Oracle Bones

by Peter Hessler

  He often spoke in English. His name was Zhao Jingxin, and people called him Zhao Lao, a term of respect that means “Old Mr. Zhao.” He belonged to a generation of the Beijing elite that was disappearing as fast as the hutong: the Mandarins of the Kuomintang period, who had grown up in a world both Chinese and Western. Old Mr. Zhao’s father had been a Chinese Baptist theologian with an honorary doctorate from the Princeton Theological Seminary, and he had educated all four of his children in English as well as Chinese. Old Mr. Zhao, like his siblings, had spent time in the United States. During the Second World War, he worked for the U.S. Army in Honolulu, teaching Chinese to American troops who were preparing for an invasion of Japanese-occupied China.

  The invasion never happened, and once that war ended, another one picked up—the struggle between the Communists and the Kuomintang. By the late-1940s, it was clear that Mao’s troops would take the nation, and the young foreign-educated Chinese faced a crucial decision. Two of the Zhao brothers stayed in the United States, but Old Mr. Zhao and his sister returned to China. They eventually became English teachers at Beijing universities.

  “My father wanted us to come back,” Old Mr. Zhao explained. “He said that China was our home.”

  I interviewed him with Ian, who had also heard about the lawsuit. Old Mr. Zhao received us in his living room, where the windows faced south, toward the brick-lined courtyard that baked in the August sun. He shared the home with his wife, Huang Zhe. They had been married in 1953—forty-seven years together in this patch of old Beijing.

  Their home occupied less than a quarter of an acre. It consisted of two small courtyards surrounded by single-story buildings, their roofs topped with interlocking gray tiles. Red pillars of wood flanked the entrance to the main building. Certain details had been modernized: the windows were glass instead of the customary paper, and Old Mr. Zhao had installed plumbing. But the home’s layout still followed the simple lines of tradition. The main compound was arranged on a north-south axis, with four separate buildings standing around a central courtyard. This outdoor space functioned in different ways, according to the season: in winter, when residents had to move from one building to the next, they crossed the courtyard quickly; in warm weather, they shifted some of their daily routines outside, enjoying the square patch of sky.

  The outdoors connected the four buildings, but it also divided them. In traditional Beijing homes, that space sometimes defined the way that an extended family occupied a single compound. Old Mr. Zhao told us that, in the past, his father had lived in the western building, while Old Mr. Zhao’s sister had occupied the one to the east. She had gone by the English name of Lucy Chao; her Ph.D. had been from the University of Chicago, where she had written a dissertation on Henry James. In China, she was a prominent translator. In that eastern wing of the courtyard, the woman had spent a decade translating the first complete Chinese version of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. The book had been published in 1991, and Lucy Chao had died seven years later.

  According to Old Mr. Zhao, the home was more than three centuries old, although the exact age was unknown. But the authorities had never designated the compound as a historic relic, and in 1998 the district government had informed Old Mr. Zhao that they needed to tear it down. He filed a lawsuit against the district Cultural Relics Bureau for failing to add the courtyard to the list of protected properties. For Old Mr. Zhao, it was particularly infuriating because they wanted to tear it down in order to build the most mundane of modern structures: a branch of the China Construction Bank.

  “For more than a year, nothing happened,” he said. “Before October 1 of 1999, they were careful about tearing things down, because it was the fiftieth anniversary of the country and they didn’t want trouble. But after that, they started up again. With some of the people in this area, they just cut off the water or electricity, to make them leave.”

  In July of 2000, the case went to court. Old Mr. Zhao’s lawyer accused the Cultural Relics Bureau of shoddy research—twice, officials had visited the home, and each time they had spent only a few minutes wandering through the buildings before declaring that the compound shouldn’t be designated a relic. In court, independent experts testified that the home dated at least to the early Qing, and possibly the Ming (the dynasty that ended in 1644). They even located the complex on a map from the eighteenth century. But none of that evidence mattered: the court decided that the definition of a cultural relic depended strictly on the Cultural Relics Bureau’s definition. If the bureau said it could be torn down, then nothing else mattered.

