by Linda Jaivin
Line 2 runs under the Second Ring Road, the path of the old city wall. Its stations are a mnemonic of Beijing’s imperial past. Heading due West and counterclockwise, the next station is Andingmen (Peace Stabilized Gate). In Ming and Qing times troops re-entered the city through this gate when they returned from battle. (They departed via the nearby Deshengmen, Gate of Virtuous Victory.) The stop after that is Gulou, the Drum Tower and northernmost point of the Ming city’s central north–south axis. Then it’s forward to Jishuitan, named for the Yuan dynasty’s Water Collecting Pool, terminus of the Grand Canal and today’s Shichahai.
The train then zooms southward to Xizhimen, originally the second largest of all the city gates after Qianmen. It was Xizhimen’s Yuan antecedents whose discovery, recording and destruction were witnessed by both Liang Sicheng and Pierre Ryckmans when the gate itself was demolished during the Cultural Revolution. Xizhimen was nicknamed the Water Gate because it was through this gate that water was conveyed from the Jade Spring to the Forbidden City. It’s now a mega-station in the midst of a confusing set of flyovers; I can’t entirely blame the rocket-fuel liquor ergoutou I’d been drinking for the 45 minutes it took me one night, in −12ºC weather no less, to get there from a Mongolian hotpot restaurant only several blocks away where I’d been dining with friends.
After Xizhimen comes Chegongzhuang, a former village just outside the wall (zhuang in a place name indicates village, just as men means gate). Chegongzhuang’s feng shui made it a good site for burial. The Catholic Church might consider that the soul of the Jesuit Matteo Ricci went to Heaven, but his body went to Chegongzhuang; his restored tomb can be found on the nearby campus of the Beijing Administrative Institute (formerly the Beijing Party School). Chegongzhuang is also the stop for Beijing’s top theatre dedicated to Peking Opera: the appropriately named Mei Lanfang Grand Theatre.
If Xizhimen was the Water Gate, Fuchengmen was the Coal Gate to which trudged the camel trains bringing deliveries from the mines at Mentougou. After Fuchengmen comes Fuxingmen (Revival of Prosperity Gate). Fuxingmen was not one of the nine original gates in the Ming and Qing city walls. Like its equivalent in the East City, Jianguomen (Build the Nation Gate), Fuxingmen was carved out of the wall during the Republican period to aid traffic flow along Chang’an Avenue; both got their current names following the Japanese surrender.
The station at the southwestern corner of the line is called Changchunjie (Cedar Street), named for a Ming dynasty temple. The train then heads east to Xuanwumen, site of the Ming and Qing elephant stables, but also nicknamed ‘Death Gate’ because it was through this gate that condemned criminals (including the scholars behind the Hundred Days’ Reform of 1898) were taken to the execution grounds at Caishikou (Vegetable Markets). Carved into the gate were the words ‘too late for regrets’. It was at Xuanwumen that Johann Adam Schall von Bell built Beijing’s first Catholic church, on the site of Ricci’s old home.
Next up is Hepingmen (Peace Gate). This gate dates back only to 1926; it had no great watchtowers and, like Fuxingmen and Jianguomen, was created simply to help traffic flow between the Inner and Outer Cities. Following Hepingmen is the all-important Qianmen, the ‘Front Gate’, the only station where the gate is more than just a historical memory.
Then comes Chongwenmen, named for a classical expression meaning ‘respect for civil rule’. It’s also known as Hadamen after a Yuan dynasty Mongol prince, Hada, who lived nearby. Just south of the Qing’s Legation Quarter, Chongwenmen was once the busiest gate in the whole city, charged with collecting the entry and exit taxes that paid for everything from Empress Dowager Cixi’s cosmetics in the Qing to Yuan Shikai’s salary during the Republic. Unlike at the other eight gates, at Chongwenmen closing time was announced with bells instead of gongs, and may well be why, in Beijing dialect, the term zhongdian, ‘bell point’, is used to indicate the hour. It forms a pair with Xuanwumen, a phrase signifying military glory; just as the military (wu) and civil (wen) offices were positioned on the west and east respectively, both inside and outside the palace in the Ming and Qing dynasties, so Xuanwumen is to Qianmen’s west and Chongwenmen to the east. Both were pulled down in 1965.
