by Linda Jaivin
The emperor’s chief ceremonial hall, later called the Taihedian (Hall of Supreme Harmony), thus rested atop a marble ziggurat symbolizing the mountain at the centre of the universe in Buddhist cosmology. Within, his throne perched on another stepped platform, this one representing the nine layers of Heaven. The number nine, jiu, is a homonym of the Chinese character meaning ‘everlasting’; it is associated with a high degree of yang (male, active) energy. Nine auspicious figures ride the flying eaves of the main halls (with the eccentric exception of the Taihedian, which has ten); the number nine figures in the dimensions of all the ceremonial buildings; and nine dragons dance across the magnificent ceramic screens of the Forbidden City and Beihai Park.
Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests at the Temple of Heaven.
An imperial quarry near Peking Man’s old haunts at Fangshan supplied the white marble for the Taihedian’s ‘cinnabar stairway stone’, the ramp carved with five-toed imperial dragons over which the emperor was carried in his golden palanquin into the hall. It took 1,000 horses and mules to haul the stone to the palace in winter along a throw rug of ice created by splashing water onto the road.
The kilns at Liulichang (Glazed Tile Factory), south of the walled city, produced the ceramic tiles for the palace, including the mustard-gold roofing tiles used exclusively for palace roofs. The imperial library was the only palace building roofed in black because, as the colour geomantically associated with water, it was a talismanic precaution against fire.
Within the palace, civil officials occupied the offices to the east of the imperial halls – the east evoking wood, spring and growth. The military occupied the west – metal, autumn and force. Everything had its place, even dissent: the huabiao, decorative winged pillars with dragons’ bodies and lions’ heads standing sentinel at Tiananmen, invited senior officials to criticize the emperor should he stray from the path of virtue.
The Taihedian (Hall of Supreme Harmony) in the Forbidden City.
Because of their association with masculine yang, odd numbers featured in the dimensions of all the halls of government. The buildings in the northern, residential part of the palace, where the women of the seraglio lived and which was forbidden to all men except the emperor and eunuchs, were linked to the feminine yin principle, and built with even-numbered dimensions. These were designed, in Barmé’s words, for ‘intimacy and intrigue rather than vistas and spectacle’. They were lit by oil lamps and heated, in braziers and under the brick platform beds, by charcoal of such superior quality that it produced no smoke and burned down to fine, odour-absorbing ash that eunuchs used to line the emperor’s platinum potty.
The palace also contained imperial workshops, places of worship and meditation, kitchens, pharmacies, libraries, tearooms, theatres, schools and armouries. It covered 72 ha and contained 9,999.5 rooms (so as not to presume on the perfection that was Heaven’s alone).
The Ming city retained the chessboard design of the Yuan. But now there were more than 30 major north–south avenues, plus smaller streets, and 458 hutong, running largely east–west. The east–west boulevard just south of Tiananmen was called Chang’an (Eternal Peace), after the much-admired capital of the Tang dynasty, today’s Xi’an.
Forbidden City detail.
The preparations were finally complete. Yet the Ming court, still in Nanjing and accustomed to the refined pleasures and rice-bowl comforts of the south, grizzled at the thought of moving to the cold, dusty and hostile north. Making the case for Beijing, a group of scholar-officials collaborated on a sublime hand-scroll of poems, essays and paintings called The Eight Views of Beijing. ‘Layered Shades of Green at Juyong Pass’ and ‘Dawn Moonlight at Lugou [Marco Polo] Bridge’ portrayed the majestic defences of the Great Walls to the north and the famous Jin dynasty bridge in the south. ‘Cascading Rainbow at Jade Stream Mountain’ illustrated Beijing’s natural beauty (and, pointedly, water supply) while ‘Crystal Clear Waves at Taiye Pond’ and ‘Spring Clouds at Hortensia Isle’ celebrated its man-made wonders. ‘Sunset on the Golden Tower’ alluded to the glorious days of King Zhao, ‘Misty Trees at Jimen’ evoked the bustling grandeur of Zhongdu and ‘Clearing Snow on West Mountain’ the area’s rustic beauty.
When they finally shlepped north in 1421, the courtiers’ misgivings were reinforced by the sight of refugees fleeing south from famine. Three months later, lightning struck the palace, reducing three halls to ashes. Some ventured that it was a sign of Heaven’s displeasure. Yongle threw his critics in prison and began rebuilding.
