by Linda Jaivin
Another of Beijing’s great ‘hyperbuildings’ is the National Centre for the Performing Arts, ‘The Egg’, a translucent glass-and-titanium ellipsoid dome set in a reflecting pool – yolk and albumen. Speaking to Ron Gluckman of Asiaweek in 2001, its French architect, Paul Andreu, whose background was largely in designing airport terminals, called this commission ‘the big chance of my life’.
The Beijing Television Cultural Centre and the Mandarin Hotel ablaze, 2009.
The government invited Andreu to lay his Egg, the size of four football pitches, on a site southwest of the Forbidden City that was one of Beijing’s oldest hutong neighbourhoods. It incited controversy from the start. At 56 m high, it violated the zoning laws for the vicinity of the Forbidden City. More than 100 Chinese architects signed a letter protesting its construction. It would not have been nearly as contentious had it been located elsewhere – even if to the Chinese eye it also looks inauspiciously like a giant tumulus, a grave mound of supra-imperial proportions.
For better or worse, the Nest, the Cube, the Underpants and the Egg are among contemporary Beijing’s landmark buildings. There are other fine examples of both large- and smaller-scale new architecture in the city. The Japanese architect Kuma Kengo’s Opposite House, a chic boutique hotel with international A-list clientele, is one. Another is ‘Split House’, designed by Yung Ho Chang, founder of the first private architecture firm in city and the son of the designer of the National Museum of Revolution and History; Split House is one of the pavilions of the architectural showcase hotel, Commune at the Great Wall. Zaha Hadid’s Galaxy SOHO residential and office complex opened in late 2012 in Beijing’s East Second Ring Road’s new transportation and business zone, the city’s fourth CBD and the first dedicated centre for foreign businesses. Anthony Tao, of the irreverent website Beijing Cream, characterizes it as a ‘weird, shiny, spaceship-like gob of postmodernity’; Hadid describes Beijing as ‘a very exciting territory’ for architects.
For every interesting or exceptional building there are acres of humdrum piles of concrete and glass, some Morse-coded with the odd dot or dash of colour. Then there are the buildings that have slapped together so many disparate architectural styles that they look like a man in an ill-fitting suit with clown shoes and a baseball cap. These have precedent in the great architectural conservationist Liang Sicheng’s one regrettable contribution to post-1949 architecture: a ‘national style’ created at the behest of the Party that tacks a Chinese ‘hat’, a roof with curved eaves and other broadly traditional features, atop an otherwise undistinguished block. Contemporary Beijing architecture, in short, is an omnishambolic mishmash that in parts, as Martin Filler writes, makes ‘1980s Houston seem like Haussmann’s Paris’.
‘The Egg’ with the nesting box of the Great Hall of the People in the background.
Not all of the blame goes to the designers. Hong Kong architect Tao Ho wanted his China Construction Bank in Beijing wrapped in translucent green glass; the developers ignored this, choosing instead what the writer Ron Gluckman in Asiaweek dubs ‘Darth Vader-type dark glass’. Gluckman quotes the dismayed Tao Ho as saying ‘the difference is night and day’ and says that Chang’an Avenue itself has acquired the nickname ‘Architectural Hall of Shame’ for its ‘row after row of kitschy flash’ displaying ‘little sense of subtlety or substance’.
Beijing skyline with the Forbidden City in mid-frame.
Aesthetics aside, Jasper Becker reports in The City of Heavenly Tranquillity that the reflected sunlight from the new walls of glass and mirrors have heated the asphalt to record highs in summer, and the typhoon-speed winds that can gust through the valleys between buildings have blown workers off their scaffolding, resulting in injury and death. Does anyone care? Martin Filler summarizes Koolhaas’s manifesto ‘Bigness, or the Problem of Large’ (1994) thus:
Beyond a certain critical mass, a building becomes a Big Building. Through size alone, such buildings enter an amoral domain, beyond good or bad. Their impact is independent of their quality . . . Bigness is no longer part of any urban tissue. It exists; at most, it coexists. Its subtext is fuck context.
