by Linda Jaivin
1644
Li Zicheng’s peasant army besieges Beijing. The Chongzhen emperor hangs himself on the artificial hill to the north of the palace, today’s Jingshan Park. A Manchu army unseats the rebels and establishes Beijing as the capital of the Manchu Qing dynasty.
1648
The Qing court orders all ethnic Han Chinese, except those in the Manchu social, military and political organization known as the Banners, to leave the Inner City.
1790
The Qianlong emperor’s 80th birthday celebration sees the birth of Peking Opera.
1860
Following the Second Opium War, the British dispatch a delegation to Beijing to demand greater concessions from the Qing court. The emissaries are imprisoned and tortured in the magnificent imperial garden palace, the Yuanmingyuan. British and French forces march on Beijing and loot and burn the palace.
1861
The Xianfeng emperor dies. The Empress Dowager Cixi, acting as co-regent for her son, the young Tongzhi emperor, begins her rise to become one of nineteenth-century China’s most powerful and controversial figures.
1900
A violently xenophobic and superstitious sect known as the Boxers, with the help of imperial forces, besieges the Legation Quarter for 55 days. Foreign troops invade the city to relieve the siege; they then loot and plunder. Cixi, the emperor and the court flee to the countryside.
November 1908
The Empress Dowager Cixi and her nephew, the Guangxu emperor, die, suspiciously, over a mere two-day period. The Xuantong emperor, three-year-old Puyi, becomes the last emperor to be enthroned in the Forbidden City.
1911
Republican revolution breaks out in the south of China.
1912
The new Republican government transfers to the north at the insistence of President Yuan Shikai. It’s legal again for Chinese to reside in the Inner City.
1915
Yuan dissolves parliament and declares himself emperor; he dies the following year.
1917
The beginning of the Warlord Era, in which provincial military bosses conquer and loot Beijing in turn.
4 May 1919
Thousands of Peking University students march in protest at government concessions at foreign powers; this sparks a cultural and intellectual ferment known as the May Fourth Movement.
1924
Warlord Feng Yuxiang kicks Puyi out of the palace, which one year later opens some of its buildings and collection to the public as the Palace Museum.
8 July 1937
The Japanese instigate an incident at Marco Polo Bridge as a pretext for invading Beijing and the rest of China. They make Beijing the capital of their provisional government before moving it south in 1940, after the Rape of Nanjing.
1945
The Japanese surrender.
1949
Following years of civil war, the Communist army led by Mao Zedong ‘peacefully liberates’ Beijing. On 1 October Mao announces the founding of the People’s Republic of China from Tiananmen.
1952
The demolition of Beijing’s city walls and pailou begins.
1959
The ‘Ten Great Structures’ are erected for the tenth anniversary of the People’s Republic. Tiananmen Square is expanded to its current size.
1966–76
The Cultural Revolution: million-strong Red Guard rallies in Tiananmen Square, wilful destruction of much of Beijing’s physical heritage and violent factional battles on the streets and campuses.
1976
The Tiananmen Incident, Mao’s death and the arrest of the ‘Gang of Four’.
1978–9
Democracy Wall, and the launch of new leader Deng Xiaoping’s Reform Era.
1989
Student protests against corruption and for democracy and occupation of Tiananmen Square end with Deng Xiaoping ordering the army to clear the streets and square. Approximately 1,000 are left dead, and untold numbers are wounded in the massacre of 3–4 June.
1992
The beginning of the real estate boom and the razing of historical neighbourhoods and hutong.
2008
Beijing Olympic Games.
2009
The pro-democracy activist Liu Xiaobo is sentenced to eleven years for subversion; he is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize the following year while still in prison.
2014
Beijing now has 21.2 million residents, six ring roads and seventeen subway lines, including one servicing the airport. Scientists liken effects of Beijing’s air pollution to ‘nuclear winter’; a video entitled ‘Happy in Beijing’, filmed on one of the capital’s most polluted days and uploaded to Youku, goes viral.
