Beijing

by Linda Jaivin

  Khubilai charged a Chinese hydrologist called Guo Shoujing with reconstructing the Grand Canal of the Sui dynasty, by then in ruins. Diverting water from the Jade Stream in the Western Hills, Guo repaired, re-routed and shortened the canal. He devised an ingenious system of 24 locks. These allowed barges pulled by teams of peasants all the way from Hangzhou, and loaded with southern goods and foodstuffs, to dock at Jishuitan (Collecting Water Pool) where, Marco Polo attested, they received a raucous welcome of gongs and drums. Guo also created a reservoir for the waters of the Jade Spring, known today as Kunming Lake (on the grounds of the Summer Palace). The Khitan adviser Yelu Chucai was buried on the shore of the lake, where a small temple to his memory still stands. Only at the turn of the twentieth century did railways and shipping render Guo’s hydraulics obsolete.

  Of all the wonders of Khanbalik, none matched the Khan’s palace – according to Marco Polo, ‘the greatest palace that ever was’. Its single-storey buildings were crowned with ‘lofty’ roofs, their walls ‘all covered with gold and silver’ and decorated with gilt dragons, ‘beasts and birds, knights and gods’. It featured marble stairways and a hall ‘so large that it could easily dine 6,000 people’. Marco Polo wrote:

  The building is altogether so vast, so rich, and so beautiful, that no man on earth could design anything superior to it. The outside of the roof is all [coloured] with vermilion and yellow and green and blue and other [colours], which are fixed with a varnish so fine and exquisite that they shine like crystal . . .

  The Yuan dynasty reservoir Kunming Lake today (part of the Summer Palace).

  Among the innumerable treasures of the palace was a gold and pearl-studded clepsydra, a water clock, with a golden figurine that announced the hour with placards.

  Parklands recreated the wild landscape of the Mongolian steppes and complemented the architectural grandeur of the palace. Ducks, geese and swans swam in the lakes, including Taiye Pond (today’s Beihai). Wildflowers of Mongolian blue bloomed on their shores, and white stags, gazelles and roebucks grazed under fruiting trees. The lake itself was stocked with all varieties of fish for the emperor’s table, prevented by metal grates from escaping to the rivers that fed into and flowed out of the lake.

  On the Jin dynasty Hortensia Isle, Khubilai Khan built an artificial hill, Green Mount, of which Marco Polo reported:

  Foreigners picnicking on Beijing’s city walls, 1919.

  EXOTICA

  Marco Polo tells us that at Khubilai Khan’s great banquets, Mongolian barons helped ‘foreigners, who do not know the customs of the Court’, from committing such literal faux pas as stepping on the raised threshold when entering (an act punishable by a beating).

  The Khan’s successors didn’t make it so easy for foreigners in Beijing to cross that threshold. Jesuits squeaked into the Ming and Qing courts only because they possessed knowledge the court found useful. It took an unequal treaty forced on the Qing in 1844 to legalize teaching Chinese to foreigners and another to sanction their residence in Beijing.

  By the time the Australian George Ernest Morrison (‘G. E.’ or ‘Chinese’ Morrison) arrived as correspondent for the London Times in 1897, imperialism had forced open China’s doors, but at the price of China’s humiliation. In 1949 Mao shut those doors on all but Communism’s fellow travellers. Thirty years later Deng opened them once more, but on China’s terms.

  Today, nearly 200,000 foreigners reside in Beijing, 70,000 of them students. Despite the conspicuousness of those of non-Asian background, the majority hail from other Asian countries.

  Wangfujing was briefly named Morrison Street in English after the Australian, but foreigners rarely leave as much of an impression on Beijing as it leaves on them. The exceptions are those who have treated it badly, from the French and British who sacked the Yuanmingyuan in 1860 to the British man in 2012 whose drunken harassment of a Chinese woman led to his beating and viral shaming on the internet.

  Marco Polo wrote of the threshold rule that guests were ‘not expected to stick at this in going forth again, for at that time some are like to be the worse for liquor, and incapable of looking to their steps’. These days, the expectation is that they’d better do so.

  wherever a beautiful tree may exist, and the emperor gets news of it, he sends for it and has it transported with all its roots and the earth attached to them, and planted on that hill of his. No matter how big the tree may be, he gets it carried by his elephants; and in this way he has got together the most beautiful collection of trees in the whole world. He has also ordered the whole hill to be covered with green stones. Thus not only are the trees all green, but the hill itself is all green likewise; and there is nothing to be seen on it that is not green; and hence it is rightly called the Green Mount. On top of the hill there is another fine big palace which is all green inside and out. Thus, the hill, the trees, and the palace form together a charming spectacle.