Within the city, official rank dictated the number and size of rooms and courtyards a person could have in his home. Imperial regulations prescribed the colours with which people could decorate and even the exact depth of the entryway – the higher the status, the deeper the door. To flaunt any of these rules was to invite the death penalty.
Though Yongle employed Mongols in his army he forbade the speaking of Mongolian within the city and barred Mongolian fashions from Beijing. As the capital of a Chinese dynasty, with a predominantly Chinese population, the hybrid Beijing vernacular absorbed more words, phrases and linguistic habits from other Chinese dialects than ever before.
After Yongle died leading a campaign against the Mongols in 1424, his son and successor led the relieved court back to Nanjing. It took over ten years and another two brief imperial reigns before Beijing was once more the Ming capital. Only in 1441 did the government ministries ranged to either side of the Imperial Way (military to the west, civil to the east) finally remove the preface xingzai (residence pro tempore) from their signboards.
Early in his reign, on the eve of a hunting trip, Yongle had asked a trusted general, Gang Bing, to guard the palace women in his absence. Returning, he heard rumours that Gang had disported himself in the harem. Yongle confronted Gang, who produced a bag from the emperor’s own saddlery. It contained the general’s severed genitalia: foreseeing the opportunity for trouble-making on the part of his enemies, Gang secretly castrated himself before Yongle’s departure. Yongle richly rewarded Gang for such above-and-beyond loyalty. When Gang died in 1410, Yongle endowed an ancestral hall in the western outskirts in his honour; it became known as the Eunuchs’ Temple.
Eunuchs usually came from poor families. Their parents had them castrated in the hope that as servants of the palace, they’d lift the family fortunes. Yongle’s father perceived that eunuchs’ proximity to power and the fact that there was little other reward for their sacrifice made them prone to influence peddling and other self-enriching mischief. So he banned eunuchs from both political participation and the Confucian education that was the recognized and legitimate key to power. He restricted them to menial tasks, the ‘cleaning and sweeping’ of the palace residences.
The Xuande emperor (r. 1425–35) naively established a school for eunuchs within the palace itself and entrusted them to supervise both politics and military affairs. Eunuchs rapidly expanded in number and influence, ‘cleaning and sweeping’ their way through the treasury and causing a succession of political and financial scandals. While most spent long days in menial labour and short lonely nights in tiny cells within the palace, others accumulated obscenely large fortunes. According to The Forbidden City, one of the most egregiously corrupt, Liu Jin, acquired, among other things, two solid-gold suits of armour, thousands of gold rings and more than 11 kg of precious gems. Among the most controversial was Wang Zhen, who had tutored the Zhengtong emperor (r. 1435–49) as a child, and by the 1440s was considered the most powerful man in China.
Though much despised, Wang Zhen did leave Beijing a tangible legacy – the Zhihua Temple, the greatest extant example of Ming temple architecture in the city. Eunuchs patronized, funded and looked after the upkeep of hundreds of Buddhist temples, shrines and monasteries in Beijing and the surrounding hills. Confucianism, which placed supreme value on the continuation of one’s family line through the production of male heirs, was not eunuch-friendly (nor did it approve, for similar reasons, of monastic celibacy). By con
trast, the Buddhist doctrine of reincarnation offered eunuchs hope for reunion in the next life with their carefully preserved ‘precious’, kept ever-handy in a special jar.
The Ming saw a great flourishing of religion generally, with the establishment of over 1,000 Buddhist, Lamaist and Daoist temples as well as mosques, in Chinese, Mongolian, Tibetan, Uighur, Indian and Korean architectural styles. There were also many temples dedicated to specific deities – the City God, and the gods of war, literature and horses for example. There were temples just for opera singers and even for people with sick pets. The Chinese approach to religion has long tended towards inclusivity: laymen may burn joss at a Buddhist temple one day and at a Daoist temple the next, while carefully maintaining the altar to their ancestors that is at the heart of personal Confucian ritual.
In 1449 Wang Zhen convinced the Zhengtong emperor to lead what proved a disastrous campaign against the Mongols. The emperor was abducted and Wang Zhen himself killed. This prompted a succession crisis that concluded with the emperor’s 21-year-old brother taking the throne as the Jingtai emperor.
