Beijing

by Linda Jaivin

  In the Ming and Qing dynasties, Zhengyangmen was another kind of ‘zero point’ – the start of the Corridor of a Thousand Steps, or Imperial Way, leading to the gate of the Imperial Precinct, Tiananmen. Considerable power resided on either side of the corridor in the form of the imperial Six Ministries: three military ministries to the west, three civil ministries to the east. The axis then passed through Tiananmen, the defensive gate Duanmen and finally the Meridian Gate (Wumen) that gives entry to the Forbidden City itself. If it could be said that power passed along the axis like a current, it surged in its approach to the main throne hall, Taihedian.

  Imperial power concentrated along this axis, which was closely associated with the emperor himself. Whether officiating over a major ceremony with his court in the Taihedian, being conveyed in his yellow palanquin to the Meridian Gate to survey prisoners of war or promulgate an edict, or borne down a gold-dusted Imperial Way in a curtained cab on the back of a Burmese elephant to conduct rites at the Temple of Heaven, the emperor commanded the axial paths and the central archways of the gates. On occasion he shared the central archway of the Meridian Gate with, for example, the top graduates of the imperial examinations or honoured emissaries from foreign lands. But even the structure of the imperial palanquin, carried on the shoulders of bearers who ran on either side – never in front or behind – ensured that the emperor owned the centre.

  Moving north from Taihedian, the axis progresses through another two ceremonial halls before passing through the Gate of Heavenly Purity that opens on to the residential quarters of the Forbidden City: the emperor’s Palace of Heavenly Purity, the empress’s Palace of Earthly Tranquillity and the Hall of Union lying between them on the axis.

  Beyond the Forbidden City’s Gate of Divine Prowess, it traverses the five peaks of the former imperial preserve now called Jingshan Park to reach Tiananmen’s ‘mirror’ of Di’anmen, the no longer extant Gate of Earthly Peace, in the north of the Imperial Precinct. Its traditional terminus is at the axially aligned Drum and Bell Towers.

  Arrow Tower, Zhengyangmen, Mao Zedong Memorial Hall, Tiananmen and (just visible in the distance) Jingshan on a clear October afternoon.

  When the Ming Jiajing emperor walled in the southern suburbs in the sixteenth century to protect them from Mongol raids, he extended the axis southward to the new Outer City’s south gate of Yongdingmen. Before the construction of the Olympic Green for the 2008 Olympics, which extended it further northward, it measured 7.8 km from top to toe.

  The prescription for the axis comes from the ancient Canon of the Jade Ruler, the monk Zicong’s guide and inspiration for the design of the Yuan capital of Khanbalik. It aligns the capital and court with a celestial geometry that places the emperor in the position of the Pole Star. The Ming, which overthrew the Yuan, followed similar principles but, as discussed earlier, shifted their own axis to the east of that of the Yuan so that, being closer to the sun, it would ensure that the Ming’s qi would suppress that of the Yuan.

  It’s said that a ‘dragon’s vein’, a feng shui phenomenon associated with good fortune, runs along Beijing’s axis. When Line 8 of the Beijing metro is complete, it will shoot up this vein from south of Yongdingmen to north of the Olympic Green, making only a slight eastern detour around Tiananmen Square and the Palace, a route extending 17 km in all.

  Dragons also symbolize imperial power. Bas-relief dragons wend their way up the central marble ‘cinnabar stone’ over which the emperor, in robes embroidered with dragon motifs, was carried to his ‘dragon throne’ in Taihedian, the roof of which features ‘dragon kisses’, dragon heads that face off across the ridge of its roof. The sinuous River of Golden Waters flows in a curved path along the forecourt of Taihedian in such a way, as Hok-Lam Chan writes in Legends of the Building of Old Beijing, as ‘to bolster the circulation of the dragon’s ether’. Geomancers called Jingshan (or Longevity Hill, as it was known in the Ming) ‘the back of the dragon’s cave’ so that, as Chan explains, it would ‘conserve the auspicious ether’ generated by the flow of waters and the interaction of yin and yang generated by the Son of Heaven’s copulations with his palace women.

  View from Drum Tower looking to the south, on a smoggy October afternoon.

