Beijing

by Linda Jaivin

  Cows graze on garbage in this still from the documentary Beijing Besieged by Waste (2011).

  The Yuanmingyuan in bloom – and under reconstruction.

  Controversies rage around the future of the Yuanmingyuan, as some advocate preserving the ruins as an eternal reminder of Western imperialist aggression and others argue for recreating its former glory (and better exploiting its tourist potential). The establishment of a winter amusement park with sledding and skiing and the development of theme parks and ‘culture squares’ on its periphery – and occasional shows in which valiant Chinese villagers shouting ‘Kill the foreign devils!’ fight stupid-acting dwarfs in woolly blonde wigs – have roused fury and despair among heritage scholars and conservators.

  The conservationists and historians are fighting a difficult battle. With rising incomes across China and extended public holidays designed to stimulate travel and consumption, Beijing is inundated with domestic tourists. Long gone are the days when a visitor like Peter Quennell, who travelled to Beijing in the 1930s, could wander in the palace for hours, ‘unaccompanied’, as he wrote in A Superficial Journey, ‘save by the rhythm of your own footsteps’. On just one day in October 2012 alone, the Forbidden City hosted 180,000 visitors. The shoes of the tourists are wearing down the ancient paving stones and their exhalations are corroding the wooden buildings. Despite installing 1,600 alarms and 3,700 security cameras, the Palace Museum management struggles to combat theft, attempted theft and graffiti.

  Other scandals have erupted in the Forbidden City over dubious conservation practices, termite infestation and even tax avoidance. In 2011, after a benefactor sponsored the meticulous reconstruction of the building consumed in the suspicious fire of 1923, the Jianfu (Established Happiness) Palace, public outrage forced authorities to scotch plans to convert it into an exclusive club for the über-wealthy and ultra-connected.

  Beijing’s past shadows and illuminates its present. In his 1930s memoir Escape with Me!: An Oriental Sketchbook, Osbert Sitwell made the observation, still true today,

  much of what Marco Polo writes concerning Cambaluc remains true of . . . modern Peking . . . the same vast population . . . the same great numbers of foreign merchants, travellers and provincial fortune seekers . . . [and its] air of luxury and cosmopolitanism.

  The Line 10 subway station Jintaixizhao (Sunset on the Golden Tower), named for both King Zhao’s tower, which once stood nearby, and the Ming dynasty painting commemorating it, is a reminder that Beijing has weathered many cycles of prosperity, corruption, decay and regeneration. Travel further north on Line 10 to where it hooks around to the west and it runs under the northern sector of the old Yuan dynasty city walls. The walls that once so impressed Marco Polo are now an uneven string of grassy knolls overlooking a revived moat in a Yuan Dynasty Relics Park that traverses seven city blocks. It is hard to imagine that this peaceful park, where lovers stroll and locals practice Tai Chi, overlooked by giant statues of Khubilai Khan and his court, was once the site of imperial grandeur, siege and desolation.

  Tourists at the Meridian Gate of the Forbidden City.

  Lin Yutang, also writing in the 1930s, averred that, ‘What are centuries elsewhere are but short moments in Beijing. Conquered many times, it has ever conquered its conquerors.’ Yet the conquerors no longer come from outside China’s borders. The architect Liang Sicheng’s first wife, the great poet Lin Huiyin, whose work was admired by Rabindranath Tagore, had been as passionate a conservationist as Liang. She even threatened to kill herself at the city gates when the last of the walls came down, but died of tuberculosis first, in 1955. When Sitwell and Lin Yutang were writing about Beijing, she and Liang were living in a beautiful siheyuan courtyard house on Beizongbu Hutong in the East City, working on their collaborative landmark study of Chinese traditional architecture.

  CHAI

  The journalist and urban historian Wang Jun, author of a popular book on the architect-conservationist Liang Sicheng’s efforts to save old Beijing in the 1950s, posted the following blog post on 10 July 2009:

  Although the Beijing Municipal Planning Authority has already ruled that there be no more demolitions of major buildings, that the old city is to be protected in its entirety, a notification of demolition was nonetheless posted on the walls of Bei Zongbu Hutong in the East City and the work of tearing down the historical home of the architect Liang Sicheng and his wife Lin Huiyin has begun.

