Beijing

by Linda Jaivin

  The Xian-yun [people] are undone.

  The frontier forts to which this poem from the sixth century BCE refers failed to ‘undo’ the Xianyun or any of the other militant tribes to China’s north. The rulers of four out of the five dynasties that made Beijing their capital were nomadic tribes that had come conquering across these walls. As for the Xianyun (later called Xiongnü and possibly the ancestors of the Huns), they menaced Chinese states for nearly a thousand more years.

  The Great Wall is in reality a series of discontinuous fortifications including walls, beacon stations and watchtowers stretching from China’s northeast coast to its northwestern deserts. It came to symbolize China itself only after the Japanese occupied Manchuria in 1931; Mao was referring to the fight against the Japanese when in 1935 he wrote the famous line, ‘Unless you make it to the Great Wall, you’re no hero.’ Richard Nixon became a hero in 1972 at Badaling and Pierre Cardin in 1979, when he launched his Spring/Summer collection there. Ravers have danced on it, artists have wrapped it and tourists, heroes all according to the souvenir t-shirt, stage daily human wave attacks on the ancient defences.

  The great early twentieth-century writer Lu Xun called it ‘a wonder and a curse’, saying he felt ‘hemmed in on all sides by the Great Wall’. The narrator of the popular Chinese television documentary miniseries River Elegy (1988) attacked it as

  a symbol of confinement, conservatism, impotent defence, and timidity in the face of invasion. Because of its massive scale and venerable history, it has left the imprint of its grand conceit and self-deception on the very soul of the Chinese. Ah, Great Wall, why do we still sing your praises?

  Great Wall near Beijing.

  Schematic map showing Ming Inner and Outer Cities. The suffix ‘men’ means ‘gate’.

  In 1602, when the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci, fluent in Chinese and trained in court etiquette, received permission to enter the Forbidden City, he kowtowed to an empty throne. Ricci was invited to stick around to teach the eunuchs how to wind the European clocks in the palace collection. He engaged in philosophical discussion with officials, drew maps of the world, taught eunuchs to play the harpsichord and devised the first system for transcribing Chinese into roman letters: Ricci’s Latinate ‘Pequim’ gave us ‘Peking’. As appalled by Beijing as Choe Bu had been, Ricci described the city as ‘a true Babylon of confusion, full of every sort of sin, with no trace of justice or piety in anyone’. Its population was ‘gente effeminate, deliziosa’ – effeminate and hedonistic. He estimated there were 40,000 prostitutes in Beijing including boys in ladies-of-the-night clothing.

  In 1603, in response to an anonymous pamphlet attacking Lady Zheng, Wanli unleashed a wave of terror. Eunuchs tortured his critics at court and caned a famous Buddhist monk to death. Taxation and corruption reached intolerable levels. Coal miners protested. People starved. Bandits thrived. Peasant rebellions brewed. ‘Purity’, lamented one Chinese writer in 1609 (quoted by Brook in The Confusions of Pleasure), had been ‘completely swept away and excess inundated the world’. The Jurchens, meanwhile, had established a new, improved Latter Jin dynasty north of the border. They became known as the Manchus. In 1636 their emperor, Nurhaci, changed the title of the dynasty to Qing (Clear).

  A ruthless peasant rebel called Li Zicheng, who had killed hundreds of thousands of people by breaching the dykes of the Yellow River, reached Beijing with his army in early 1644 and laid siege to the city. The panicked Chongzhen emperor (r. 1628–44) murdered his wife, concubines and daughters to protect them from rape and hanged himself from a pavilion on Jingshan. The following morning, the people of Beijing awoke to find notices posted on every door proclaiming Li the emperor of a new dynasty.

  As Li’s army terrorized Beijing, over 300 km away, the Ming general Wu Sangui opened the Great Wall pass of Shanhaiguan to a Manchu-led army promising to help unseat the rebels. The Manchus did as promised: they drove Li out. Then they declared Beijing the capital of the Qing and put their six-year-old emperor Shunzhi on the throne.

  Pictorial map of the Ming Tombs, after 1736, brush-and-ink watercolour.