A Taste of the City
When I think of eating home cooking in Beijing, I think of simple yet mouth-watering staples such as laobing, a savoury flatbread; flattened fried rolls stuffed with meat known as jianbing; noodles; steamed dumplings dipped in black vinegar and eaten with cloves of raw garlic; simple stir-fries; and a small bowl of millet porridge to wash it all down. Traditional Beijing tastes are for wheat and millet over rice, for mutton or lamb (eschewed as too gamey by many southerners), and for pungent, garlicky flavours.
Southerners, whether Cantonese, Shanghainese or other-ese, typically complain that northern fare is rough, unrefined, overpowering, more suitable for peasant palates than city tastes. This doesn’t bother anyone in Beijing, where people boast of being kouzhong, ‘heavy in the mouth’. Millet and wheat are northern crops and the pastoral lands north of the Great Walls are good for raising sheep and cows. The Mongolians gave Beijing its favourite winter meal of shuanyangrou, mutton (or Mongolian) hotpot and its refreshing summer drink of cool, sweetened yoghurt. Uighurs from Xinjiang grill the spiced kebabs that are a standard late-night snack and the Manchus have contributed a variety of treats including the classic sweet lüdagun, ‘donkey does a somersault’, glutinous millet flour scrolled around a sweetened bean paste. In fact, many of Beijing’s favourite foods are not Chinese at all, at least not in an ethnic sense.
Those that are belong to the regional cuisine known as Lu, the classical name for nearby Shandong province. Lu is one of four major cuisines in China, the others being Chuan (Sichuan), Huaiyang (Shanghai area) and Yue (Cantonese). A friend in the Peking Opera likens the four dominant Chinese cuisines to the four main role types in Peking Opera. Spicy, fierce Sichuan food equates to the jing, in which the face is painted into a wild mask. Shanghai-area food, nuanced, beautiful, delicate and clever, is the dan, the female characters. My friend doesn’t care much for Cantonese food, classing it with the chou, roughly translated as clowns, who in the opera context represent the wit and wiles of the lower classes. As for Lu, it is basic, straightforward, sometimes a little rough around the edges, but reliable: your classic sheng, or male role.
Mongolian hotpot.
The imperial kitchen, of course, was another story. It’s said that the Empress Dowager Cixi, having heard that in hard times the peasants were reduced to eating crude buns of steamed maize, wished to sample these for herself. As concocted by her chefs as an amuse-bouche, the tiny, fine-grained wowotou were quite nice, especially when consumed as part of a meal that might also include turtle soup, roast pork, bear’s paw, shark’s fin, duck webs in mustard and up to 108 other delicacies from around the empire; she couldn’t see what the problem was.
Curiosity worked both ways. When it became known in the Ming dynasty that the emperor enjoyed noodles as delicate as the hair on a dragon’s beard, fine ‘dragon-beard noodles’ established themselves as a popular local dish.
Chef at Quanjude expertly carving duck.
No Beijing dish is as famous as Peking duck, the 1864 creation of the Qianmen chef Yang Quanren, who invented the open, ‘hung oven’ for roasting ducks and fed the fire with the smokeless wood of date, peach and pear trees. (Legend has it the restaurant began in an old fruit shop.) His restaurant, Quanjude, has since grown into a chain with dozens of affiliates across China and Beijing selling 2 million ducks (as well as zillions of the thin pancakes, cut shallots, cucumbers and dabs of plum sauce that complete the dish) to 5 million customers a year. Speciality Peking duck restaurants like Quanjude offer ‘duck banquets’, which may include fried duck hearts, boiled duck livers, mustardy duck webs – pretty much everything but the feathers. In 1985, when I was living in Beijing, another Peking duck restaurant became one of the first, if not the very first, restaurants in the city to home deliver; the duck came complete with a chef who carved it into 108 auspicious pieces right in your o
wn home.
Possibly because of their city’s long, ethnically mixed and relatively cosmopolitan history, Beijing diners are particularly open to other regional cuisines. It was not long after the first privately run restaurants opened in the 1980s that eateries featuring Sichuan and Hunan food opened up and were instantly thronged. Southwestern Yunnan and Guizhou provinces, with their piquant combinations of sweet, sour and red-hot spicy tastes, have enjoyed fads in more recent years, as have Korean, Thai and Japanese food.