  In 1945, when the long war of resistance against Japanese invasion ended with Japan’s surrender in the Second World War, Liang Sicheng publicly appealed for the victors to preserve Japan’s ancient cities including Kyoto and Nara. Even as the Japanese were planning to erect a monument to him, Wang Jun notes, the wreckers in Beijing were flattening his house.

  ‘Unless we have become completely alienated from our national culture, this is something no Chinese ought to tolerate.’ Wang wonders if the developers knew that Liang and Lin helped design China’s national emblem and the Monument to the People’s Heroes in Tiananmen Square, or that the national prize for architecture is called the Liang Sicheng Prize. Regardless, they should at least know the 2004 and 2005 municipal and State Council laws forbidding further destruction of the old city. ‘Chinese who love their country’s traditional culture will pursue those who have trampled on our national cultural heritage until they have been forced by the law to take responsibility for their actions,’ he promised, ‘even if it takes several generations.’

  Marked for demolition: the white-painted character ‘chai’ condemns another hutong home.

  Beizongbu Hutong is prime real estate by today’s standards. Fuheng Realty, a subsidiary of the state-owned company China Resources, had their eye on it for some time. On the fourth day of the Chinese New Year holiday in 2012, when nearly everyone in China would be with family or on vacation, Fuheng sent their wreckers to pull down Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin’s old home (see p. 168). Even the China Daily reported on the widespread outrage sparked by this particular demolition. The head of the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Cultural Heritage, Kong Fenzhi, told the state’s Xinhua News Agency that it ‘should never have happened’. Promising that the home would be rebuilt using traditional methods and materials, he contributed a phrase to the Chinese language, much parodied since: weixiuxing chaichu: ‘maintenance-style demolition’.

  Months earlier, authorities had conducted a poll to find the right words to describe the ‘Beijing Spirit’. They announced that the winners were ‘patriotism, innovation, inclusion and virtue’. Even as a propaganda exercise, it was lame, and Chinese netizens lampooned it with especial glee. Playfulness, wit and gentility were never going to make an official list but, although diluted by development, growth and globalization, neither have they disappeared. If Beijing has lost much of the lifestyle and physical beauty that earned it so many admirers in the past, it still retains something of its real spirit which, whatever happens, will live on in the vast and still growing body of literature, film and art that it has inspired over thousands of years.

  THE CITY TODAY

  Xiao Ju’er (Little Chrysanthemum) Hutong. In the several years since this photo was taken, the lane has filled up with shops, cafés and bars.

  In the Shadow of the Drum Tower

  As I drag my suitcase along Xiao Ju’er (Little Chrysanthemum) Hutong, I’m greeted with smiles and the simple welcome ‘hui laile’ – ‘you’re back’. The kids wave and call out ‘Ayi’, Auntie. I’ve returned to Beijing after a few months’ absence to my favourite home-away-from-home, a small courtyard residence in a historic hutong belonging to a pair of Chinese sisters. Opening the handsome red door, the older sister greets me warmly, but with bad news: the night before, my bathroom ceiling fell down.

  The false ceiling hangs at a 45-degree angle from one corner. I put down my bags and return to the hutong. Within five minutes, a neighbour has introduced me to a migrant worker from the provinces, Han: ‘I trust him like my own son.’ Han’s crew is renovating the man’s ho
me inside one of the lane’s warren-like dazayuan, divided courtyards.

  The amiable Han follows me back inside, admiring the courtyard garden’s pomegranate and persimmon trees. The dangling ceiling doesn’t alarm him. By the following evening, he has replaced it for a total cost of $150 including materials. Even my host, who thinks I have the words ‘I’m a Foreigner, Rip Me Off’ tattooed on my forehead, is impressed. Han has done an immaculate job.

  Unlike during the Qing dynasty or Republican period, you are unlikely to find travelling magicians, almanac pedlars or men with trained monkeys or bears trawling Beijing’s hutong today. Itinerant snack vendors no longer carry sour-plum soup and almond tea in buckets dangling from the ends of shoulder poles. No one offers to light your lamps. But pedlars and tradesmen are still very much part of the life of the hutong.