Following Chongwenmen comes the bustling Beijing Railway Station, soon after which the train heads north, pivoting at Jianguomen. Jianguomen station isn’t too far from the International Post Office, itself close to the site where the Qing postal bureau was set up in 1907. The train sweeps up to Chaoyangmen, the old entry point for the city’s grain shipments, and then Dongsi Shitiao, where granaries have stood since the time of the Yuan dynasty. Finally, the train pulls into Dongzhimen (East Direct Gate). Like its symmetrical partner in the west, Xizhimen, Dongzhimen has its antecedents in the Yuan. In the Ming, it was the gate through which building materials like lumber and gravel were transported. It became a well-to-do neighbourhood with some elegant princely mansions and fine courtyard houses, and is today the centre of the embassy quarter. After Dongzhimen, the train completes its circle at the Lama Temple.
Subway map, 2014.
Unlike the brightly coloured stations and sleek trains of Beijing’s more recent subway lines, Line 2 itself, with its dim, cavernous platforms, remains a palpable link to Beijing’s more distant, pre-prosperity past as well. After visiting the Soviet Union in 1949, where he was impressed by Moscow’s subway, Mao decided Beijing should have one too. It was 1958 before the project got under way, codenamed Project 401. Line 1, also part of the project, was to run under the new east–west axis of the extended Chang’an Avenue. Project 401 was temporarily derailed by the economic dysfunction of the Great Leap Forward and subsequent famine. As tensions with the Soviet Union rose in the 1960s, it gained new urgency as part of a secure getaway plan for the leadership in case of nuclear attack.
Just to be sure, engineers dug a scale model of the tunnel in the desert at Lop Nor in northwestern Xinjiang, set a subway car inside, and the army dropped a 780-kg A-bomb on top. After two further years of trials that included several catastrophic fires, three fatalities and more than 100 injuries, China’s first subway line, linking Beijing Train Station with Gongzhufen (Princess Tomb), 10.7 km due west, opened for organized visits in January 1971. Nixon rode it on his visit in 1972. It was formally launched in 1981; three years later, Line 2 began operation.
Riding it back then, when these were the only two lines, Beijing’s subway struck me as one of the oddest and least practical of public transport systems. You could circle the inner city on the train, but never enter it. It brought to mind the fact that there was once a wall, that Beijing has always been a city of walls, of careful demarcations between nei (inner) and wai (outer). Lying just south of the ultimate demarcation, the Great Walls, Beijing’s own battlements enclosed, in turn, the dusty rose-coloured walls of the Imperial Precinct. A few metres of the Imperial Precinct walls have been reconstructed as part of Dong Huangchenggen Park along Beiheyan Street. These, of course, encircled those of the Forbidden City itself.
Status determined how far inside these walls you might go. With the exception of eunuchs, no man but the emperor could penetrate the part of the Forbidden City known as Danei, the Great Within. Walls kept some out and confined others: women, for example, were expected to remain within the innermost quarters of palace or household. Beijing has long fostered a culture of walls that insulated and isolated as effectively as they guarded; a number of Chinese thinkers have noted their subtle influence on Chinese political thought.
The Circle Line is today but one link in a sophisticated transport network that conveys people as easily to Wangfujing and the old Lantern Market (Dengshikou) in the old city centre as to the Yuanmingyuan in the northwest and Marco Polo Bridge in the southwest, to the Yuan Dynasty Relics Park, the airport’s new Terminal Three or the Olympic Green’s Birds Nest. It has opened the closed city, and in many ways Line 2 – circular and chained by every station name to a thickly inscribed past, but now boasting so many transit points outward – seems a perfect metaphor for Beijin
g’s own transformation.
The Thirsty City
It’s China’s National Day holiday, 1 October. The brimming waters of Shichahai (Ten Temple Lake), three linked lakes north of the former Imperial Precinct, sparkle under a retro-blue morning sky. Workers on low motorized skiffs are skimming leaves, plastic bags and other flotsam from the surface with long-handled nets. The area around the lakes has had a large Muslim population and a mosque since 1644; outside a lake-side halal restaurant, men in white caps serve up steamed and grilled breads with sweet or savoury fillings to queuing locals. The trishaws – bicycle rickshaws – are already milling at Yinding (Silver Tael) Bridge. A louche young driver rises on his pedals and calls out to me in English: ‘Lady! Hutong tour!’ I shoot back a smartarse answer in Chinese. In Beijing, verbal banter is a folk art. He laughs and gives me the thumbs up.