Zhengtong returned eight years later and wrested back the throne. But the short-reigning Jingtai emperor made his own contribution to Beijing culture: he had such a fondness for blue cloisonné in particular that he invited Byzantine craftsmen to the capital to produce it for him; to this day, cloisonné is a Beijing speciality, known in Chinese (whatever its colour or date of origin) as Jingtailan, or ‘Jingtai indigo’.
Other artisans who had come to furnish and decorate the palace helped make Ming Beijing a shoppers’ paradise. The grand avenue east of the palace known then as the Street of the Ten Princely Residences (later Wangfujing, literally the Well of the Princely Residences) was renowned for its imperial supply shops. But the real action was in the southern suburbs outside Qianmen, where merchants who’d travelled north on the Grand Canal settled; the hundreds of new hutong there were named for their resident trade guild (Jade Polishing, for example), master craftsman (Coffin-maker Shang) or product (Beancurd, Hairpin, Horse Post). Here too were the famous langfang sitiao (Gallery Streets), stately rows of carved and gilded shopfronts.
Shoppers could find fine silks from Hangzhou, porcelain from the imperial kiln at Jingdezhen and exotica such as leopard skins and ivory. As Timothy Brook notes in The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China, however, they needed to be well on guard against fakes and counterfeits: the fifteenth-century update of the early Ming shoppers’ bible Essential Criteria of Antiquities advised that if you wanted properly made lacquer furniture with mother-of-pearl inlay in Beijing, you needed to have it made under supervision at home.
In the halcyon days of the Ming, foodstuffs were plentiful, whether imported from the south or locally grown. Specialized markets sold rice, fruit, vegetables – some cultivated in heated greenhouses – and livestock. As Jasper Becker observes in The City of Heavenly Tranquility, the citizens of fifteenth-century Beijing enjoyed a more varied diet than sixteenth-century Europeans. Eating out was popular and singers and storytellers entertained at the city’s restaurants, teashops and taverns, sometimes with satirical poems and songs about corruption and official bastardry. (These days, sardonic political ditties are passed around by SMS or WeChat.)
Beijing’s celebrated temple fairs date back to the Ming. They were carnivalesque affairs with stilt dancers, puppet shows, food, craft stalls and entertainment. Becker describes the astonishment of one visitor to the splendid New Year’s Lantern Festival at Dengshikou (Lantern Market Crossroads) at seeing a eunuch pay 300 oz (19 lb; 8.5 kg) of silver for a lantern fashioned entirely of eggshells. At the time, a palace cook’s monthly salary was about 2 oz (55 g) of silver; according to history scholars at Peking University, most workers lived on far less.
Not all eunuchs were a welcome sight to Beijing merchants. The city’s most brutal standover gangs were composed of eunuchs who’d failed to enter palace service and were accepted nowhere else in society. The best policing efforts of the Imperial Brocaded Guards, whose most infamous chief got about in plainclothes on the back of a mule, could not stamp out crime. The authorities installed lockable fences at the ends of the hutong throughout the area south of Qianmen that became known then as Dashila’r (‘Big Fence’ in Beijing patois).
A Beijing Spring Festival temple fair today.
Choe Bu, a 34-year-old Korean official shipwrecked in China, arrived in Beijing in 1488. As Becker writes, Choe Bu noted with distaste that while the ‘Great Ming has washed off the old dirt and made those who buttoned their coats on the left [Mongols and Tibetans] take the ways of hat and gown’ (and had thus ‘civilized’ them), the people worshipped Daoist and Buddhist gods. Even more repugnant to a stern Confucian such as himself, for whom scholars and farmers were the most respectable of social classes whereas only soldiers were lower than merchants, the people of Beijing preferred commerce to tilling the land. And worse still,
Their clothing is short and tight, and men and women dress the same. Their food and drink are rancid . . . The mountains, moreover are bare and the rivers filthy . . . dust fills the sky.
Not in terms of population (about 700,000 at the time), architecture or markets, he sniffed, did Beijing even ‘come close’ to the civilized southern cities of Suzhou or Hangzhou.