  The ‘fine big palace’ was Khubilai’s legendary ‘detached palace’, the Jade Palace. The Khan and his guests reached the isle by crossing a bridge, described by Odoric as ‘the finest that I have ever seen, both for the quality of the marble and for the delicacy of architecture.’ A Muslim architect had designed the Jade Palace complete with mechanical fountains, Turkish baths with perfumed waters and a special Rouge and Powder Pavilion where the women could freshen up. The Jade Palace was the site of endless amusements: mechanical dancing peacocks, viewings of caged beasts and feasts for up to 600 people. Men and women drank wine in golden goblets refreshed from golden pitchers or dipped into an enormous carved black jade bowl that, Marco Polo tells us, ‘[exceeded] the value of four great towns’ and that was emptied ‘by the riotous crowd of revellers as fast as pipes could bring the liquor flowing into it’. Jugglers, magicians and musicians entertained the guests until everyone was ‘full of laughter and enjoyment’.

  On other occasions, colourful ‘dragon barges’ with moving tails and fins carried jolly imperial parties over the crystal waters of the lake to opera stages and wine shops nestled in the shade of pines, junipers and willows. The Khan and his court didn’t neglect to provide spectacles for the common people, either. His grand imperial processions included one at New Year led by 500 splendidly adorned elephants. Even the ritual washing of the elephants in the moat outside the city walls on the sixth day of the sixth month was part of the pageantry of daily life in Khanbalik.

  Khubilai Khan’s ‘Green Mount’ today: Hortensia Isle in Beihai Park.

  Under Khubilai’s patronage, crafts, science, medicine and astronomy flourished in the capital, benefiting from the talents of a diverse population that included not only Mongols and Chinese, but Uighurs and others from the Central Asian deserts, Europe and the Middle East. People of all religions were welcome: Khubilai’s own mother, Sorghaghtani Beki, was a Nestorian Christian. It was to her credit that Khubilai was religiously tolerant, literate and respectful of Chinese tradition – all attributes that benefited both Khanbalik and its residents.

  Khubilai’s grandson and successor Temur Khan (r. 1294–1307) would continue the tradition of religious tolerance, welcoming to Khanbalik a papal envoy, Franciscan friar John de Montecorvino. The friar built two churches in the city and claimed to have baptized ‘more than ten thousand Tartars’, converting several prominent Nestorians to Catholicism in the process.

  Khubilai Khan was mindful of the high place of Confucianism in Chinese culture and society. This philosophy holds that a ruler’s authority is based on moral example and the advice of scholar-officials, chosen for service in the court through competitive examinations. Khubilai founded the magnificent and still extant Confucian Temple as well as the National College (Guozijian) next door, where Mongol boys studied Chinese and Chinese boys studied Mongolian. He added a state library to the complex in 1313. The temple became home to ten black stone drums acquired by the Jurchens when they sacked Kaifeng. The drums were believed to date back to the Zhou dynasty (1122–255 BCE); the hunting poems carved on them were
among the earliest examples of Chinese writing. (The original drums were lost; the drums on exhibition at the Confucian Temple today are copies from the eighteenth-century reign of the Qianlong emperor.) Khubilai conscientiously performed Confucianist state rituals such as agricultural rites at the Altar to the God of Land and Grain (in today’s Zhongshan Park adjoining the Forbidden City), and the cultivation of sesame, beans, melons and even rice in paddy-fields irrigated by the waters of Jishuitan.

  Beijing’s Confucian Temple, which dates back to the time of Khanbalik.

  Detail of stela at the Confucian Temple.

  Khubilai’s second wife Chabi, renowned for her wise policy advice as well as the hat and robe designs that would define Mongolian fashion for centuries, was an ardent devotee of Tibetan Buddhism; she even gave their first son the Tibetan name Dorghi. Khubilai restored some of the area’s ancient Buddhist temples, commissioning a Nepali architect to rebuild the Liao dynasty White Dagoba; it still stands, 51 m tall, near the old city’s southwest gate of Fuchengmen.

  Image of Nezha superimposed on plan of the Ming dynasty capital Beijing.