With an increasingly sophisticated, cashed-up and gastronomically curious population and a growing and wealthy expatriate community, it’s unsurprising that Beijing today offers a wide range of good non-Asian restaurants as well: Spanish tapas bars, Argentinian grills, Italian trattoria, French bistros, Israeli delis, Persian dining rooms and all manner of fusion, not to mention a full-fat selection of American fast-food chains. As for those nighttime food markets at Wangfujing full of scorpions and starfish – strictly for tourists, foreign and domestic.
Since the eruption, from around 2008, of a series of shocking food scandals such as those involving melamine in milk, toxic additives in pork and ‘gutter’ (recycled) oil in the woks, Chinese friends in Beijing have become far more selective when eating out. At the very least, they’re sure to check the signs that are usually displayed at the front and that reveal the health inspectors’ most recent report card: as in school, it’s best to try for all As.
A vendor of jianbing, a kind of savoury crêpe.
Yet in hutong neighbourhoods you’ll still find people queuing at hole-in-the-wall shops or mobile carts for zhima shaobing, dense, dark sesame buns, pale, steamed mantou wheat buns and other staples, not to mention the ultimate Beijing comfort food, jianbing – thin griddle cakes topped with egg, seasoned with coriander and savoury spreads and wrapped around a crispy fried pastry, eaten any time of day. And where the hutong have disappeared, Beijing supermarkets almost always feature a special section offering takeaway versions of all these favourite, very Lu-style snacks and staples such as pulled noodles, laobing and more. One day, I was returning to the courtyard house where I often stay, nibbling on a laobing from the local supermarket. One of my neighbours saw me. ‘Where did you get that?’, she asked. ‘The supermarket’, I replied. She wrinkled her face in disgust. ‘You don’t know what sort of ingredients they use’, she said. I replied mildly that it tasted all right to me. ‘You like laobing,’ she said, ‘I’ll make you laobing.’ Such neighbourly generosity is part of what defines the city’s character for me.
Buying sliced melon in Dashila’r.
But perhaps the ultimate Beijing speciality is douzhi, a greyish, viscous mass of fermented mung bean powder, more gloop than soup, that’s stewed in a wok and has a sour flavour enhanced by spicy or savoury condiments. Douzhi is reputed to be particularly nutritious, full of vitamin C and protein. And its pedigree is impeccable: it dates back to the tenth century, when the Khitan Liao ruled the place. A saying has it that ‘if you don’t like douzhi, you’re not a real Beijing person.’
I was finishing this essay back in Sydney when I encountered a woman originally from Tianjin, a city very close to Beijing. I told her I’d just returned from Beijing. Unprompted, she asked me if I’d ever eaten douzhi, and made a face. I said yes, and that I liked it. She burst out laughing at the improbability of this: ‘Only real Beijing people can stomach that stuff.’
The Prince’s Garden
Down the end of a willow-fringed lane off Shichahai’s Qianhai (Front Lake), at 17 Qianhai Road West, is the entrance, as the popular saying has it, to ‘half the history of the Qing dynasty’: Gong Wangfu, Prince Gong’s Mansion. Its extensive, landscaped grounds, which cover an area of some 61,000 sq. m, are graced with elegantly proportioned buildings, covered walkways, artificial hills, lakes, a private opera theatre and follies such as one gate built to resemble a crenellated section of the Great Wall and another in ‘Jesuit Baroque’ style.
Many scholars believe that the fictional Daguan Yuan (Prospect Garden) of the classic Qing novel Dream of the Red Chamber was styled after Prince Gong’s Mansion. John Minford, in his preface to the translation titled The Story of the Stone, notes that not only do the layouts correspond, but ‘the architectural style and scale are so exactly what one would have expected, grand but in exquisite taste.’
That exquisite taste belonged to the first and most colourful of its owners, Heshen (1750–1799), who had risen from imperial bodyguard to grand councillor under the Qianlong emperor on the basis of his good looks and native wit. Qianlong was exceedingly (some whispered excessively) devoted to Heshen, even allowing him at the age of 27 to ride his horse within the Forbidden City. Heshen dipped so liberally into the public purse that he is considered possibly the most corrupt official in Chinese history – a title for which there’s intense competition – though some scholars maintain the besotted emperor opened the purse himself.