By the time of Choe Bu’s visit, the Ming was on its fifth emperor after Yongle, the scholarly and upright Hongzhi (r. 1487–1505), the only monogamous emperor in Chinese history. Of similar temperament to Choe Bu, Hongzhi prosecuted the corrupt and curtailed the power of the eunuchs, efforts wholly undone by his son, the hedonistic Zhengde (r. 1505–21). Zhengde died childless despite having such an enormous harem that the palace stores could scarcely feed them all.
The throne, again swarming with eunuchs, passed to Zhengde’s cousin, another reprobate: the Jiajing emperor. In the wee hours of 27 November 1542, palace maids who’d had enough of the emperor’s sexual sadism were tightening the ribbon around Jiajing’s neck when their assassination attempt was discovered. All were sentenced to the fearful ‘death by a thousand cuts’ (also known as ‘slow slicing’). A shaken Jiajing quit the Forbidden City and moved with his beloved cats Snow Brow and Tiger to the Lake Palaces at Zhongnanhai (Central South Lakes), built within the Imperial Precinct, just west of the Forbidden City on the foundations of Khubilai’s palace.
In 1550 the Mongol leader Altan Khan breached the Great Walls and laid siege to the city. The defenders barred the city gates with supports as thick as tree trunks. From atop the walls, they fought off the invaders with firelocks, cannons and arrows. Before withdrawing, Altan Khan looted and burned the suburbs for three days. Jiajing considered building a second city wall enclosing all the suburbs, but the cost was prohibitive, so he walled in only the prosperous and densely populated area south of Qianmen that included the Temple of Heaven. This new wall, which had seven gates, was lower and narrower than that of the main city. Together, the two parts of the city wall, inner and outer, square and rectangle, took the shape of the Chinese ideograph for convex, , and had a total circumference of 23.7 km. Beijing, now the largest capital city in the world, had almost three times as many streets as Khanbalik, including more than 450 hutong.
A truce with Altan Khan in 1571 gave the Ming a renewed lease of life. But Zhu Yuanzhang, the Ming founder, had promised a title and remuneration to all of his descendants. By the late sixteenth century tens of thousands of imperial clansmen were clamped to the imperial teat alongside an equal number of eunuchs and 3,000 palace women.
The righteous saw moral corruption everywhere, even in the undergarments of the merchants, who flaunted imperial law to wear silk, a luxury reserved for officials. Despite the ongoing ban on Mongol styles, as Antonia Finnane relates in Changing Clothes in China, Mongol-inspired, pleated-skirts called yesa became the fashionable Beijing man’s must-have, while women wrapped themselves in chic Mongolian hooded cloaks. Another clothing fad, for Korean-style horse-tail skirts, Finnane writes, led to
horses throughout the city losing their tails to thieving fashion victims.
As the 1580s drew to a close, the upright official Hai Rui, who’d escaped execution for remonstrating with Jiajing only because Jiajing died first, spoke out again. He urged the young Wanli emperor (r. 1572–1620) to punish the corrupt severely – by skinning embezzlers, for example, and stuffing their skin with straw for display. Wanli responded that such cruel punishment ‘contradicts our sense of good government’.
Wanli’s sense of good government didn’t extend to worrying about the cruel punishments his own eunuch favourites inflicted on conscientious officials who dared oppose them. The most notorious eunuch of all, the vicious Wei Zhongxian, rode through the Forbidden City on his horse, an outrage to protocol. But even Wanli had his limits. When Wei refused to dismount in front of him, Wanli shot the horse from under Wei with an arrow.
At the age of 25, furious with his court for refusing to promote his beloved, Lady Zheng, to the rank of empress, Wanli effectively went on strike. He refused to attend court, banqueted his way to morbid obesity and spent the rest of his years constructing an opulent tomb for himself and Lady Zheng (at Dingling, in today’s Changping county) so they would be united in the afterlife. Wanli was obsessed with tombs: he destroyed those of the Jin emperors and would have desecrated those of the Yuan as well but couldn’t find them. No one ever has.
GREAT WALLS
The king has ordered [General] Nan-zhong
To build a fort on the frontier.
To bring out the great concourse of chariots,
With dragon banners and standards so bright.
The Son of Heaven has ordered us
To build a fort on that frontier.
Terrible is Nan-zhong;