  4 The Qing Dynasty (1644–1911)

  The Qing court rewarded Han Chinese who threw in their lot with the Manchus with government posts, land grants and inclusion in the Banners – the colour-coded Manchu military, political and social organization. In addition to Manchus and Han Chinese, the Banners also included many Mongols and even some Russians. The new rulers invited high-ranking Ming officials to serve the Qing and promised not to vandalize the Ming emperors’ tombs. No one replaced General Wu at Shanhaiguan. The Great Walls, intended to keep out Manchus and Mongols, were allowed to fall to ruins.

  Like the Mongols, the Manchus were great equestrians and hunters. They maintained imperial hunting grounds close to and within the city where the emperor could hunt wild boar, pheasants and even tigers, which were kept caged until needed. They were, however, content to maintain both the system of governance and architecture of Ming Beijing. Most changes were cosmetic: they rebuilt (and renamed) palace and other buildings that had been torched during the short but violent reign of Li Zicheng, and enhanced Beijing’s parks and lakes. They gave Tiananmen its current name, and added Manchurian and sometimes Mongolian names to the signs on many palace and official buildings. Following a visit by the fifth Dalai Lama in 1651, the Qing court erected a Tibetan-style stupa – the White Dagoba – in his honour on Hortensia Isle, where Khubilai’s Jade Palace once stood. (This is distinct from the Yuan era White Dagoba Temple to the west.)

  The Manchu transformation of Beijing’s human landscape was far more radical: in 1648 the emperor ordered all non-Bannermen Han Chinese out of the Inner City. Many migrated to Dashila’r (the Ming dynasty neighbourhood ‘Big Fence’) and other parts of the walled Outer City, which acquired the nickname ‘the Chinese City’. Within the Inner City (later known in English as the ‘Tartar City’), each Banner occupied a geographical quarter; Lanqiying (Blue Banner Camp) close to Peking University is just one place name that recalls those times.

  The White Dagoba erected on Hortensia Isle at Beihai to honour the fifth Dalai Lama.

  Manchu directness, wit and manners contributed to the blend of roguishness, humour and courtesy that defines the archetypal Beijing personality. In humble courtyard houses and grand wangfu (princely mansions) alike, Manchus cultivated the leisure pursuits and xiaowanyi’er (little amusements) now spoken of as quintessentially Beijing: growing and tending courtyard gardens, making and flying kites and breeding crickets, goldfish and lapdogs, as well as art of constructing musical whistles to attach to the tail-feathers of homing pigeons, to mention a few.

  Manchu men shaved the front of their heads and wore their hair long and plaited, hanging straight down the back like a horse’s tail. The court ordered all Chinese men to do the same, on pain of death: no queue, no head. Manchu women, who wore their hair in high lacquered wings festooned with flowers and gems, enjoyed greater freedoms and social status than Chinese women and never bound their feet as Chinese women had done since the Tang dynasty. According to The Manchu Way by the Qing specialist Mark Elliott, many Chinese Bannerwomen eventually abandoned foot binding as well.

  Wary of Ming restorationists, the court imposed a curfew on Beijing and policed the city heavily. More than 1,000 sentries kept watch from the walls, and the gates between the Inner and Outer Cities were shut between midnight and dawn. The Qing fortified Hortensia Isle with signal cannons and installed more than 1,700 lockable fences along the avenues and hutong. The Communist hukou (household registration) system harks back to the Qing, when it was decreed: ‘Should there come [into the neighbourhood] an outsider, carefully check his history.’ Even the fields close to the city walls were ploughed with furrows parallel to the walls to frustrate the advance of rebel cavalry.

  The long-reigning Kangxi emperor (r. 1661–1722), one of the Qing’s most exemplary rulers, tolerated only 400 eunuchs in his court, and strictly for ‘cleaning and sweeping’. His hare
m was relatively modest as well: only 300 women. The conscientious Kangxi once penned an ode to a Western chiming clock. Jonathan Spence translated it in his brilliant ‘autobiography’ of Kangxi, Emperor of China:

  Red-capped watchmen, there’s no need to announce dawn’s coming.

  My golden clock has warned me of the time.

  By first light I am hard at work,

  And keep on asking, ‘Why are the memorials late?’

  Those imperial clock-winders, the Jesuits, won even greater favour with the Qing than the Ming. When the young German Jesuit Johann Adam Schall von Bell accurately predicted a solar eclipse, the Shunzhi emperor (r. 1644–61) appointed him head of the Bureau of Astronomy. After Schall von Bell cured the emperor’s sick mother with Western medicine, he was permitted to build a cathedral, Nan Tang (Southern Cathedral), inside Xuanwu Gate, on the site of Matteo Ricci’s old home.