In a few hours Shichahai will be swarming with Chinese and foreign tourists. They’ll wander along its willow-fringed paths, paddle boats on the lakes, troop through Prince Gong’s Mansion (see pp. 231–7) and throng the restaurants and souvenir shops. When a few short months later the lakes freeze over and temperatures swoop below zero, the young and hardy will return to sled and skate. But for now, everyone’s busy soaking up the last burst of summery warmth before autumn sets in. When darkness falls, it’ll still be balmy, and the open-fronted bars standing doorjamb-to-doorjamb on the lakeshore will crank up their warring sound systems, the touts launching a barrage of temptations on passersby – Beer! Rock ‘n’ roll! Girls!
In 2003 the SARS epidemic scared the city’s clubbers away from the packed venues around the Workers Stadium and nearby Sanlitun (Three Mile Village). Bars closed (temporarily) in the city only to regroup at Shichahai, previously one of the most peaceful places in Beijing. Early in the morning, when it remains the domain of the locals, it still is.
Morning at Shichahai.
At a pocket park, middle-aged people perform calisthenics to pop music burbling from a tinny radio and a young man swings purposefully along the monkey bars, his bare arms sinuous. Further west and across the narrow lakeside street, stands a grand residence adjacent to the mansion of Prince Chun (father of Puyi, the last Qing emperor) that was once part of its garden. The widow of the republican revolutionary Sun Yat-sen and a former president of the People’s Republic of China, Song Qingling, lived there from 1963 until her death in 1981; it’s now a museum to her memory. Shichahai has long been one of Beijing’s best addresses.
Following the curvature of the lake, in another tiny park, I come upon a pack of dog fanciers discussing the apnoea afflicting their Pekinese, the 2,000-year-old breed of ‘sleeve dogs’ (pets small enough to be carried in one’s sleeve) once favoured by the imperial court. Further along, an old man carefully hooks his bird cage on to a tree branch as his neighbour confides that though her marriage was passionless, at least her husband never hit her – and he always handed over his pay packet. (Like most novelists, I’m an incorrigible eavesdropper.)
Some of Beijing’s greatest delights are its constructed lakes and waterways. These include extant segments of the old Grand Canal, Kunming Lake at the Summer Palace and Fuhai at Yuanmingyuan, as well as Beihai (North Lake), to which the lakes of Shichahai are linked. Even the Yuan Dynasty Relics Park, tracing the remains of the northern section of Khanbalik’s city wall, runs alongside a renovated section of the Yuan dynasty city moat which leads in the east to Beijing’s largest surviving marsh, bursting with water lilies and bulrushes.
In historical times, Beijing was famous for the abundant sweetness of its well water. A thousand years ago there was enough well water for residents to tend their orchards of fruit, date and chestnut trees – the produce from which ranked highly in the Tang court. Nezha had done well in his battle with the Dragon King for supremacy over the area’s water supply; the Dragon King was confined to Zhongnanhai and Beihai (Nezha’s stomach), obediently ‘lifting his head’ a few times a year to bring spring and summer rains. As late as the Qing dynasty, the Jade Spring in the Western Hills provided much of Beijing’s water via the reservoir of Kunming Lake. The writer Lin Yutang described Shichahai in the Republican period as ‘half rice fields and half lotus ponds’. Though drier than it had been, say, in the Tang, the city the Communists took over in 1949 was blessed with abundant marshlands, ponds and streams.
A small part of Shichahai, severed by the Ming city walls, existed as a small reed pool until 1958, when the city government dredged it and gave it the name Taipinghu (Peace Lake). Covered in lotus blossoms and humming with frogs, it was one of author Lao She’s favourite retreats – and the scene of his still mysterious death. Today Taipinghu is a marketplace and train depot. The Jade Spring has run dry. So have the wells, though they’d already lost their famous sweetness by 1885.
The elderly physicist Wang Zhidong remembered visiting his grandfather’s home near the Goldfish Ponds, a naturally replenishing pool south of Qianmen where ornamental fish were bred for sale. Wang told an interviewer for the Canadian environmental foundation Probe International that when he was a university student, the
whole western area of Beijing was water . . . there were reed beds everywhere. If you walked in from Haidian South Road it was all just a crescent-shaped reed pond, with the reeds growing as tall as a man.