In any case, when he built his garden mansion by Shichahai in 1776, he needed to build a two-storey brick building almost 200 m long with more than 40 rooms just to store his loot. His trove included 24 solid-gold beds inlaid with precious gems, 400 solid gold eating utensils, and 100,000 precious porcelain vessels. The total value of his property equalled ten years of Qing imperial revenue. Qianlong’s successor, Jiaqing, was far less entranced. He charged Heshen with twenty crimes, about half of which related to acting above his station. Only the two highest ranks of Qing princes, those with the closest blood ties to the throne, were legally entitled to wangfu, a class to which Heshen’s residence unashamedly aspired. He’d even had the audacity to build a hall there based on Qianlong’s Forbidden City Palace of Tranquil Longevity.
Jiaqing had Heshen sentenced to death by a ‘thousand cuts’, but permitted him to commit suicide instead. In 1799 the court generously provided him with a gold-coloured silk ribbon. He lives on as a popular stock villain in television, film and stage shows about the Qing dynasty.
Part of the estate is called Wanfuyuan, the Garden of Ten Thousand Bats – bat, fu, , being a homonym for good fortune, fu, , and wan, ten thousand, being a highly propitious number in Chinese cosmology. This was a mystery, however, for there appeared to be only 9,999 representations of bats and the character in the garden, including a bat-shaped pond. Other bats, and the character for ‘good luck’, were carved, drawn or fired into the garden’s roof tiles, doorjambs, eaves and latticework.
A Great Wall for the Princely Garden: Heshen’s imperial ambitions.
The Jesuit Baroque gate in Prince Gong’s Mansion.
Qianlong’s grandfather, the great Kangxi emperor, had once famously written the character in a large, fluid and elegant hand. The calligraphy was carved into a large stone that was believed to ensure anyone who touched it good fortune. But the stone disappeared. After Heshen’s death it was discovered hidden in a cave inside an artificial mount in the Garden of Ten Thousand Bats: it was the 10,000th fu. Jiaqing was furious. Because Heshen affixed the stone to the cave wall with stone-carved dragon heads, it was impossible to remove without breaking it. Believing that the talismanic power of the stone could allow Heshen’s descendants to prosper despite his disgrace, Jiaqing ordered the cave sealed. Only in the Mao era, when Premier Zhou ordered the cave opened, was it rediscovered. Once the garden was opened to the public in the mid-1990s, Chinese tourists began rubbing it smooth; today it is under a pane of glass smudged by the palms of thousands of fortune-seeking visitors.
Another view of the baroque gateway, decorated for the Chinese New Year.
One of the mansion’s many charming vistas, early spring 2014.
In 1852 the Xianfeng emperor granted the estate to his younger brother Prince Gong, also known as Yixin. That’s when it properly joined the ranks of official Qing wangfu, princely mansions, of which there were about 90. (The Ming also had princely mansions – Wangfujing, the ‘Well of the Princely Mansions’, was named for the ten that once lined that street.)
The emperor cha
rged Prince Gong with protecting the capital. When he fled the Allied troops in 1860, Prince Gong conducted the negotiations with Lord Elgin and the French representative Baron Gros following the burning of the Yuanmingyuan that resulted in one of the most notorious ‘unequal treaties’ in Qing history at his Shichahai estate.
After Xianfeng’s death, Prince Gong supported Cixi’s bid for power. As prince-councillor, he capably guided reforms of China’s military defences, transportation and communications networks and acted as China’s first Foreign Minister. But his relationship with Cixi grew strained. She sacked him in the early 1870s when he opposed her proposal to rebuild the Yuanmingyuan, insisting that it was an unaffordable luxury. Taking refuge from politics in his estate, he devoted himself to poetry and entertaining.
Like most Manchu noblemen, Prince Gong adored the opera. But Qing noblemen were forbidden to frequent the theatres of the common people, so they built private theatres at home. Prince Gong’s was particularly grand, set within a peony garden and housing his own troupe – the only one at the time that specialized in the ancient form known as kunqu, one of the forebears of Peking Opera. The troupe, which lasted only two years, consisted of some of the greatest singers of the time. Their disciples included several of kunqu and Peking Opera’s greatest stars, including Mei Lanfang.
