurchens expelled the Khitans, Genghis Khan came knocking at the gates. By then, Zhongdu had a population of 1 million residing in 250,000 households; its palaces and many of its buildings were among the finest of their time.

  Genghis Khan had a well-deserved reputation for fierceness. It’s said that when one of his warriors suggested that falconry was life’s greatest pleasure, Genghis Khan averred that better still was the act of vanquishing one’s enemies, seizing their horses and possessions and ravishing their ‘weeping women’. It took a mighty bribe of 3,000 horses, 1,000 young men and women (undoubtedly weeping), mounds of gold, hoards of silver, reams of silk, and one exceptionally beautiful princess, the daughter of the Jin Emperor, to persuade the Great Khan to leave the city in peace. One year later, he was back for a bout of ‘glorious slaughter’. He left the streets running with blood and the prized palaces of the Jin reduced to ash and rubble.

  2 Khanbalik

  Europeans who experienced the sanguinary depredations of Genghis Khan’s cavalry called the Mongols ‘Tartars’ and their realm ‘Tartary’ after Tartarus, the hell of Greek mythology. The Chinese considered them barbarians. Yet it was Khubilai Khan, Genghis’s grandson, who created Beijing’s most legendary incarnation, Khanbalik (City of the Khan).

  By 1260 the Mongol realm stretched from Korea to eastern Europe. In 1271 Khubilai, inheriting the Chinese portion of the realm, established the Yuan (Original) dynasty. He would build his capital at Zhongdu. A Khitan man called Yelu Chucai, whose father had served the Jurchen Jin dynasty, had persuaded both Genghis Khan and his son and successor Ögedei that their Chinese subjects were more useful – and taxable – alive than dead, and that the Chinese system of governance that both the Liao and Jin had adopted was a sound one.

  Khubilai also benefited from advice given to him by his mother, Sorghaghtani Beki. She was herself one of the towering figures of her age. She won the praise of poets, missionaries, historians and scholars from many lands; the great Syriac scholar Bar Hebraeus said of her: ‘If I were to see among the race of women another woman like this, I should say that the race of women was far superior to that of men.’ For a time, Sorghaghtani Beki administered parts of the Mongol empire including some of what is now Hebei Province; she passed on to her son valuable insights on how best to rule an agricultural people.

  For the design of his capital, Khubilai turned to yet another adviser, the Chinese Buddhist monk Zicong. Zicong had authored a treatise on feng shui, Chinese geomancy, titled The Canon of the Jade Ruler. Zicong was also an authority on ancient Confucian and Daoist texts including the I Ching (Book of Changes). The 63-year-old polymath had already designed one fabled city for the Khan. When, to quote Coleridge, ‘in Xanadu, did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree’, he had decreed it from Zicong.

  Statue of Khubilai Khan in the Yuan Dynasty Relics Park.

  Now Zicong was to design Khanbalik, or as it was known in Chinese, Dadu (Great Capital), in accordance with an extension of feng shui that Hok-Lam Chan, the author of Legends of the Building of Old Peking, calls ‘astral geography’. This ancient form of urban planning was based on the notion that the emperor was to his court and domain as the Pole Star was to the constellations. If the earthly realm reflected the celestial order, then ruler and ruled would enjoy peace, stability and prosperity. By situating the ruler’s palace within three concentric sets of walls, one for the palace itself, one for the Imperial Precinct enclosing it and one for the city as a whole – the number three suggesting heaven, earth and humankind – the scheme places the emperor at the symbolic nucleus of the universe. These principles guided the layout of the canal city Suzhou, the Tang capital Chang’an (Xi’an) and the Han dynasty’s Luoyang. In Khanbalik, they reached their supreme expression.

  The Jurchens’ palace had not even given a cursory nod to the principles of feng shui. Its central axis ran east–west, not north–south. It had neither mountains at the back to block the flow of negative yin, nor slow-flowing water and a clear view to the south to encourage positive yang. The Yuan would have to start from scratch.

  Augurs foretold that if Khanbalik were constructed on the exact site of Zhongdu, rebellion would follow. The feng shui of the area to the immediate northeast, however, was superb: like a ‘coiling dragon, crouching tiger’. As for the precise location of the palace, Zicong credited the guidance of a tree just south of today’s Tiananmen; Khubilai gave the tree the rank of ‘general’ and hung lanterns on its branches at festival time.

  By 1276 nearly 30 km of tall, tapering tamped-earth walls had risen around the new, nearly square city. Under the bright northern sun they shone yoghurt-white like the Mongol yurts; whereas for Chinese, white was the colour of mourning, for Mongols it signified celebration and nobility. Nine guarded, gleaming red gates pierced the white walls. Attached to each was a specialized storeroom holding quivers, saddles, bridles or other equipment for the Mongol cavalry.

  Fifty is a significant number in the I Ching. Zicong gave the city 50 square residential, administrative and commercial wards. Nine straight north–south and east–west avenues, each about 36 m wide, broad enough for nine chariots to travel side by side, gridded the city. The minor streets were half as wide. Then there were 29 east–west hutong, residential alleyways, which, at 6–7 m across, were half as wide again as the smaller streets. Khanbalik’s precise geometry was only broken in elegant accommodation of the Jin dynasty lakes, now enclosed within the city itself and, in the case of Beihai (North Lake) and Zhonghai (Central Lake), inside the walled Imperial Precinct.

  The grey-walled hutong, and the courtyard homes known as siheyuan that they contain, are residential Beijing’s most emblematic features. The word hutong only occurs in Beijing and its immediate environs. It is a loanword from Mongolian and other central Asian languages, and most likely means a drinking well; all the first hutong were lanes with wells. According to the linguist Zhang Qingchang, it was originally pronounced ‘huto’. Eight different ways of transcribing the sound in Chinese characters were eventually unified into the current one . The first documented reference to hutong in the Chinese language is the Yuan dynasty play Zhang sheng zhu hai (Zhang Sheng Boils the Sea) by Li Haogu, in which one character asks ‘Where can I find you?’ and another answers, ‘Zhuanta Hutong’, Brick Pagoda Hutong – which can still be found just west of today’s commercial street Xidan.

  In 1285 the former residents of Zhongdu began moving into Khanbalik. First in were the elites, who were allocated the most desirable properties. By 1290, Khanbalik was the grandest capital of any Chinese
dynasty to its time and among the finest cities in the world. Its most famous chronicler, the Venetian traveller Marco Polo, wrote of ‘Cambulac’ with awe:

  The streets are so straight and wide that you can see right along them from end to end and from one gate to the other . . . the whole city is arranged in squares just like a chessboard.

  When asked for directions, the people of Beijing, even now, tend to give directions by referring to the points of the compass, east, west, north or south, rather than right or left. Marco Polo described how these avenues were lined with trees that provided shade in summer and, in winter storms, helped travellers find their way. He marvelled at the many grand buildings, fine homes, inns, shops and temples as well as specialist markets for gems and geese, camels and hats.

  Post roads ribboned out from the city gates. The Mongols’ pony express was so fast and efficient that, according to a later visitor from Venice, the Catholic missionary Odoric de Pordenone, ‘the Grand Khan receives news in twenty-four hours from countries at a distance of at least three days’ ordinary riding’. Vibrant suburbs sprang up along the post roads. They encompassed markets of their own, caravanserais housing great crowds of travellers, merchants and ambassadors, and brothels staffed by tens of thousands of prostitutes. Khanbalik’s suburban population at times equalled that of the city itself: some half a million by the end of the thirteenth century.