by Linda Jaivin
No one was sure if the Republic would hold. In Beijing, more men kept the Manchu queue than elsewhere in China. Yet with no more imperial regulations on how people should dress, people experimented: both Manchu and Chinese women in Beijing adopted high-collared, narrow-sleeved, side-fastened dresses inspired by the traditional Manchu man’s gown. As Antonia Finnane writes in Changing Clothes in China, the vogue for qipao (Banner robes) spread to Shanghai, where cosmopolitan Shanghainese tailors transformed them into the body-hugging frock also known by the Cantonese name cheongsam (long shirt). Even Puyi played dress-up in a Republican general’s uniform until his guardians forced him back into his dragon robes, caning the eunuchs responsible.
For the first time since 1648, Han Chinese were legally allowed to live in the Inner City, even if in practice they had been quietly returning from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Theatres, hotels and restaurants could also set up inside the walls. The Western District soon rivalled Dashila’r for commerce and entertainment. Peking Opera was in its heyday; rickshaws whisked its greatest star, Mei Lanfang, a male player of female roles, from performance to performance.
In 1914 Beijing got its first modern administration, a municipal council. The council smoothed and paved the pot-holed streets, nicknamed ‘incense burners’ after their thick accumulation of dust. It tackled the problem of the malodorous open sewers, some of which originated in kiln pits where the bricks for the Ming Outer City wall had been fired.
According to Barmé, the council used ornamental rocks, stelae and bricks from the Yuanmingyuan to transform both the imperial Ancestral Temple and the Altar to the God of Land and Grain in the former Imperial Precinct into Peace Park and Central Park respectively. Central Park’s playgrounds, restaurants, bowling alleys, teahouses and photography studios drew families, prostitutes, students and wealthy burghers alike. Yet as Juliet Bredon wrote in Peking, at the time, old folk grumbled about the sacrilege, saying that if people wanted somewhere to hang out, they should visit a temple.
In 1916 the Australian G. E. Morrison, who’d lived in Beijing since 1897 and served for a time as Yuan Shikai’s adviser, observed:
Peking you simply would not be able to recognise except by its monuments. Macadamised roads, electric light, great open spaces, museums, modern buildings of all kinds . . . motor cars (there are I think at least 200), motor cycles more numerous than we care for, and bicycles literally by the thousand. New roads are being driven through the city in many directions and the Imperial city wall is now pierced in a dozen places.
Yuan had determined that a railway line should ring the outside of the city wall. The construction dismantled enceintes and sluice gates, and left arrow towers literally on the wrong side of the track. Feng shui masters fretted that the railway strangled the city, and warned that each new breach in the walls caused the city to leak wangqi, imperial spirit.
Yuan was keen on wangqi. In 1914 he’d donned imperial robes to conduct rites for the winter solstice at the Temple of Heaven. The following year he dissolved parliament, declaring himself emperor ‘by popular demand’. After his death in 1916, parliament reconvened but a power struggle erupted. The president asked a provincial military governor, Zhang Xun, to help quell a rebellion by the premier. Unwittingly, he repeated the Ming general Wu Sangui’s mistake: Zhang, a Qing loyalist who still wore the queue, arrived in the summer of 1917, put down the rebellion, and placed Puyi, now eleven, back on the throne with himself as regent.
The Republican government sent a warplane over the Forbidden City. The emperor and his courtiers dove under tables as a missile exploded at the Gate of Honouring the Ancestors, wounding a sedan-chair carrier. A second bomb fell in a palace lake. A third landed near a cluster of terrified eunuchs but, as Puyi recounted in his 1964 memoir From Emperor to Citizen, failed to explode. After a twelve-day reign, Puyi abdicated a second time; Zhang Xun, the ‘Pig-tailed General’, took refuge in the Dutch Legation.
China slid into the violent chaos known as the Warlord Era. For the next twelve years, rogue generals and their troops took turns fighting over, occupying, plundering and abandoning parts of China including Beijing. As Lao She wrote in his novel Rickshaw Boy (1936), war became as much a part of the cycle of Beijing life as ‘the sprouting of spring wheat’. One of Beijing’s more rapacious occupiers dynamited and looted the tombs of Qianlong and Cixi, leaving their stripped and mutilated corpses out to rot.