References
p. 21 ‘The language of Beijing . . .’. Liu Yong et al., Beijing lishi wenhua shiwu jiang (Fifteen Lectures on Beijing History and Culture) (Beijing, 2009), p. 407.
p. 35 ‘The Daoists tell the story . . .’. The translation of the exchange is by Arthur Waley, in Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China (New York, 1956), pp. 13–14.
p. 42 ‘According to the linguist Zhang Qingchang . . .’. Zhang Qingchang, Hutong yu qita (Hutong and Other Topics) (Beijing, 1990), pp. 57–67.
p. 42 ‘The streets are so straight and wide . . .’. The translations from Marco Polo come from a number of sources, including ‘More excerpts from The Book of Sir Marco Polo: The Venetian. . ., Chapters LXXVI and LXXVII: Description of the Great City of Kinsay, Which is the Capital of the Whole Country of Manzi’, at http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/special/marco_polo.htm (accessed 23 January 2014), and Yule Cordier, The Book of Ser Marco Polo, Cathay and the Way Thither, as quoted in Juliet Bredon, Peking (Shanghai, 1919), p. 148.
p. 43 ‘The Grand Khan receives news . . .’. Odoric de Pordenone, quoted in René Grousset, The Rise and Splendour of the Chinese Empire (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 1968), p. 254.
p. 47 ‘Marco Polo tells us that . . .’. See Marco Polo, ‘The Fashion of the Great Kaan’s Table at His High Feasts’, in The Travels of Marco Polo, at http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au, 10 November 2012.
p. 48 ‘The finest that I have ever seen . . .’. Pordenone, quoted in Grousset, Rise and Splendour, p. 253.
pp. 62–3 ‘Making the case for Beijing . . .’. For a complete account, see Kathlyn Liscombe, ‘“The Eight Views of Beijing”: Politics in Literati Art’, Artibus Asiae, XLIX/1–2 (1988–9), pp. 127–52.
p. 63 ‘As the capital of a Chinese dynasty . . .’. See Liu Yong et al., Beijing lishi wenhua shiwu jiang, p. 400.
p. 66 ‘At the time, a palace cook’s monthly salary . . .’. Beijing Daxue Lishixi (Peking University History Department), Beijing shi (Beijing History) (Beijing, 2003), p. 173.
p. 66 ‘The best policing efforts of the Imperial Brocaded Guards . . .’. Ibid., p. 180.
p. 69 ‘The righteous saw moral corruption everywhere . . .’. Timothy Brook, The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China (Berkeley, CA, 1998), p. 73.
p. 69 ‘Wanli responded that such cruel punishments . . .’. Translated in Jasper Becker, City of Heavenly Tranquility (Oxford and New York, 2008), p. 56.
p. 70 ‘The king has ordered [General] Nan-zhong . . .’. Poem adapted and excerpted from Arthur Waley’s translation of The Book of Songs by Claire Roberts, in Claire Roberts and Geremie R. Barmé, The Great Wall of China (Sydney, 2006), p. 16.
p. 70 ‘The great early twentieth-century writer . . .’. The translation of Lu Xun is from Geremie Barmé and John Minford, eds, Seeds of Fire: Chinese Voices of Conscience (New York, 1989), p. 1.
p. 70 ‘The narrator of the popular . . .’. The translation of the River Elegy narration is taken from Geremie Barmé and Linda Jaivin, eds, New Ghosts, Old Dreams: Chinese Rebel Voices (New York, 1992), p. 151.
p. 73 ‘Its population was “gente effeminate” . . .’. Jonathan D. Spence has written extensively about Ricci’s experiences in Beijing in The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (New York, 1984); these examples are drawn f
rom pp. 217–21.
p. 73 ‘A ruthless peasant rebel . . .’. See Stephen G. Haw, Beijing: A Concise History (New York, 2007), p. 64. Official histories tend to gloss over Li’s record of murderous violence.
p. 78 ‘Should there come [into the neighbourhood] an outsider . . .’. The original reads ‘yuyou wailai zhi ren, wu xiangjiu laili’. See Beijing Daxue Lishixi, Beijing shi, p. 275.
p. 78 ‘Red-capped watchmen . . .’. The Kangxi emperor, translated in Jonathan Spence, Emperor of China: Self-portrait of K’ang-Hsi (New York, 1975), p. 63.
p. 81 ‘Among the patrons of the Dashila’r wine shops . . .’. The description of Li Yu comes from Liu Dongli, Beijingde hongchen jiumeng (The Mortal Pleasures of Old Beijing) (Beijing, 2009), pp. 51–7.
p. 84 ‘Believing that the expensive magnifying glass . . .’. See Chris Elder, Old Peking: City of the Ruler of the World (Hong Kong, 1997), p. 62.
p. 85 ‘On just one February night . . .’. Beijing Daxue Lishixi, Beijing shi, p. 277.
p. 86 ‘Qing officials imprisoned the emissaries . . .’. See among other contemporary sources, Lieutenant-Colonel G. J. Wolseley, Narrative of the War with China in 1860 (London, 1862), pp. 259–75.