  The Chinese dragon, a fanciful composite of camel, cow, snake, deer and carp, may be a symbol of imperial power, but it is also a folkloric creature associated with the sometimes malevolent control of water and rain. Beijing’s patron deity, Nezha, is renowned as a wrangler and conqueror of local water-controlling dragons. A Tantric boy deity with a red stomach-protector, breath of blue mist, multiple arms, a fire-tipped spear and wind-fire wheels on which he flies (making him, incidentally, the god of bus and taxi drivers) tussled with dragons that ruled the Bitter Waste Sea (the North China Plains) and visited havoc on the city’s water supply. In one version of the legend, he fought a dragon who denied the city rain unless given human children to eat. Nezha stories were so popular in Yuan times the city was nicknamed Nezha Town. But during the Ming and Qing dynasties, Nezha faded into the background, no longer the staple of storytellers and plays he had been in Khanbalik.

  The Nezha myth became entwined with early Ming history only in the early Republican period, when what David Der-wei Wang has characterized as ‘the ghostly veil of nostalgia’ shrouded the crumbling city. It is in stories published at that time, both in Chinese and by English writers including E.T.C. Werner (whose daughter’s murder in 1937 is the subject of Paul French’s Midnight in Peking), that Nezha made his comeback. The twentieth-century accounts had Nezha guiding Yongle’s advisers on the layout of the Ming capital and palace. In these accounts, his head is associated with Qianmen and his shoulders, hands, outward-bent knees and feet with the other eight gates of the city. The red of the palace and Imperial Precinct walls is that of his apron. His spine is the city’s axis, the hutong his ribs. Shichahai is his bladder, another thing to consider before swimming there (see p. 203).

  Given the association of the axis with power, mythic and otherwise, it’s no coincidence that Mao’s portrait hangs where it does, over the central arch of Tiananmen, or that his body lies in his mausoleum astride the axis, as does the 38-m-tall obelisk Monument to the People’s Heroes designed by Liang Sicheng with his wife Lin Huiyin. Among the historical incidents commemorated in the bas-reliefs on the base of the monument is the May Fourth Movement, just one of many political protests and spectacles that have taken place on, gravitated towards or strived to occupy Beijing’s symbolical centre.

  It was from the rostrum of Tiananmen that Mao proclaimed the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, and it was from there he addressed the millions of Red Guards who attended the Cultural Revolution rallies in 1966. It was in the square and around the Monument to the People’s Heroes that protestors flocked in the Tiananmen Incident of 1976, and again in 1989, when pro-democracy protesters occupied the square. National Day celebrations and military parades from 1949 to the present crescendo as they reach the axis.

  Mao had hoped to reorientate the city along an alternative east–west axis, continuing the work begun by Yuan Shikai to lengthen Chang’an Avenue in both directions. In the twenty-first century, Beijing’s governors added a second axis to the west, which runs through both the Millennial Monument and Beijing West Station. These axes have their functions, but lack magic.

  Most days, out-of-towners gather to watch the ceremonial raising and lowering of the flag at dawn and dusk in the square, and tourists meander about taking photos. But few locals who live under the Communist Party’s authoritarian regime would be unaware of the prowling masses of plain-clothes police who complement the presence of uniformed security personnel and soldiers on the square. When, from time to time, protesters manage to unfurl a banner, the time between action and reaction can be measured in seconds. Yet in October 2013 an SUV, allegedly driven by Uighur anti-government protesters, crashed through the square’s security barriers and ploughed through a crowd of people, injuring dozen
s before exploding; five people – three in the car and two tourists – died. It would be marginally easier to protest elsewhere – but everyone knows that the further you go from that dragon’s vein, that spine, that axis, the less it matters.

  ‘Chinese Town’

  When the Qing kicked the non-Bannermen Chinese residents and their businesses out of the Inner City in the seventeenth century, most moved to the walled Outer City south of Qianmen. The Outer City became the ‘Chinese City’, at its heart the thoroughfare of Qianmen Street, leading from the city gate down towards the Temple of Heaven in the Chinese City’s southwest. By the early twentieth century Qianmen Street and its surrounding hutong were renowned for food, entertainment and shopping. On the one hand were countless food stalls and pedlars offering everything from jianbing (savoury crêpes) to ox-marrow tea with candied fruits. On the other, there were great restaurants like Quanjude, which served up its famous Peking duck roasted over the wood from fruit trees.