  Manchu women.

  Kangxi ordered all Jesuits to learn Manchu. He liked to converse with them about cannons and windmills, cartography and Euclidean geometry. They taught him to play the harpsichord. They never succeeded in baptizing an emperor, but according to Emperor of China, by the late seventeenth century they claimed 16,000 converts in Beijing.

  Kangxi commissioned a string of garden palaces, including in the Fragrant Hills in the west and on Jade Spring Mountain. Some were built on the foundations of Jin pleasances or Ming villas. The Yuanmingyuan (Garden of Perfect Brightness) to the city’s northwest was his gift to his fourth son and heir, the Yongzheng emperor. Yongzheng (r. 1722–35) adored the Yuanmingyuan, adding audience halls so that he could administer the empire from there.

  It was Yongzheng who, faced with southern courtiers who spoke impenetrable dialects such as Cantonese and Fujianese, decreed a unified system of pronunciation for guanhua (‘official language’, or Mandarin) based on the Beijing dialect; Manchu was called guoyu – the ‘language of the state’. (Two centuries later, a Qing scholar proposed a ‘common language’, putonghua, also based on the Beijing dialect, for the people at large; in the 1950s, the Communists adopted the name putonghua for the national language. On Taiwan they call it guoyu.)

  As emperor, Yongzheng virtually abandoned the Forbidden City. Like many others of the Qing’s ruling Aisin Gioro clan, he found it claustrophobic. (Barmé’s Forbidden City quotes a later Qing emperor describing the palace as a warren of ‘dank ditches with vermilion walls and green-tiled roofs’.) The wangfu that had been Yongzheng’s childhood residence became a detached palace he called Yonghe Gong (Palace of Eternal Harmony). After Yongzheng died in 1735, his son and successor, Qianlong (r. 1736–95), ordered the Yonghe Gong’s turquoise roof tiles replaced with imperial yellow and, in 1744, transformed it into a temple. Known as the Lama Temple in English, it’s still called by its palace name in Chinese.

  Through a combination of military conquest and religious diplomacy, Qianlong brought Tibet and Xinjiang under Qing rule and expanded China to its current size. His reign was famous as one of the country’s most prosperous ages. Master carpenters, weavers, wine-makers, coppersmiths, chandlers and their guilds and products further enlivened the hutong of the Outer City. Many famous lao zihao (old brands) of Beijing, such as Tongrentang pharmacies and Quanjude Peking Duck restaurants, hark back to those days. The Outer City grew even more famous for its entertainments following an official ban on restaurants, theatres and brothels in the Inner City from 1671. Among the patrons of the Dashila’r wine shops in the 1670s was the old rake, tippler, opera librettist and literary genius Li Yu, the author of the erotic novel Rouputuan (Mat of Flesh), who got about town with a lively entourage of pretty and clever young things.

  The people of Qing Beijing were mad for opera. When four great troupes arrived in Beijing from the provinces in 1790 to perform at the palace for Qianlong’s 80th birthday celebrations, Peking Opera – a distillation of poetry, dance, music, aesthetics, humour and philosophy – was born in the mix. Among the theatres Qianlong built inside his palaces for the entertainment of himself and his court was the three-storey Pavilion of Delightful Melodies, which featured trapdoors and other mechanical devices that allowed actors to appear and disappear as if by magic and fly like immortals across the stage.

  Qianlong was a connoisseur, collector and patron of all the arts. He amassed an almost incomprehensibly large collection of artistic treasures from around the empire. Learning that Khubilai Khan’s famous black jade wine vessel had ended up in a Daoist temple as a pickling jar, he purchased it for 1,000 pieces of gold and installed it in Beihai’s fortress-like Tuancheng (Circular City), where it is on display today. Qianlong also rebuilt the Temple of Heaven’s iconic Hall of Prayers for Good Harvests, expanding the round building to its current size and retiling the roof a uniform cobalt blue. More Buddhist temples were built in two decades of Qianlong’s reign, in Beijing and elsewhere, than in the entire Ming dynasty.