  The city acquired its founding myth during Khubilai’s rule. Nezha was a Tantric child deity, dharma enforcer and demon-battler with a breath of blue mist who could grow three heads and six arms at will. The story went that when Nezha bathed in the Eastern Sea, he accidentally trampled on the palace of the Dragon King, the ruler of the Bitter Sea Waste (North China Plain). In the battle for control over rain and water, Nezha slew all nine sons of the Dragon King, proving himself the perfect guardian spirit for a place subject to drowning rains and lengthy droughts. Nezha was a popular character in Yuan drama, and Khanbalik was nicknamed Nezha Town.

  For all the kowtowing to Confucius, Mongol law still reserved its harshest punishments for ethnic Chinese. In practice, imperial appointments largely supplanted the civil service examinations that had historically afforded even the least advantaged the hope that they could elevate themselves and their family fortunes through study. Qualified Han Chinese scholars found themselves sidelined in favour of the Khan’s fellow outlanders, as Persians, Turks and others took many of the plum positions at court.

  Among these ‘coloured-eye people’ (semu ren), as they were known, was Khubilai’s minister of finance, a man called Ahmed Benaketi from what is today Uzbekistan. Ahema, as he is commonly known, was corrupt and ruthless. In 1282 a 29-year-old Chinese resident of Khanbalik by the name of Wang Zhu smashed Ahema’s skull with a bronze hammer. Khubilai and his court were in Xanadu when the news of Ahema’s murder rippled through the city followed by unabashed jubilation as a citizenry long oppressed by Ahema’s shameless, incessant taxation celebrated his demise. Khubilai ordered Wang Zhu captured and killed, but once he learned the truth, he exonerated his minister’s murderer, albeit posthumously.

  Khubilai died just over a decade after this event and his successors restored the civil service exams. Yet they continued to deny Han Chinese all but the lowest offices. Overeducated, underemployed and increasingly impoverished, some literati channelled their energy and discontent into writing plays, one reason the Yuan is known as a golden age for Chinese theatre. Wang Shifu’s Xixiang Ji (Romance of the Western Chamber), a story of illicit love set in the Tang dynasty, is a Yuan classic that also provides early evidence of the er sound that Beijing people characteristically affix to the end of many words and compounds. Another famous play from that time, Guan Hanqing’s Gantian dongdi Dou E yuan (How the Injustice Done to Dou E Moved Heaven and Earth) tells the story of a young widow framed for murder by a man she refuses to marry. The theme of a defenceless woman hounded to death by a powerful and corrupt man resonated with the Mongols’ Chinese subjects.

  Wary of insurrection, the Yuan rulers imposed a curfew on the city. Once the Bell Tower in the city centre had tolled three times, no one was to leave home. Anyone caught outside for any reason less than a medical emergency could look forward to seeing in the dawn under interrogation.

  Legend has it that when the building of Khanbalik began, the first spadeful of earth that was turned unearthed a nest of red-headed worms. This spooked the monk Zicong, who saw them as an omen of dynastic collapse. Following Khubilai’s death in 1294 the old patterns soon set in: corruption, infighting and rebellion. By 1368 the Yuan was on its eighth khan in just over seven decades. Natural disasters and epidemics, including a plague similar to the Black Death that the Mongols are believed to have taken to Europe, further doomed the dynasty.

  In 1368 the Yuan dynasty was three years short of its centenary. A peasant rebel called Zhu Yuanzhang, at the head of an anti-Mongol army called the Red Turbans, stormed Khanbalik. The last Yuan emperor, Togan Timur, fled. Zhu Yuanzhang laid waste to the city that Togan Timur had called his ‘bejewelled hearth’ and declared himself the first emperor of the Ming dynasty.

  3 The Ming Dynasty (1368–1644)

  Zhu Yuanzhang set up the Ming court in warm, fertile central-south China, in a city he named Nanjing (Southern Capital – and which is still known by that name today). Though Nanjing would be safe from lightning raids by resurgent Yuan armies, the Mongol threat was still live. Beipingfu (Northern Peace Prefecture), as Khanbalik was now known, remained vital to the country’s defence. Zhu named his fourth son, the ten-year-old Zhu Di, ‘Prince of Yan’ and dispatched him to the shattered, depopulated former capital in 1370 in the care of a trusted general, Xu Da.