  As winter approaches, hawkers pedal flatbed bicycle carts through the hutong with stacked quilts; in spring, they’re singing out their list of potted plants and flowers. They deliver briquettes of charcoal and take away old bottles and scrap. Vendors of the Beijing Evening News, a popular tabloid of local news, gossip and human-interest stories, announce their presence with a pre-recorded squawk from speakers attached to their bicycles.

  If neighbours know who can do renovations, the neighbourhood committees – the party and state’s eyes and ears on the hutong – know everything else. Chinese law requires non-citizens to register with the police within 24 hours of arrival. (Hotels register their guests automatically.) Once, I forgot. At the 25th hour, a small posse from Ju’er’s neighbourhood committee knocked on the door to order me to the police station. Its other duties include seeing that everyone flies the flag on National Day and posting reminders to practise ‘civilized behaviour’.

  Civilization has a long history in this neighbourhood. Ju’er Hutong is one of sixteen hutong running east and west off the north–south axis of Nanluoguxiang (South Gong and Drum Street). Seven centuries ago, in the days of Khanbalik, the street was called Luoguoxiang, ‘Arching Street’, because it has a turtleback hump in the middle. Before a subway station was plonked down on the southern end of the street several years ago, it measured 786 m long. It remains only 8 m wide, a fact that Beijing drivers blithely overlook, along with the fact it is supposed to be a one-way street with limited traffic – though increasingly dense crowds deter all but the most intrepid drivers.

  Hutong flower pedlar.

  Early morning traffic, Nanluoguxiang.

  The neighbourhood, in the shadow of the Drum Tower and close to both Shichahai and the Forbidden City, has long been prize real estate, with some of the finest siheyuan courtyard homes in the city. In Qing times, as the domain of the Bordered Yellow Banner, it was, in the words of John Minford, co-translator of The Story of the Stone (better known as Dream of the Red Chamber), ‘a sort of Manchu Kensington’.

  During Qianlong’s reign, the prosaic hump of ‘Luoguo’ gave way to the more dignified, martial ‘Luogu’. The many carved stone drums standing in pairs at the entryways to siheyuan around the neighbourhood attest to its historic population of military officials; it had previously been popular with Ming dynasty generals. Civil officials’ homes featured a different style of mendun (‘door stone’) – a pair of rectangular blocks with a lion on top like an official seal, or ‘chop’. Liu Yong and his fellow authors of the Chinese-language Fifteen Lectures in Beijing History and Culture trace the history of mendun back to the earliest courtyard houses of the Han dynasty; they comment that a tall red door without mendun is as ‘tasteless’ a sight as a man dressed up in a suit without shoes. While Beijing’s largest extant mendun, 90 cm tall, can be found just inside Xizhimen, the smallest is on Ju’er Hutong itself, a tiny 15 cm in height.

  The wangfu (princely mansion) of Prince Seng (Senggelinqin in Manchu), who led the Qing forces against the British and French in the Second Opium War, once occupied nearly the entire length of Chaodou (Fried Beans) Hutong, which branches off to the west of Nanluoguxiang. Ronglu, the powerful commander of the Imperial Guard who was rumoured to have been Cixi’s childhood sweetheart and was a member of the Plain White Banner, lived in a grand residence off Ju’er itself, with a multi-courtyard mansion and extensive garden. Corresponding to today’s 3, 5 and 7 Ju’er Hutong, the estate extended back to tiny Shoubi Hutong when it was still called Choupi, or ‘Stinking Skin’ Hutong. The ‘empress’ of the dethroned last emperor of China, Puyi, grew up in a residence spanning numbers 35 and 37 of nearby Mao’er Hutong.

  During the Republican years, both warlords and Nationalist officials lived in the neighbourhood. The roll call of famous residents also includes the novelist Mao Dun, China’s Minister for Culture from 1949–65. Mao Dun’s old home on Houyuanensi (Back Garden Benevolence Temple) Hutong, one south of Ju’er, is today a museum. Though few are open to the public, dozens of the mansions around here are heritage-listed. Some have been converted to hotels or hostels.

