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City of Heavenly Tranquility: Beijing in the History of China
by Jasper Becker
Reviewed by Tim O'Connell
The 1960 Rome Olympic Games were judged a triumph, at the time, but half a century later the Italian people came to rue them as among the worst acts of cultural vandalism in the nation's history. For in the decade before the Games, in secret and without public consultation, an insecure and autocratic government laid plans to bulldoze 95% of the ancient capital to rubble, discarding all property rights and regulations while evicting millions of residents from their centuries-old communities. A handful of major tourist sites were preserved -- not so all but a tiny fraction of the city's imperial architecture, princely palaces and charming, maze-like streets. Rome had seemed eternal, but one of the world's great historical, cultural and religious centers had been leveled, then "modernized", forever, in the service of two weeks of ball games.
The Eternal City was spared such tragedy, of course -- two new works of love and lament by long-time foreign residents of a now nearly-vanished Beijing explore why and how the Rome of Asia met a different fate.
Jasper Becker's City of Heavenly Tranquility: Beijing in the History of China began life as a conventional history. But as the imperial capital crumbled around the veteran author, a former Beijing bureau chief for the South China Morning Post, Becker found himself dashing to record the places, races and faces that gave the city its unique character and charm, before they disappeared forever. This beautifully-written combination of historical research and reportage is chaptered thematically, from Ming to Mao to music, with a particular focus on individuals fighting a heroic if mainly doomed rear guard action to preserve aspects of the capital's identity and integrate them with the modern.
Becker discovers how much of what he loves about the distinctive Beijing culture and character is owed to the Manchu bannermen. That hereditary class of former warriors-turned-leisured gentlemen "exhibited an amused tolerance for life's ups and downs, a pronounced courtesy and ... a humorous, cynical reserve." They relished an unhurried life of "small games" (cricket fighting, pigeon whistles), tasty snacks and the witty banter called xiangsheng; the distinctive burr of the local dialect also has its roots in "the consonant-rich Manchu language." Seeking out remnants of that subsumed minority, the author meets surviving members of the ruling Aisin Gioro clan (including Pu Ren, the last Qing emperor's younger brother), and traces their troubled journeys through 20th-century China. He even tracks down the dynasty's last surviving eunuch, 96-year old Sun Yaoting:
City of Heavenly Tranquility aims not just "to tell the history of this ancient, magical city," and "to reveal what made Beijing so delightfully unique," but "to explore why the city was devastated in the name of modernity." The book surveys the country's century-long struggle to modernize, and shows how the destruction of the past decade is but the last stage of a plan envisioned by Mao Zedong, one that would have been completed earlier had it not been for the chaos of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.
Becker ascribes two motives to the secretive decisions of Jiang Zemin and his successor engineer-rulers to complete the demolition of this sublime work of unified urban artistry and fill it with incoherent, largely foreign-designed "hyperbuildings". Firstly, the Communist Party has warred on China's cultural inheritance as the most serious obstacle to modernization since "Liberation" (using the Olympic opening ceremony to recast itself as its guardian notwithstanding). "Few examples in history compare with China's effort to substitute another culture for its own," the author writes, "... to Westernize ... the greatest non-Western civilization in history." The second, the Party's determination to monopolize, mold and manipulate a self-justifying version of modern and dynastic history. "It is on a blank page that the most beautiful poems are written," Mao famously wrote. Observes Becker, "Beijing was, after all, just a stage where the sets changed frequently to help the audience forget what had happened in the last scene. Everyone lived brainwashed in a timeless present."
In THE LAST DAYS OF OLD BEIJING: LIFE IN THE VANISHING BACKSTREETS OF A CITY TRANSFORMED, MICHAEL MEYER, explores much the same story of urban transformation and dislocation on a more intimate, personal level. The first-time author came to China in 1995 with the Peace Corps and stayed on as a teacher, travel writer and preservation expert working with UNESCO. As stunned as Becker at the helter-skelter of destruction taking place around him, he moves into a shared courtyard home in Dazhalan, Beijing's oldest neighborhood (just southwest of Tiananmen Square), and volunteers to teach at its Coal Lane Elementary School. This charming, informative book describes his two years there, opening a fascinating window on traditional life in the hutong ("the lanes that lattice the heart of Beijing") as these distinctive communities fall rapidly to the wrecking ball.