p. 86 ‘After an orgy of looting . . .’. The ‘inconvenient truths’ of the participation of southern Chinese in the looting of the Yuanmingyuan, like the torture of the envoys, is generally not mentioned in ideologically driven Chinese histories of the events, but is attested to by such contemporary accounts as that of Comte Maurice d’Hérisson, quoted in Geremie Barmé, ‘The Garden of Perfect Brightness, A Life in Ruins’, East Asian History, XI (1996), pp. 134–5.
p. 93 ‘Geremie Barmé has written how the Boxers . . .’. Ibid., p. 139.
p. 99 ‘As a result of all these things . .’. For an account of the effect of the turmoil on the silk merchants and Chinese New Year’s, see Chen Hu et al., Beijing bainian wangshi: bu xunchangde shige ‘zinian’ (Ten Unusual Zi [Zodiac Cycle] Years in a Century of Beijing’s History) (Beijing, 2009), pp. 30–32.
p. 105 ‘The Yuanmingyuan yielded more stones and bricks . . .’. See Barmé, ‘The Garden of Perfect Brightness’, p. 140. All further details on the continued, post-1860 despoilment of the Yuanmingyuan come from Barmé’s meticulous scholarship on this issue.
p. 105 ‘According to Strand . . .’. See David Strand, Rickshaw Beijing: City People and Politics in the 1920s (Berkeley, CA, 1989), pp. 205–6.
p. 105 ‘One out of four people in Beijing were poor . . .’. Madeleine Yue Dong, Republican Beijing: The City and its Histories (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 2003), Table 2: ‘Distribution of Beijing Families by Economic Group, 1926’, p. 215.
p. 105 ‘A Chinese researcher . . .’. Strand, Rickshaw Beijing, p. 42.
p. 109 ‘The wind found its way . . .’. Lao She, Beneath the Red Banner, trans. Don Cohn (Beijing, 1982), pp. 74–5.
p. 111 ‘A “rare and happy time for foreigners” . . .’. Fairbank made the observations quoted in this and the following paragraph in his review of Hugh Trevor-Roper’s Hermit of Peking: The Hidden Life of Sir Edmund Backhouse, ‘The Confidence Man’, New York Review of Books (14 April 1977), www.nybooks.com.
p. 111 ‘Slipping into the luxurious calm . . .’. Susan Naquin, Peking: Temples and City Life, 1400–1900 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, and London, 2000), p. 699.
p. 112 ‘Even the monks of the Lama Temple . . .’. See Don Cohn and Zhang Jingqing, Beijing Walks (Hong Kong, 1993), pp. 203–7.
p. 113 ‘They imported huge quantities of drugs . . .’. Beijing Daxue Lishixi, Beijing shi (Beijing, 2003), p. 438.
p. 113 ‘Corruption blossomed and inflation bloomed . . .’. The price of flour comes from Chen Hu et al., Beijing bainian wangshi, p. 94.
p. 113 ‘In January 1949 . . .’. C. P. Fitzgerald is quoted in Geremie Barmé, The Forbidden City (London, 2008), p. 143.
pp. 114 ‘As the journalist-historian Dai Qing has observed . . .’. Dai Qing, ‘How Peaceful was the Liberation of Beiping?’, China Heritage Quarterly, XIV (2007), www.chinaheritagequarterly.org.
p. 114 ‘In May the Communist newspaper . . .’. These details come from Michael Meyer, The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed (New York, 2008), p. 279.
pp. 114–15 ‘He’d written of Beijing . . .’. Liang Sicheng is quoted in Yue Dong, Republican Beijing, p. 29.
p. 115 ‘Liang raved to his friends . . .’. This detail comes from Xiao Hu, ‘Preserving the Old Beijing: The First Conflict between Chinese Architects and the Communist Government in the 1950s’, James A. Rawley Graduate Conference in the Humanities, Paper 8 (2006), p. 8, at http://digitalcommons.unl.edu.
p. 117 ‘His adopted daughter . . .’. Dai Qing, ‘How Peaceful was the Liberation of Beiping?’.
p. 117 ‘Within one year of taking office . . .’. These figures are taken from Xiao Hu, ‘Preserving the Old Beijing’, p. 8.
p. 117 ‘Some were renamed to avoid confusion . . .’. See Cohn and Zhang Jingqing, Beijing Walks, p. 34.
p. 118 ‘The Palace Museum’s first exhibition . . .’. See Barmé, The Forbidden City, p. 8.