In 1898 Peking University had replaced the imperial college of Guozijian. By the Warlord Era it was China’s largest, most prestigious and progressive centre for higher learning. Cai Yuanpei, its president from 1917, recruited some of the greatest cultural figures of the era to teach there, including the writer and satirist Lu Xun, the philosopher and Dream of the Red Chamber scholar Hu Shi and the radical publisher Chen Duxiu. (Chen later co-founded the Chinese Communist Party with the university librarian Li Dazhao, whose assistant in 1918–19 was a young Hunanese called Mao Zedong.)
The May Fourth Demonstrations as represented by a frieze at the base of the Monument to the People’s Heroes in Tiananmen Square.
In 1919 the Treaty of Versailles that ended the First World War ratified Japanese claims over former German concessions in Shandong province. On 4 May 1919, furious at the ongoing insults to Chinese sovereignty, 3,000 students marched from Peking University to Tiananmen and thence the Legation Quarter. Sympathetic townspeople swelled their ranks. Mass arrests sparked more protests, strikes and boycotts of Japanese goods. The May Fourth Movement that began in Beijing galvanized the nation and sparked a cultural renaissance.
Progressive intellectuals argued that Confucianism, with its innate conservatism and hierarchical thinking, dragged China backwards. In editorial offices and presses around Liulichang, they published books and journals that promoted vernacular literature, science, democracy and women’s rights as vital to national salvation. Despite the conservatism of his ‘little court’, even the former emperor Puyi was exposed to Western learning from 1919 in the form of a new tutor, Reginald Fleming Johnston, whose Mandarin he found easier to understand than that of some of his southern courtiers, even if, as he admitted in From Emperor to Citizen, the Englishman’s blue eyes made him ‘uneasy’. Puyi took the English name of Henry and to the horror of his minions, cut off his queue in 1922, the same year that the Imperial Precinct lake Beihai was turned into a public park.
Liulichang Street: from imperial brick kiln to the centre of literary ferment.
With China in chaos, the court’s pension dried up. Suspicious of the extent to which his eunuchs were plundering imperial treasure, Puyi ordered an inventory. On 27 June 1923 a mysterious fire consumed the Palace of Established Happiness, repository of 6,643 priceless objects. Diplomats partying on the roof of what is today the Raffles Beijing Hotel saw the flames; the Italians dispatched a fire brigade to help put it out. Only 387 items were recovered; the missing included 2,685 gold Buddhas and 435 porcelain, jade and bronze artefacts. Puyi ejected nearly all remaining eunuchs (over 1,500) from the palace; as Barmé notes in The Forbidden City, many promptly opened antique shops around Qianmen. On 5 November 1924, another warlord turfed Puyi himself from the palace. Puyi moved into the Japanese embassy with his own plunder, 1,000 or so imperial artworks and artefacts, before decamping to Tianjin.
For all the decades of energetic looting, the Forbidden City was still home to more than a million antiquities. On 10 October 1925 the inner courts of the Forbidden City opened to the general public for the first time as the Palace Museum. Among the museum’s most popular exhibitions was the Clock Pavilion, showcasing the Western novelty clocks once wound by Jesuits.
Missionaries established Yenching (a variant spelling of the old city name of Yanjing) University on the ruins of imperial gardens in the city’s northwest, giving the Chinese language a new word: xiaoyuan, literally ‘school garden’, meaning campus. The Yuanmingyuan yielded more stones and bricks for the university’s buildings, but by then the pickings were slim. Following the collapse o
f the Qing, the Yuanmingyuan’s caretakers had even sold its trees and wooden bridges for charcoal.
A similar fate threatened Beijing’s city walls. The American architect E. N. Bacon called them ‘man’s greatest single architectural achievement on the face of the Earth’. Lao She wrote poetically of the tiger-eye date trees and golden chrysanthemums growing along their solid, tranquil base, and the ducks that paddled the surrounding moat. But wherever they crumbled, unsentimental residents pilfered bricks. Made desperate by a collapsing economy, officials joined them, selling bricks to pay government wages.
Rickshaw Beijing: City, People and Politics in the 1920s by David Strand and Madeleine Yue Dong’s Republican Beijing are two excellent English-language sources that document, among other things, the increasing desperation and impoverishment of Beijing in that era. According to Strand, in January 1926 soup kitchens in Beijing fed 30,000 people daily; in March, 80,000. That spring alone, 250,000 refugees from warlord-ravaged areas nearby entered the city. One out of four people in Beijing were poor or destitute; many others had clothes and enough to eat, but precious little else. A Chinese researcher of that era quoted by Strand discovered rickshaw puller households ‘so poor that the family slept without bedding on dirt floors in rooms emptied of possessions except for a pile of pawnshop tickets’.