  But the old man refused to give up. He was well connected—this was one reason why he acted so fearlessly—and he filed a second lawsuit against the district housing office. This department, in accordance with the rules for demolition, had offered to compensate Old Mr. Zhao according to the quality and size of his home. The settlement came to nearly three million yuan—over three hundred thousand American dollars. Old Mr. Zhao’s suit claimed that the figure was too low, although he told us that this was just a legal tactic.

  “It has nothing to do with money,” he said. “This house is mine. My father bought it, and I’ve lived here for more than fifty years. Listen to what the famous architect I. M. Pei says—he says that Beijing has already razed too many courtyards. Ask any foreigner what he remembers about Beijing, and he’ll say the hutong. Now, if the foreigners want to protect places like this, why don’t the Chinese? Right now, in all of China, there are only two cities that are still intact: Pingyao and Lijiang. That’s all that’s left after five thousand years of history!”

  He referred to two small cities, one in the north of China and the other in the southwest. Now the old man shifted back to English, speaking the words clearly. He held his head back—jutting jaw, flashing eyes.

  “As a Chinese person, I have a responsibility to protect this place. I won’t leave willingly. The court can come, the police can come, the ambulance can come. They can force me to leave, but I won’t sign my name and agree. For them, I have just two words: Not moving.”

  IN CHINA, OTHER former capital cities had a longer history than Beijing, but none was so deliberately and carefully created. The city bore the imprint of the Ming emperor Yongle, who had a flair for big ideas. The fleets of Yongle’s reign sailed all the way to Indonesia, India, and the southern tip of Africa. In Nanjing, the original Ming capital, it was Yongle who had attempted to carve out the largest stone tablet in the world.

  His plan for Beijing was even more ambitious. In 1421, Yongle moved the capital north from Nanjing, to a city that had formerly been a center for northern people such as the Mongols. In the past, there had been cities on the site, but Yongle approached it more or less like he did the massive slab of limestone—as a blank slate. He organized the new capital along traditional Chinese notions of geomancy; everything was arranged on a strict north-south axis, with the imperial palace facing south. The city reflected a vision of a holy body: certain temples and landmarks corresponded to the head, hands, feet, and other organs of the god Nezha. Over the centuries, the city expanded, but it never lost its original layout.

  In the first half of the twentieth century, as modernity transformed so many cities around the world, Beijing remained relatively intact. Political instability stunted China’s growth, and then Nanjing became the capital once more, under the Kuomintang. Even during the Japanese occupation, Beijing’s physical layout wasn’t threatened. In fact, the Japanese planned to preserve the old city, concentrating all new development in a separate satellite district. This plan was never implemented, and in 1949, after the Kuomintang fled to Taiwan, the Communists made Beijing the capital of their New China. There was nothing else in the world quite like it—a major capital city, designed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, that had hardly been touched by modernity or war.

  But Mao Zedong, like Yongle, was a ruler with big ideas. He envisioned Beijing as an industrial center, and the city’s old gates and walls were considered an i
mpediment to progress. One by one, they were torn down, for various reasons. In 1952, Xibian Gate was destroyed, in order to harvest bricks. From 1954 to 1955, the Gate of Earthly Peace was demolished, in order to build a road. Chaoyang Gate, in 1956: condemned because of disrepair. Dongzhi Gate, 1965: a new subway line. Chongwen Gate, 1966: subway line. Before the Communists came to power, the fifty-foot-high city wall and its gates had been among the city’s most distinctive features, but by the end of the 1960s virtually all of the structures had been torn down. During the Cultural Revolution, most of Beijing’s remaining temples were either destroyed or converted to other uses.

  But many hutong survived Mao. His vision of industrial development was basically just a vision: there wasn’t an economic reality behind his theories. He could tear down the city wall and the major gates, but he never created the prosperity necessary to change the neighborhoods where most people actually lived. After the Cultural Revolution, much of central Beijing’s residential layout was still medieval.