  To make the city easier to defend, Xu Da shrank it. He constructed a new northern boundary wall 2.9 km south of the old one while shifting the southern boundary further south by just under a kilometre to where today’s Qianmen (Front Gate) stands. At about 30 sq. km, Beipingfu was two-thirds the size of Khanbalik.

  The tamped-earth Yuan walls required constant maintenance and were vulnerable to attack. Xu Da faced the new walls with brick and topped them with crenellated ramparts. Beipingfu’s city walls, 11 m high at their tallest, were wide and strong enough to support the movements of troops, horses and chariots. Whereas the Yuan city walls had nine gates, the Ming had seven. As the dynasty progressed, barbicans, arrow towers and enceintes would further fortify the walls and gates giving them an aesthetic form and solidity that lasted well into the twentieth century.

  Zhu Di settled into a pied-à-terre of 811 rooms in the Khans’ old palace, demolishing the rest. By the time his father died, 28 years later, the intelligent and ambitious Zhu Di was in his prime and commanded a loyal army of 50,000. When he learned that his bookish 21-year-old nephew was his father’s chosen successor, Zhu Di was outraged. He rode south with his men. After three years of warfare against his nephew, the Jianwen emperor, he razed Jianwen’s palace to the ground. Jianwen’s body was never found. Zhu Di declared himself the Yongle (Perpetual Happiness) emperor and returned north.

  In January 1403 Yongle gave Beipingfu the name Beijing (Northern Capital) and made it the seat of the Ming empire. To guarantee a food supply, he dispatched soldiers and convicts to work with peasants to cultivate the surrounding wilderness. They planted hardy grains such as millet, wheat, barley and sorghum alongside crops of turnips, carrots and cabbage. On barges pulled by hundreds of coolies up the newly restored Grand Canal came supplies from the south, including rare hardwoods for the building of a grand, new palace and imperial capital.

  Yongle conscripted 1 million men to restore and construct more than 1,000 km of Great Walls snaking over the ranges north of the city, cutting off Mongol attack routes. Another million labourers, including 100,000 artisans, worked on the new palace.

  Like that of Khubilai, Yongle’s palace faced south, straddling a central north–south axis, the northern end of which was capped by Drum and Bell Towers (still standing today). The Ming situated their axis east of that of the Yuan so that, being closer to the rising sun, the Ming’s qi (vital essence, or breath) would subdue that of the Yuan. Workers digging moats and expanding the lakes helped to bury the Yuan by heaping mud on to the ruins of the old palace. Soil from the moats and lakes also wen
t into enlarging a hill created just north of the palace by the Yuan, today’s Jingshan (Prospect Hill) Park. Jingshan is what feng shui theories call a kaoshan, or ‘mountain to lean on’; it’s complemented to the south by the Jinshui He (River of Golden Waters) that flows in graceful curves across the palace’s forecourt.

  As in the Yuan, the walled palace (later named Zijin Cheng, the Forbidden City) lay within the embrace of a walled Imperial Precinct encompassing lakes and parkland as well as the imperial Ancestral Temple and the Altar to the God of Land and Grain. The Imperial Precinct’s southern entrance was the gate later named Tiananmen (Gate of Heavenly Peace). A T-shaped space backed up against the Imperial Precinct, its stem the north–south Corridor of a Thousand Steps, or Imperial Way, leading to the city wall’s Qianmen (Front Gate), which was in perfect north–south alignment with the gates of the Imperial Precinct and the palace itself.

  Further south, Yongle built the Temple of Heaven (Tiantan) and the Temple of the First Farmer (Xiannongtan). The original Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests in the Temple of Heaven was square, replaced only in 1545 by the now-iconic round hall with its three-tiered roof, then tiled in blue, gold and green. Other key imperial rites would be held at Ditan (Altar of the Earth) to the north, Ritan (Altar of the Sun) to the east and Yuetan (Altar of the Moon) to the west. The walled Imperial Precinct stretched from Ditan south to Tiananmen and from Dong’anmen (Gate of Eastern Peace) west to Xi’anmen (Gate of Western Peace).

  The design of the palace that 24 emperors of two dynasties would call home combined the best features of Khubilai’s palace and the one Yongle destroyed in Nanjing. The goal, as Geremie Barmé writes in The Forbidden City, was to ‘create nothing less than a terrestrial refraction of the realm of the celestial Jade Emperor, or Heavenly Ancestor, and his court which was said to rule over the universe.’