At the start of the Republican period, 90 per cent of Beijing’s buildings were siheyuan, courtyard homes. As the population swelled, many of these were converted into multi-family tenements called dazayuan. With up to 60 people living in homes designed for one family, mansions degenerated into slums.
Warlords continued to fight over the city. Warplanes belonging to the ‘Mukden Tiger’, Zhang Zuolin, another Qing loyalist, dropped bombs on the city including near the Temple of Heaven, killing an elderly woman. Demobbed soldiers, many still armed, contributed to rising disorder and crime. Bankers, foreign diplomats and merchants banded together to pay the salaries of police and militia.
In this seething, distressed city, about 60,000 people, including erstwhile public servants, craftsmen, shopkeepers, musicians and even the odd Qing general and Manchu nobleman took up the punishing yoke of the rickshaw puller. In Rickshaw Beijing, Strand describes how a flat terrain, widespread poverty and the desire to display status on the part of those who still had money made rickshaws central to Beijing life. A uniquely Beijing literary genre of ‘rickshaw literature’ came into being, Lao She’s Luotuo Xiangzi (Rickshaw Boy, also translated as Camel Xiangzi) its most famous example. ‘The rickshaw’, Strand writes, ‘seemed to carry with it a natural air of melodrama that poets, professors and editorialists found irresistible.’
Streetcars came to Beijing in 1925. For the first time, Beijing people could easily work and play outside their immediate neighbourhoods. Streetcars also delivered people to the entertainment district at their terminus: Tianqiao (Heaven’s Bridge), a 2.6-sq.-km hook of land in the Outer City north-northwest of the Temple of Heaven. Formerly a passageway for the procession of the emperor, the ‘Son of Heaven’, to the Temple of Heaven, the area was once a favourite idyll of scholar-officials. Daoist priests sold medicinal herbs by the bridge, antique sellers followed. In the sixteenth century, when the southern suburbs were walled, Tianqiao was the thriving marketplace at the heart of the Outer City. The following century, the shops, restaurants and theatres exiled by the Qing from the Inner City flooded into the area.
By the twentieth century, crowded, down-at-heel Tianqiao was famous for the rich, disordered bargains of its markets and the marvels of its entertainments, including storytellers, wrestlers, ‘cross-talk’ comedians, a man who performed stunts on a donkey’s back and, according to accounts quoted by Madeleine Yue Dong, a snake swallower who could make serpents emerge from his ears. It was there, in 1912, that women performed opera in public for the first time. With hutong named Yanzhi (Rouge) and Pitiao (Pimp), Tianqiao was also notorious as a hive of criminal activity, with hundreds of brothels and opium dens. It too inspired a unique Beijing genre of fiction. Tianqiao had its dark shadow in the Badlands east of the Legation Quarter, described by Paul French in Midnight in Peking as ‘the playground of the foreign underworld’, another infamous site of brothels, opium dens and a criminal hang-out.
Rickshaws waiting for custom at the Qianmen Railway Station.
Pomegranates and persimmons in a siheyuan.
COURTYARD LIVING
Traditional Beijing life revolved around the siheyuan, or courtyard house, and its grander cousin the wangfu, or princely mansion. Both were structured around rectangular courtyards so perfectly aligned with the points of the compass that their residents could tell the hour by the movements of the shadows. Some were humble, and some were grand.
The great Beijing writer Lao She wrote of both types in his novel Beneath the Red Banner. The narrator recalls how in winter, ‘the wind found its way into our home from every conceivable direction.’ He lies on the kang, the brick sleeping platform with a built-in stove common to dwellings across northern China, and grows itchy with the combined warmth of the sun’s rays and the heat from the tin stove inside the kang. He then thinks about the homes of the officials and the rich, which have brass or iron stoves, potted plants and lovely curios decorating the kang. He thinks about how in the grander homes, in cages hung under the eaves, songbirds stretch their wings and sing while servants prepare ‘Mongolian gazelles and Manchurian pheasants’ for the coming New Year’s feast. His family, he says, loves plants too, but ‘we couldn’t afford plum blossoms or narcissuses’. Instead they have two ‘gnarled’ date trees, ‘one behind the screen wall which stood behind the front gate of our house, the other by the foot of the southern wall’.