  Once the reforms gained momentum, however, the market did a much more thorough job of demolition than Mao. Beijing boomed—the population had been about seven hundred thousand in 1949, and it grew to more than twelve million by the end of the 1990s. Roads needed to be widened, and there was a financial incentive to replace hutong with apartment blocks. Banks made more sense than courtyards. In the life-span of old Beijing, the last decade of the millennium was the one that brought the greatest physical change to the city.

  Despite the transformation, much of the ancient nomenclature survived. Along the Second Ring Road, there were subway stops and intersections known as Chaoyang Gate, Dongzhi Gate, Chongwen Gate, among others. None of these gates existed in the physical sense, but their names still represented important landmarks. If you went to the Gate of Earthly Peace, you saw traffic lights, pavement, and restless red cabs itching to pass through the memory of a building that had once marked Beijing’s northern axis. A cabbie could take you to Hongmiao—“Red Temple”—but there wasn’t a temple there anymore. Fuxing Gate didn’t exist; Anding Gate was just a name. Old Beijing was becoming a city of words: an imaginary place that residents invoked when they went from one point of modernity to another.

  The final word was always chai: “pull down; dismantle.” In Beijing, that single character was painted onto structures that were condemned to demolition, and you saw the word everywhere in the old parts of the city. Usually, the character was about four feet tall, surrounded by a circle, like the A of the anarchist’s graffiti:

  As Beijing changed, that word gained a talismanic quality. Residents cracked jokes, and local artists riffed on the character. One shop sold baseball caps with encircled embroidered onto the front. When I hung out in Ju’er Hutong, a neighbor named Old Wang liked to make puns. “We live in chai nar,” he used say. It sounded like the English word “China,” but it meant “Demolish where?” Old Wang remarked that ever since he could remember, people had been tearing down ancient buildings in Beijing. In 1966, along with other schoolchildren, he had been enlisted in a volunteer brigade that helped the old city wall near Anding Gate.

  September 21, 2000

  Throughout the fall, a steady stream of Chinese reporters visited Old Mr. Zhao. His lawsuit was part of a new trend—during the late 1990s, there had been a number of significant private suits against the government, including some class-action cases. Whenever a suit was successful, it received prominent coverage in the Chinese press, as a sign that the government was fair. But most lawsuits failed, and those were the ones you never heard about. They remained in the purgatory of reform, where cases could be made but never won, and reporters could investigate but never publish. A few articles about Old Mr. Zhao’s lawsuit appeared in minor provincial newspapers, but there was a strict media blackout in the capital. The Beijing reporters visited the courtyard as a kind of ritual: they paid homage to the story, even though they couldn’t tell it.

  Censorship of the press was one reason why relatively few Beijing residents seemed to worry about the destruction of the old city, but there were other factors that contributed to the passivity. In the hutong, many homes were without plumbing; residents used public toilets, and they were often happy to move to new apartment blocks. It was hard for them to conceive of the other option: modernize without destroying the ancient layout, the way European cities had. Finally, it was rare for a structure to embody a straight line of human history, like Old Mr. Zhao’s courtyard. During the political campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s, squatters from the proletariat class had been encouraged to occupy the homes of the wealthy, and many courtyards had been subdivided by makeshift structures. After Reform and Opening, it wasn’t hard for developers to remove these squatters, who generally didn’t hold legal title to the property.

  Even when contracts were well documented, as in Old Mr. Zhao’s case, the law didn’t provide complete protection. The national constitution—which had been adopted in 1982, after the Zhao family had already owned their home for more than three decades—stated clearly that all land belonged to the nation. Individuals could buy and sell land-use rights, but the government could force a sale if the property was necessary for national interests. But the national interest was a murky concept in Chai nar, where power was being decentralized. Often local authorities were the ones who really mattered, and they could twist the “national interest” to serve their own ends.