  China’s first screenings of moving pictures, or ‘electric shadows’ as they are still known, took place in the Outer City. China’s own first film was a silent movie of a Peking Opera. The theatres offered opera, the tea houses storytelling and music, and the hutong a moveable feast of shadow puppetry, street acrobatics, wrestling, magic and comic dialogues. In the twisting, teeming lanes of Tianqiao, you might encounter legendary street performers such as ‘Pockmark’ Cao, a storyteller with a belled plait that rose from his head like an exclamation mark. You could easily lose yourself (and your money) in the district’s brothels, opium dens and gambling parlours, and then pray for salvation or just better luck in its many temples. There was something for everyone, especially the inevitable standover men and gangs of pickpockets.

  For a safer, more anodyne experience of Tianqiao’s pleasures, a mere 20 Chinese cents bought entry to South City Amusement Park on its northwest corner. South City offered billiards and bowling, magic shows, food stalls, ‘popgun’ games, films, acrobats and Peking Opera – even if you’d be unlikely to catch the likes of Mei Lanfang on its carnivalesque stages.

  The entrance to the Outer City: north end of Qianmen Street, 1900.

  The bookstores and curio shops, stationery shops and printing presses of Liulichang, the old glazed tile factory west of Tianqiao, meanwhile, were a magnet for the city’s literati. According to the writer Wang Jie, the great early twentieth-century author Lu Xun visited Liulichang no less than 480 times, acquiring some 4,000 old books, scrolls and manuscripts.

  The Japanese occupation and civil war in the 1930s and ’40s brought bankruptcy and ruin to many of the area’s businesses. Then, the decades of puritanism, political movements and poverty that followed the Communist victory in 1949 saw the colourful districts south of Qianmen fade to grey.

  In 1980, not long after Deng Xiaoping launched the policies of economic reform and opening up, the city tore down the Ming and Qing dynasty shops of Liulichang and rebuilt them in faux-antique style. Tourists might prefer authenticity, however shabby, but tourism in post-1949 China has never really been about them. In Mao’s day, tourism’s agenda was diplomacy and propaganda. Now, the red of its agenda is that of the redback, the 100-yuan note that is China’s largest banknote: unfortunately, that often translates to replacing antique structures and icons rather than conserving them: authenticity can be less important than turning a quick and easy profit.

  Liulichang is still a mecca for calligraphy materials, seals, fans, picture books and the odd brass doorknocker in the shape of a lion’s mouth, as busloads of tourists can attest. But you’re unlikely to run into any of the city’s literati there – your chances are probably better at the Apple Store at The Village shopping plaza in Sanlitun.

  As part of the city’s Olympics refresh, the entire down-at-heel commercial district running south from Qianmen was slated for demolition and reconstruction. The project was a management fiasco and eventually fell into the lap of the property developers of SOHO. The company, led by a husband and wife team, has been behind some of the capital’s most architecturally entertaining residential and office developments. But SOHO was not experienced in conservation or traditional design. It reproduced Qianmen Street as a cut-rate ‘tidy town’ version of old Beijing; China’s own Chinatown, lacking even the veracity featured in the Beijing Film Studio’s old Beijing film set. A trolley glides down a pedestrian street lined with two- and three-storey buildings with ye olde Republican era facades and neat plantings of crab apple trees. Photogenic at a distance, disappointing in detail, Qianmen Shopping Street is a kind of upmarket, updated, open-air South City Amusement Park – a sanitized version of a lost world.

  Diplomacy and propaganda still play a role in contemporary tourism: one reconstructed laneway off Qianmen Street leads to ‘Alishan Square’, named for a famous mountain in Taiwan. The mountain is home to some of the island’s aboriginal people, whose life was romanticized in the faux-folk song ‘Alishande guniang’ (‘Girl from Alishan’). The song blasts from the speakers in Alishan Square. Given that the song was written in 1947 by a Shanghai film director in need of a quick theme song and a Sichuan composer who’d never been to Alishan, it seems an appropriate soundtrack for the incongruous little plaza, with its decorative map of Taiwan and coral and globe shops.

  Qianmen Shopping Street today: a sanitized version of a lost world.

  North end of Qianmen Shopping Street.