Courtyard homes are still notoriously difficult to heat, their upkeep can be expensive and plumbing remains an ongoing challenge. Yet given the large-scale destruction of the old city and the division of so many remaining courtyard homes into multi-family tenements, even a humble courtyard home is today considered a treasure by anyone lucky enough to own or occupy one.
In 1926 the right-wing authoritarian Chiang Kai-shek, who had led the Nationalist Party following Sun Yat-sen’s death in 1925, launched the Northern Expedition to mop up the warlords, turning violently on his erstwhile Communist allies in the process. In June 1928 Chiang arrived at the gates of Beijing, seeing off the warlord du jour.
Chiang ordered trees planted outside Tiananmen to limit spaces available to protesters. In Republican Beijing, Madeleine Yue Dong describes how Chiang primly renamed a number of hutong: Choushuikeng (Stinky Pond) became Cuihuawan (Emerald Flower Creek), Gouyiba (Dog’s Tail) became Gaoyibo (Upstanding Old Man) and Jizhua (Chicken Feet) became Jizhao (Propitious Sign) Hutong. Han names replaced Manchu and Mongol ones; Uighur Village in the Haidian area became Weigongcun (Gentleman Wei Village). As for Beijing, it became Beiping (Northern Peace) – Chiang moved the capital back to Nanjing. The diplomats, comfortable in the Legation Quarter, were reluctant to follow; the Americans kept their embassy in the north.
Workshops in the Qianmen area continued to produce cloisonné, painted lanterns and carved lacquerware. Yet as late as the 1930s, this city of 1.5 million had scant modern industry aside from some factories producing matches, glassware and government uniforms. Beiping, as Dong shows, was forced to rely on other parts of China and foreign imports for almost everything else, including foodstuffs and medical supplies.
In 1929 the city’s rickshaw pullers petitioned and eventually rioted against the streetcars that, alongside inflation, had bitten painfully into their livelihood. It was the worst public disturbance since Yuan’s troops ran amok in 1912.
A more deadly threat lay north of the Great Wall. In 1931 the Japanese invaded the Manchurian homelands of the northeast and one year later established the puppet state of Manchukuo (Manchu Nation) with Puyi as emperor. In Beiping itself, the Japanese maintained a shadowy presence, controlling the black market and running opium dens.
In 1933 Chiang Kai-shek secreted more
than 600,000 palace treasures out of the palace (‘about one tenth of the entire imperial patrimony’, according to The Forbidden City), shipping them to Nanjing. (They now reside in Taiwan’s Palace Museum.) Dong writes in Republican Beijing of how residents feared that this indicated that the Nationalists were unwilling or unable to defend the city from Japanese attack.
Despite the turmoil, as historian John K. Fairbank has written, the period between 1901 and 1937 was a ‘rare and happy time for foreigners in Peking’. Those with money shopped in the modern department stores and speciality shops of Wangfujing – called Morrison Street in English after the Australian correspondent – and in the antique shops that the visiting English poet Osbert Sitwell described as grander than those of Rome or Venice. They bought Italian wines, shopped at a French grocer, socialized at a Swiss hotel, had their hair done by white Russians and their clothes made by British tailors. In summer they rented temples in the Western Hills, or swam in a new public pool at the Lake Palaces, relaxing later, perhaps, on a former imperial barge in Beihai over a banquet cooked by one of Cixi’s erstwhile chefs.
For the less well-heeled there was the colourful area just east of the Legation Quarter, adjacent to the Badlands and inhabited, in Fairbank’s words, by
remittance men of alcoholic dignity, sociable widows of diplomatic background, superannuated musicians, stranded poets fond of boys, budding art collectors, sincere scholars, patriarchal ex-missionaries, archaeologist-priests, a whole Maughamesque cast of characters . . . entranced by the sights, sounds, cuisine, and service of Peking.
Pierre Loti, who pronounced the city the last refuge on earth of the unknown and marvellous, Victor Segalen, George N. Kates, Osbert Sitwell and Harold Acton were among those writers captivated by the city, ‘slipping’, as the historian Susan Naquin puts it in Peking: Temples and City Life, ‘into the luxurious calm of the (partially imaginary) life of a Chinese scholar’.