  According to Old Mr. Zhao’s lawyer, if the courtyard was demolished, the land-use rights would be sold three separate times. First, the district government would acquire the rights from the old man, and then it would immediately resell them at a profit to the state-owned developer. Finally, the developer would raise the price again, selling them to the bank, which was also government-owned. In other words, three different government bureaus would buy and sell the land among themselves before anything was built. Along the way, the price would increase roughly ten times the amount that had been paid to Old Mr. Zhao.

  The second lawsuit focused on this arrangement, accusing the government of not offering the true market value. The suit was decided on the morning of September 21, at the Number Two Intermediate People’s Court. At 9:15, the judge entered the courtroom, told everybody to stand up, and read the decision: Old Mr. Zhao and his wife must vacate the courtyard within five days. If they refused, the local authorities had the right to forcibly remove the couple and tear down the structures.

  Outside the courtroom, where a Beijing television crew waited, an argument broke out between the old man’s lawyer and the government representatives. The lawyer swore he’d find a way to appeal; the two sides shouted back and forth. The television crew filmed the argument. It did not appear on the evening news.

  September 25, 2000

  Old Mr. Zhao and Huang Zhe still hadn’t left. The old woman looked nervous; she told me that there were rumors the police might come any time. But her husband seemed invigorated. “They’ll have to force me to move,” he said. “Otherwise, I’m not leaving.”

  Late September is one of the best seasons in Beijing, and the temperature on that day was perfect. We met in the main courtyard, just as the afternoon shadows were starting to slip eastward, toward the building where Lucy Chao had translated Whitman. Some rose bushes stood out in front, bare for the coming winter. A huge yellow crane loomed high above us—construction was already under way on one of the bank buildings next door. Almost all of the neighbors had already moved out.

  Earlier that morning, Old Mr. Zhao had played a tennis match at Tsinghua University, against some other retired teachers. He told me that he had won, six games to two. He seemed upbeat, showing me a number of anonymous letters of support that had been dropped into the mail slot of the courtyard’s front door. One note had been signed “A Citizen of the Capital.”

  The couple had no children, and friends had told me that they suffered a great deal during the Cultural Revolution. Old Mr. Zhao never spoke in detail about that period; whenever the subject came
up, he brushed it aside. When I asked about his brothers in the United States, he said that one was a retired freelance writer. The other brother was a retired geologist named Edward C. T. Zhao, who had spent his career with the U.S. Geological Survey.

  “You know how the U.S. landed on the moon,” Old Mr. Zhao said. “They brought back moon rocks, and there were many geologists who wanted to study them. Four geologists were chosen, and my brother was one of them. He was quarantined afterward for two weeks. They didn’t know what kind of germs might be on the rocks.”

  The afternoon shadows crossed the courtyard, and we moved inside, to the main living room. I asked Old Mr. Zhao if he had ever had second thoughts about his decision to return to China after the war.

  “None of us has any regrets,” he said. “My brothers took their road, and I took mine. Of course, in 1998, when the government first said they were going to this home, my brothers invited me to go to America, but I didn’t want to. I’m a Chinese, and even if I went to America, I’d still be a Chinese.”

  Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Old Mr. Zhao hadn’t seen his brothers. In 1972, the geologist made his first trip back to China, as part of an American delegation that arrived in the wake of President Nixon’s visit to Beijing. Inside his living room, Old Mr. Zhao pointed out a gift from one nephew: a commemorative plate from Springfield, Illinois, with a sketch of Abraham Lincoln in the center.

  Every time I passed through the courtyard, there was something soothing about its regularity: the right angles, the square buildings. I imagined what it had been like with the patriarch in the west, the daughter in the east, the son in the north. But the sense of order broke down once I entered the living room, whose walls reflected the different worlds that had passed through this single home. Alongside the Abraham Lincoln plate hung an award from the Beijing Tennis Center. Near that, an orange plastic Wham-O Frisbee dangled from a television antenna. Above that, two calligraphy scrolls, memorials to Old Mr. Zhao’s father. A black-and-white photograph of the patriarch. A painting of Jesus teaching the Pharisees. A Chinese landscape. A plastic Santa Claus. More calligraphy. Another tennis trophy.