Meyer interweaves his personal experiences with aspects of Beijing's rich history and like Becker, places the city's accelerated pre-Olympic destruction in the larger context of China's 20th-century struggles with modernization. The tragic story of Liang Sicheng, the nation's most prominent architect and architectural historian, features in both books and makes clear there were alternatives to the Communist program of ruthless reinvention. Immediately after the 1949 revolution, the idealistic Liang lobbied Mao with a plan to build a new administrative center in the western suburbs (ironically an idea shared by Japan's invaders), preserving the Old City as a living museum and turning the beautiful Ming walls, gates and moats into a continuous public park. But an army of laborers was soon "tearing at the structure like ants eating a bone," and Liang met a typically sad end during the Cultural Revolution, avowing, "I regret that I took up architecture. It would have been better if I had studied mechanics or radio."
The heart of The Last Days of Old Beijing, however, lies in its affectionate, compassionate, often humorous portraits of such Dazhalan neighbors as the Widow (with whom Meyer shares a courtyard), fellow teacher Miss Zhu, student Little Liu and migrants Recycler Wang and Soldier Liu. What each awaits is the sudden appearance of the character chai ("raze"), "brushed on condemned homes in ghostly white strokes and circled." Rarely if ever is the symbol seen painted, the book continues, "It just appeared overnight, like a gang tag, or the work of a specter. The Hand."
Through their life stories the reader comes to understand just how much of the city's intangible fabric and spirit is being lost by the forced relocation of millions of Beijing's residents to the soulless suburbs. The author observes that when that happened, and despite their more modern surroundings (complete with indoor plumbing):
--
Tim O'Connell is a China trader turned writer and historian who has lived in Hong Kong and Beijing since 1981.
by Jasper Becker
Reviewed by Tim O'Connell
The 1960 Rome Olympic Games were judged a triumph, at the time, but half a century later the Italian people came to rue them as among the worst acts of cultural vandalism in the nation's history. For in the decade before the Games, in secret and without public consultation, an insecure and autocratic government laid plans to bulldoze 95% of the ancient capital to rubble, discarding all property rights and regulations while evicting millions of residents from their centuries-old communities. A handful of major tourist sites were preserved -- not so all but a tiny fraction of the city's imperial architecture, princely palaces and charming, maze-like streets. Rome had seemed eternal, but one of the world's great historical, cultural and religious centers had been leveled, then "modernized", forever, in the service of two weeks of ball games.
The Eternal City was spared such tragedy, of course -- two new works of love and lament by long-time foreign residents of a now nearly-vanished Beijing explore why and how the Rome of Asia met a different fate.
Jasper Becker's City of Heavenly Tranquility: Beijing in the History of China began life as a conventional history. But as the imperial capital crumbled around the veteran author, a former Beijing bureau chief for the South China Morning Post, Becker found himself dashing to record the places, races and faces that gave the city its unique character and charm, before they disappeared forever. This beautifully-written combination of historical research and reportage is chaptered thematically, from Ming to Mao to music, with a particular focus on individuals fighting a heroic if mainly doomed rear guard action to preserve aspects of the capital's identity and integrate them with the modern.
Becker discovers how much of what he loves about the distinctive Beijing culture and character is owed to the Manchu bannermen. That hereditary class of former warriors-turned-leisured gentlemen "exhibited an amused tolerance for life's ups and downs, a pronounced courtesy and ... a humorous, cynical reserve." They relished an unhurried life of "small games" (cricket fighting, pigeon whistles), tasty snacks and the witty banter called xiangsheng; the distinctive burr of the local dialect also has its roots in "the consonant-rich Manchu language." Seeking out remnants of that subsumed minority, the author meets surviving members of the ruling Aisin Gioro clan (including Pu Ren, the last Qing emperor's younger brother), and traces their troubled journeys through 20th-century China. He even tracks down the dynasty's last surviving eunuch, 96-year old Sun Yaoting:
- As he struggled into his clothes…, a telltale whiff of stale urine filled the air. Beneath the white stubble still covering his head, his watery eyes looked out alertly at the foreigner but he did not seem alarmed. His cheeks were sunken but not especially beardless or womanly. All in all, his lean frame bore little resemblance to the grossly fat, vain peacocks with rouged and powdered faces who cackle their way so prominently through Chinese literature.