p. 119 ‘The Communists’ Soviet advisers . . .’. See Xiao Hu, ‘Preserving the Old Beijing’.
p. 123 ‘Some 1,400 new factories . . .’. See Tiziano Terzani, Behind the Forbidden Door (London, 1986), p. 32.
p. 126 ‘In June 1959 an article appeared . . .’. Translated in Stephen G. Haw, Beijing: A Concise History (Oxford and New York, 2007), p. 119.
p. 126 ‘Though famine hit Beijing . . .’. Jasper Becker, Hungry Ghosts: China’s Secret Famine (London, 1996), pp. 227–8.
p. 130 ‘One morning that August . . .’. See David Milton and Nancy Dall Milton, The Wind Will Not Subside: Years in Revolutionary China, 1964–1969 (New York, 1976), p. 271.
p. 132 ‘In 1969 a shroud dropped . . .’. Details of this little-known and rarely discussed renovation can be found in Barmé, The Forbidden City, pp. 170–71.
p. 133 ‘China’s carefully calibrated welcome . . .’. This account comes from Chen Hu et al., Beijing bainian wangshi, p. 134.
p. 133 ‘He toured the Forbidden City . . .’. See Barmé, The Forbidden City, p. 23.
pp. 133–4 ‘He rode the new No. 1 subway line . . .’. For more on Beijing’s subway system at the time of Nixon’s visit, see Sang Ye and Geremie Barmé, ‘Beijing Underground: An Invisible City’, China Heritage Quarterly, XIV (2008), www.chinaheritagequarterly.org. ‘Neither subservient nor arrogant . . .’. For more on the reception given to Nixon, see Chen Hu et al., Beijing bainian wangshi, pp. 133–4.
p. 134 ‘Beijing’s Xinhua Bookstore . . .’. These details are from Chen Hu et al., Beijing bainian wangshi, p. 138.
p. 135 ‘I weep while wolves and jackals laugh’. This famous line by Wang Lishan is translated by John Gittings in China Changes Face (Oxford and New York, 1989), p. 154.
p. 136 ‘Let me tell you, world . . .’. The translation of Bei Dao, ‘The Answer’, is by Bonnie S. McDougall and can be found in Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, XVI/3 (1984), p. 27.
p. 140 ‘These entrepreneurial southerners . . .’. Xiang Biao has written the definitive history of Zhejiangcun. It has been translated by Jim Weldon and published as Transcending Boundaries – Zhejiangcun: The Story of a Migrant Village in Beijing (Leiden and Boston, 2005), pp. 1–2.
p. 142 ‘The Beijing Municipal Party Committee . . .’. Quoted and translated in Barmé and Minford, eds, Seeds of Fire, p. 400.
p. 146 ‘To the movement’s sympathizers . . .’. The paradox of the ‘tank man’ is discussed in the opening sequence of the 1995 documentary Gate of Heavenly Peace, the transcript of which is available at The Gate of Heavenly Peace website, ww.tsquare.tv.
p. 148 Wang Shuo, ‘Wanzhu’, Xiexue juan, Wang Shuo Wenji (‘The Operators’, The Collected Writings of Wang Shuo, ‘Satirical Works’ Volume) (Beijing, 1992), pp. 3–4.
p. 150 ‘According to Philip Pan . . .’. These details come f
rom Richard Bernstein’s review article ‘The Death and Life of a Great Chinese City’, New York Review of Books (26 March 2009), www.nybooks.com.
p. 151–3 ‘Between 1990 and 2007 . . .’. Statistics quoted in Meyer, The Last Days of Old Beijing, p. 293.
p. 154 ‘In 1954, having realized . . .’. See Xiao Hu, ‘Preserving Old Beijing’, p. 17.
p. 156 ‘Between 2001 and 2008 . . .’. This paragraph relies on veteran China correspondent Jaime FlorCruz’s online report, ‘China’s Capital Still Getting Kick from 2008 Olympic Party’, www.cnn.com, 2 July 2012. For the tourism angle, see Nelson Alcantara, ‘Beijing: Post Olympics, Now and Beyond’, www.eturbonews.com, 26 May 2010.
pp. 159–61 ‘In an article published in 2006 . . .’. An account of this fascinating incident can be found in ‘On Stage and Screen’, China Heritage Quarterly, VIII (2006), www.chinaheritagequarterly.org.
p. 162 ‘Linguists note . . .’. See Liu Yong et al., Beijing lishi wenhua shiwu jiang, p. 404.