  Hordes of provincial tourists in matching baseball caps bounce like pinballs between lao zihao (famous old brands) such as the Quanjude Peking duck restaurant and the xin zihao (famous new brands) of Starbucks, Zara and Häagen-Dazs. Occasionally they pause to take photos with the ghosts of Beijing past who are frozen in cast-bronze poses under the birdcage-shaped streetlamps. The traditional residents of the area, memorialized in slickly produced souvenir books and photographs as well as statuary, are meanwhile being pushed in ever greater numbers out into faceless high-rise, high-density piles beyond the fifth and sixth ring roads.

  No Beijing residents I know ever go near the new Qianmen Street – it’s not for them anyway. Some of my better-off friends do make an exception for the stylish Australian-run restaurant Capital M, on the third floor of a new-for-old building at Qianmen Street’s northeastern corner. The view from Capital M’s balcony takes in the top of Qianmen Street as well as Zhengyangmen with its Arrow Tower, a corner of the Mao Mausoleum, a snippet of Tiananmen and, on the clearest days, the roof of the pavilion atop Jingshan as well. To the east stands the old Qianmen railway station with its turn-of-the-century clock tower and arched entrance, now a railway museum.

  Yet what are we really looking at? Both the Arrow Tower and Zhengyangmen were reconstructed after being badly damaged during the Boxer Rebellion. The German architect who supervised the rebuilding of the Arrow Tower capped the embrasures with architecturally incongruous white marble eyebrows and added European-style balustrades. The mausoleum’s golden roof tiles do not make it a palace; the decorative overhangs of this interloper appear dour and stingy in comparison with the grandeur of the flying eaves of the gates afore and behind. As for the gate at Tiananmen, what we see is what China got in the discreet reconstruction of 1969. I have read that even the old railway station was moved from its original spot west of where it now stands.

  In Europe, ruins such as those that exist in Rome and Greece are revered reminders of past greatness and loss. It is and always has been different in China. Even palace buildings in China tend to be made of wood, and wood burns. As Pierre Ryckmans (Simon Leys) has observed in ‘The Chinese Attitude towards the Past’, the permanence of Chinese culture ‘is first and foremost a Permanence of Names’.

  The Temple of Heaven’s emblematic Ming dynasty circular hall was rebuilt after it burned down in 1889, buildings in the Forbidden City have burned down and been rebuilt and, although temples may date their origins to the Tang, few of their existing structures would be more than several centuries old and a number of them only decades. Even their statuar
y may be new or, as discussed in chapter Seven, originally from elsewhere.

  In the Ming dynasty, a beautifully proportioned, arched, marble bridge spanned the narrow channel between the front and back lakes of Shichahai. It was called the Yinding (Silver Tael) Bridge for its resemblance to the 38-g (1.3-oz) pieces of silver that once served as monetary units. One of Beijing’s most famous views in classical times was that from the high point of the bridge, of the shimmering reflection in Shichahai of the Western Hills. One fine autumn day in 2010, I strolled to Shichahai only to discover workers hammering the bridge to rubble. They were replacing it with a somewhat flatter bridge ‘in Ming style’ that would be wide enough for the SUVs of the Beijing plutocracy occupying some of the prime real estate around the lake. I am embarrassed to say I burst into tears – embarrassed because I failed to realize that I was weeping over a replica built in 1984 of a 1950s renovation of a Qing reconstruction of the Ming original.

  Line 2, morning rush hour.

  The Circle Line

  It’s 8:30 a.m. and the commuters on Beijing subway’s Line 2 do what people do on rush-hour trains anywhere: text, read, doze or direct their morning stare at advertisements. On a screen by the door, a McCafé hot dog nestles into vivid green lettuce in a sesame bun: ‘I’m lovin’ it!’, chirps the voiceover in English. Real estate flyers litter the seats, which, prime real estate themselves, only ever remain unoccupied for a matter of seconds. On one side of me, a suited man reads the China Defence News, on the other a young man in a tracksuit devours a paperback, the title of which translates as Murder on the Mekong; a student hangs from a strap and texts. Outside the window a zoetropic display of the delights awaiting the tourist to Japan flash past. The polite recorded voice announces the name of the coming station: the Yonghegong, Lama Temple, the former princely mansion where the Yongzheng emperor spent his youth.