City of Heavenly Tranquility aims not just "to tell the history of this ancient, magical city," and "to reveal what made Beijing so delightfully unique," but "to explore why the city was devastated in the name of modernity." The book surveys the country's century-long struggle to modernize, and shows how the destruction of the past decade is but the last stage of a plan envisioned by Mao Zedong, one that would have been completed earlier had it not been for the chaos of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.
Becker ascribes two motives to the secretive decisions of Jiang Zemin and his successor engineer-rulers to complete the demolition of this sublime work of unified urban artistry and fill it with incoherent, largely foreign-designed "hyperbuildings". Firstly, the Communist Party has warred on China's cultural inheritance as the most serious obstacle to modernization since "Liberation" (using the Olympic opening ceremony to recast itself as its guardian notwithstanding). "Few examples in history compare with China's effort to substitute another culture for its own," the author writes, "... to Westernize ... the greatest non-Western civilization in history." The second, the Party's determination to monopolize, mold and manipulate a self-justifying version of modern and dynastic history. "It is on a blank page that the most beautiful poems are written," Mao famously wrote. Observes Becker, "Beijing was, after all, just a stage where the sets changed frequently to help the audience forget what had happened in the last scene. Everyone lived brainwashed in a timeless present."
In THE LAST DAYS OF OLD BEIJING: LIFE IN THE VANISHING BACKSTREETS OF A CITY TRANSFORMED, MICHAEL MEYER, explores much the same story of urban transformation and dislocation on a more intimate, personal level. The first-time author came to China in 1995 with the Peace Corps and stayed on as a teacher, travel writer and preservation expert working with UNESCO. As stunned as Becker at the helter-skelter of destruction taking place around him, he moves into a shared courtyard home in Dazhalan, Beijing's oldest neighborhood (just southwest of Tiananmen Square), and volunteers to teach at its Coal Lane Elementary School. This charming, informative book describes his two years there, opening a fascinating window on traditional life in the hutong ("the lanes that lattice the heart of Beijing") as these distinctive communities fall rapidly to the wrecking ball.
Meyer interweaves his personal experiences with aspects of Beijing's rich history and like Becker, places the city's accelerated pre-Olympic destruction in the larger context of China's 20th-century struggles with modernization. The tragic story of Liang Sicheng, the nation's most prominent architect and architectural historian, features in both books and makes clear there were alternatives to the Communist program of ruthless reinvention. Immediately after the 1949 revolution, the idealistic Liang lobbied Mao with a plan to build a new administrative center in the western suburbs (ironically an idea shared by Japan's invaders), preserving the Old City as a living museum and turning the beautiful Ming walls, gates and moats into a continuous public park. But an army of laborers was soon "tearing at the structure like ants eating a bone," and Liang met a typically sad end during the Cultural Revolution, avowing, "I regret that I took up architecture. It would have been better if I had studied mechanics or radio."
The heart of The Last Days of Old Beijing, however, lies in its affectionate, compassionate, often humorous portraits of such Dazhalan neighbors as the Widow (with whom Meyer shares a courtyard), fellow teacher Miss Zhu, student Little Liu and migrants Recycler Wang and Soldier Liu. What each awaits is the sudden appearance of the character chai ("raze"), "brushed on condemned homes in ghostly white strokes and circled." Rarely if ever is the symbol seen painted, the book continues, "It just appeared overnight, like a gang tag, or the work of a specter. The Hand."
Through their life stories the reader comes to understand just how much of the city's intangible fabric and spirit is being lost by the forced relocation of millions of Beijing's residents to the soulless suburbs. The author observes that when that happened, and despite their more modern surroundings (complete with indoor plumbing):
- They missed their old lives. Their homes and jobs gave them an accumulated rank in a fixed setting. How people regarded them raised their standing, and self-regard. That, not a building, is what formed their attachment to their former locales. Strip that away, and it took part of their selves along, too.
- Outsiders often called hutong neighborhoods slums, but ... our neighborhood was not a pit of despair; you heard laughter and lively talk and occasionally, tears and arguments, just like anywhere else. People treated each other with something I missed the minute I set foot outside the hutong: civility. Residents recognized each other, so there was no cursing or name-calling directed at anonymous faces, without repercussions. Cars could not blare the horn, cut you off, and motor away. In the lanes, belligerence was not a virtue, tolerance was.
--
Tim O'Connell is a China trader turned writer and historian who has lived in Hong Kong and Beijing since 1981.
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