When Wang began teaching at the Beijing Institute of Industry in 1951, the Gaoliang River that once carried Cixi’s imperial barge to the Summer Palace flowed past the institute. That river has become a trickle; the Goldfish Ponds are gone. Of Beijing’s 200-odd rivers and streams, most have dried up. Professor Wang said he could never have imagined that water supply would become such a major problem for Beijing, professing himself ‘really worried for the next generation’.
Seeing people fishing and swimming at Shichahai, I worry for this one. The surface beauty of the lake is deceptive: on holidays, its waters are replenished from the Guanting reservoir – a water source so polluted that it hasn’t been used as a source of drinking water since 1997. Guanting is one of two reservoirs out of dozens built in the 1950s that are still in use. The other one, Miyun, was operating at one-tenth its capacity in 2012, and is also contaminated, but not as badly. The city has no natural source of clean drinking water left. It siphons up so much water from its underground karst aquifers (3 billion cubic metres of ground water a year), that its water table is dropping fast and the land subsiding. Much of the water it uses is piped in from what the historian and environmental activist Dai Qing, writing in the New York Review of Books in 2007, called ‘increasingly resentful’ neighbouring provinces. She recalled her father-in-law Wang Sen, the hydrologist charged with constructing the Guanting reservoir in 1953, saying: ‘Build a dam, bleed a river dry.’
The demands of industry and a growing population are part of the story. In a 76-page report, Probe International also cites a string of ‘short-sighted policies’ as culprits. These include draining wetlands, deforestation and over-reliance on dams (especially environmentally disastrous black rubber dams). What’s more, as late as 2012, households were charged a mere 3 yuan – less than 50 U.S. cents – a tonne for water use, with no penalties for wasteful consumption.
In 2007, according to Probe, Beijing people had access to less than 230 cubic metres of water per person – one-thirtieth of the world average, one-eighth of the Chinese average, and less than one-quarter of what they enjoyed per capita in 1949. It is also, as Dai Qing notes, less than a quarter of the amount of water sucked up by a typical eighteen-hole golf course in one day.
That’s not a frivolous comparison. Thanks to the sport’s popularity among China’s business and political elite since the 1990s, dozens of golf courses have sprung up around Beijing, many with multiple water features and covering more than 8,100 ha of land. According to the Beijing Water Authority, golf courses swallowed up 40 million cubic metres of water in 2012; at least six were forced to close in 2013. Dai Qing cites the vast ornamental lake surrounding the National Centre for the Performing
Arts in central Beijing and the Shunyi Water Park (built on the dry bed of the Chaobai River) as among Beijing’s other ‘water follies’.
Since the 1970s Beijing has experienced over 25 years of drought. An average of 590 mm of rain falls on the city annually, just over half of what New York, which sits on the same latitude, can expect. Shanghai receives over twice as much. Local farmers struggle to secure enough water for their crops. Drought is not a new problem: ‘I have reigned for fifty-seven years,’ the Qing Kangxi emperor lamented, ‘and have conducted rain-prayers for almost fifty years!’ The water shortage, however, is unprecedented.
What Beijing lacks in water, it makes up for in dust. This too is not an entirely new problem. In his 1907 Indiscreet Letters from Peking, Bertram Lenox Simpson wrote (under his pen name B. L. Putnam Weale) that Beijing’s dust was ‘distinguished among all the dusts of the earth for its blackness, its disagreeable insistence in sticking to one’s clothes, one’s hair, one’s very eyebrows’. The worst dust storms occur in spring, when the Gobi Desert in the Mongolian lands north of the Great Walls blows tonnes of mineral-laden sand on Beijing in candy-coloured tempests that can last hours, blotting out the sun and grounding flights. As more open-cut mines are gouged into the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, the storms have become toxic. The city’s air is already so polluted that it is frequently considered hazardous by international standards, and in early 2013 and 2014 was so dire that it made international headlines as well. The Beijing Municipal Health Bureau reported in late 2013 that the incidence of lung cancer in the capital increased by more than 50 per cent in ten years, though it blamed cigarette smoking as the primary cause. The municipal government announced a ‘Heavy Air Pollution Contingency Plan’ that would close schools and curb traffic, among other measures, following any three consecutive days of ‘serious pollution’. In early 2014, scientists warned that the effect of the smog on crops was comparable to a ‘nuclear winter’.