  Qianlong greatly enlarged the Yuanmingyuan. Carrying on with work begun in Yongzheng’s time, landscape designers and architects recreated in its gardens scenes from famous Chinese poems and paintings through the sculpting of hills and valleys, lakes and islands as well as the artful placement of temples and pavilions. Among the Yuanmingyuan’s follies was a ‘Shopping Street’, modelled after a market in southern Suzhou. There, the emperor and his consorts bargained for silks and other goods from eunuchs who played touts and merchants, while other eunuchs acted the parts of pickpockets. If caught, the thieves were caned; if successful, applauded. In the lakes, the emperor boarded miniature junks fitted with brass cannons to play naval games with his eunuchs.

  Peking Opera ‘Painted Face’ general.

  PEKING OPERA

  Drawing inspiration from Chinese history, literature and philosophy, Peking Opera is considered the very essence, jingcui, of Chinese culture and civilization. A range of archetypal characters from flirtatious young women to mighty generals (pictured), ferocious villains, brave heroes, wily ministers and clever servants strut its stage. Actors train for a lifetime to master the demanding combination of vocal performance, stylized movement and martial arts that the art form requires.

  During Peking Opera’s golden age, the late Qing and early Republican periods, it was wildly popular in common teahouses and princely mansions alike. Mao’s wife Jiang Qing recreated the form as the Revolutionary Model Opera, introducing exotic elements such as ballet and orchestral music and replacing Confucian morality tales with revolutionary ones. The best of these, such as Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, were propagandistic but stirring and engaging entertainment.

  The end of the Cultural Revolution saw a revival of traditional Peking Opera. Yet as China moved into the modern era, the opera’s slow-paced, back-circling narratives and elliptical language has largely failed to engage younger generations. Today the government vigorously promotes it in schools and in the media (Chinese Central Television has a dedicated opera channel), but its audiences are ageing and dwindling.

  Within the Peking Opera world itself, debate rages about the possibilities of and limitations on innovation. Pander to popular tastes and the form may change beyond recognition; stick to tradition and it risks becoming a museum piece. The rote, pallid performances in tourist-oriented shows demonstrate how bad Peking Opera can get when it loses its connection with its audience. Yet at venues like Beijing’s Mei Lanfang and Capital theatres, a virtuosic performance can still stir a packed house of aficionados to thunderous applause and a chorus of bravos (‘Hao!’) that recall the opera’s glory days.

  Original copperplate engraving of the Jesuit-designed Palace of the Calm Sea.

  Qianlong commissioned the Jesuits Jean Denis Attiret, Michel Benoist and Giuseppe Castiglione to design Europeanstyle buildings and water features for the gardens as well. They created grand, mock-Rococo buildings of stone and marble, furnished with calligraphy and Gobelins tapestries, carved jade and Venetian glass. Mechanical fish and birds cavorted in a marvellous fountain and the magnificent bronze heads of
the twelve Chinese zodiac animals spat plumes of water to mark the hours.

  The first British ambassador to the Qing court, Lord Macartney, declared the beauty of the Yuanmingyuan beyond description. Macartney had come to persuade Qianlong to trade with Britain; the British craved Chinese tea and porcelain. Qianlong didn’t see the point of trade: ‘We possess all things’, he responded. Believing that the expensive magnifying glass that Macartney gave him was a magical talisman by which England might conquer China, the emperor ordered it destroyed. Hammers couldn’t break it, so eunuchs buried it on the palace grounds in a (sadly unmarked) grave.

  In honour of his mother’s 60th birthday, Qianlong built another pleasure palace on the site of a nearby Jin pleasance, where the Mongols had created their reservoir. Completed in 1764, the new palace, overlooking Kunming Lake, was named Qingyiyuan (Garden of Clear Waves).

  When Qianlong retired, it was to the northeast corner of the Forbidden City, where he built a miniature of the Forbidden City itself, filled with art and with dedicated spaces for study, contemplation and entertainment. Despite the dazzling accomplishments of his reign, by its end a dangerous gap had opened up between rich and poor, even in Beijing, and within the Banners themselves. On just one February night during the first year of the reign of Qianlong’s son and successor Jiaqing (r. 1796–1820), several thousand homeless – mostly refugees from natural disasters – froze to death in the capital.

  Nothing captured the sense of a waning civilization more than Cao Xueqin’s masterpiece Hong Lou Meng (Dream of the Red Chamber, also titled The Story of the Stone in translation). Originally distributed in handwritten copies at temple fairs, it is considered the greatest Chinese novel ever written – and a uniquely comprehensive record of the customs, language, culture and mores of Beijing at the height of the Qing.