  Many more have become tenement-like dazayuan. The unpleasant truth of hutong living in the twenty-first century is the same dearth of plumbing and heating that have always been an issue with Beijing’s courtyard homes, and the fact that so many of the buildings are in need of expensive renovation. Developers hover, eager to replace ramshackle horizontals with neat verticals. Yet as Shu Yi, the son of the novelist Lao She and a preservation activist, warns: ‘History is being wiped out before our eyes. Soon there will be nothing left.’ He has called the hutong Beijing’s ‘second city wall’.

  In 1990 Nanluoguxiang and its hutong were officially recognized as one of the city’s top 25 historical districts. Ju’er became the site of a prize-winning architectural experiment that attempted to take the siheyuan and hutong living into a new age. But Nanluoguxiang remained a quiet neighbourhood, its ancient buildings slowly crumbling along the narrow main street with its broken cobbles.

  In 2002 a photographer and pioneer of China’s domestic backpacking scene fixed up one of Nanluoguxiang’s semi-derelict old buildings to open the Pass-By Bar. Its casual, funky decor, featuring the owner’s photographs from his travels in Tibet, unvarnished courtyard aesthetic and relatively inexpensive Western food gave it an off-the-beaten-track cachet that attracted young Beijing artists, writers and others. In the years following the establishment of the Pass-By – still a Nanluoguoxiang institution – the street morphed into a domestic and international tourist destination, where on weekends and holidays the crowds reach human-wave proportions.

  Dazayuan courtyard in Dashila’r transformed into a pop-up shop for Beijing Design Week.

  Even Ju’er has sprouted shops, restaurants, backpacker hostels, a mah jong parlour and café-bars, including one run for a time by a direct descendant of the Chinese sage Mencius (372–289 BCE). Once, I stumbled upon an ad hoc school – several rooms within a dazayuan – where volunteers, including foreigners, taught English and maths to migrant workers.

  In the years I’ve been around Nanluoguxiang, I’ve seen come and go a Tibet Café run by members of the Tibetan Khampa ethnic minority, a therapeutic massage centre staffed by former peasants from a Shaanxi province village, a nail parlour run by people from a village in Shanxi province, a Hunan restaurant run by a group of young Hunanese (who briefly changed over to Yunnan food when that was more trendy) and even a hole-in-the-wall pub run by Australians.

  During the run-up to the Olympics, Nanluoguxiang was again declared a heritage site to be protected. Yet pell-mell development and apparent unconcern on the part of authorities have degraded its historic legacy. Fly-by-night businesses rip down historical facades and replace them with garishly lit storefronts constructed from plastic and plywood. Months later, the businesses are gone, but the damage remains. Opportunistic rents have forced out many of the original community businesses, such as a shop where locals queued three times a day to buy the stuffed buns, steamed breads and pan-fried flatbreads called laobing that are a staple on Beijing tables.

  Not long after the Olympics ended, entire blocks of heri
tage housing on either side of the south end of the street were demolished to make way for a subway station servicing lines 6 and 8. Along with a largely silent crowd of onlookers, including many I recognized as long-time residents, I watched as workers sledgehammered the old grey wall of what days before had been a restaurant-café. Even as they smashed the plate-glass window at the front, the owner sat on a sofa inside, facing out on to the street in a stoic protest.

  In The Last Days of Old Beijing, Michael Meyer quotes a story by Pearl Buck written in 1929. In it, an old man in the southern city of Nanjing similarly sits through the demolition of his shop:

  they took the tiles from the roof and the light began to seep down between the rafters. At last they took the rafters, and he sat there within four walls with the noonday sunshine beating on him . . . people stared at him curiously but said nothing, and he sat on.

  The shopkeeper’s son in the story had no time for nostalgia: ‘Why, these streets were made a thousand years ago. Are we never to have new ones?’

  Beijing today has no lack of new streets.

  The Bell Tower today.

  The Dragon’s Vein

  The Ming capital’s north–south axis began at Qianmen, the Front Gate in the centre of the south end of Tiananmen Square. Qianmen, the city’s formal entrance, was – and is – also the point from which the formal measure of distance from Beijing to anywhere else in China is calibrated. An ornamental plaque just outside Zhengyangmen, Qianmen’s principal gate tower, marks the ‘zero point’ for highways leading out from the capital: when a place is described as x km from Beijing, it usually means it is that far from Zhengyangmen.