City of Heavenly Tranquility , livre ebook

C ITY OF H EAVENLY T RANQUILITY
JASPER BECKER
C ITY OF H EAVENLY T RANQUILITY
Beijing in the History of China
Copyright 2008 by Jasper Becker
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Becker, Jasper.
City of heavenly tranquility : Beijing in the history of China / Jasper Becker. p. cm.
First published in eBook format in 2015
eBook ISBN: 978-1-78-301785-0
ISBN 978-0-19-530997-3
1. Beijing (China)-History, 2. China-History. 3. Beijing (China)-Description and travel. I. Title.
DS795.3.B43 1998
951 .156 - dc22 20080042.49
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Maps
Introduction
1 In Xanadu
2 The Emperor of Perpetual Happiness
3 Madness in the Forbidden City
4 On the Wild Wall
5 The Ming Tombs
6 In the Garden of Perfect Brightness
7 The Broken Bowl Tea House
8 The Last Sanctuary of the Unknown and Marvellous
9 The Last Manchus
10 In Search of the Golden Flower
11 Mao and Beijing
12 History in Stone
13 The Strange Death of Lao She
14 The Red Maid s Tale
15 The Last Playboy of Beijing
16 The Protectress of Flowers
17 Radiant City of the Future
18 Destroy!
19 The Eternal Present
Bibliography
Sources and Notes
List of Illustrations
1a. The doors of a traditional courtyard home marked for demolition (courtesy of Li Jiang Shu)
1b. Demolished hutong, 2006 (courtesy of Li Jiang Shu)
2a. The city gate at Xuanwumen before it was torn down (courtesy of Li Jiang Shu)
2b. The old city wall and gate at Xizhimen (courtesy of Li Jiang Shu)
3a. Emperor Wan Li s tomb at Ding Ling (reproduced by permission of Panda Books)
3b. The site of the tomb at Ding Ling at the time of its excavation (reproduced by permission of Panda Books)
4a. The Bell Tower and Drum Tower in the 1950s (courtesy of Li Jiang Shu)
4b. Old Beijing city wall (courtesy of Li Jiang Shu)
5. Cai Jinhua, the Golden Flower concubine (courtesy of Li Jiang Shu)
6. The Fragrant Concubine, Xiang Fei, as painted by Castiglione (courtesy of Li Jiang Shu)
7a. The home of Cai Jinhua, as it appears today (photograph by Li Jiang Shu)
7b. Xiang Fei s tower (courtesy of Li Jiang Shu)
8. Wang Shixiang (courtesy of Wang Shixiang)
9. Sun Yaoting, the last living eunuch of China (courtesy of Virginia Stibbs Anami)
10. Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin on the Temple of Heaven, 1936 (reproduced by permission of the University of Pennsylvania Press)
11. Liang Sicheng as a member of the United Nations Board of Design, with Le Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer, New York, 1947 (courtesy of the United Nations)
12. Liang Sicheng s proposal to make Beijing s city walls and gates into a continuous public park (reproduced by permission of the University of Pennsylvania Press)
13. A market in Beijing in the late nineteenth century (courtesy of Li Jiang Shu)
14. Shifting to Fight in North Shaanxi by Shi Lu (reproduced by kind permission of Mrs Min Lisheng)
15. The Chinese Central Television building (courtesy of Charles Pope)
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Andy Roche, T. C. Tang, Antoaneta Becker, Gail Pirkis, Wang Zhenru, Dmitri Napara, Hong Ying and Orville Schell, and the Society of Authors for a grant.

Introduction
The sales agent had a brisk, confident air, a pageboy haircut, and a demure matching skirt and jacket ensemble. She carried an executive leather case containing a sheaf of gold and purple folders with publicity brochures neatly tucked inside. Sunshine had chosen her own English name, she explained, because she thought it made a good impression.
This outstanding property, began Sunshine Xiao in a loud and commanding voice, is an advanced, modern high-quality project which offers European royal elegance In 1999 it was chosen as one of the ten landmark buildings that comprise Beijing s Central Standard Index and in 2000 it was also awarded the first Beijing Best Property Honour We call this development the Middle Sea Purple Gold Garden. It contains the most luxurious waterside apartments in western Beijing. A world-famous international architect designed it with the motto The harmony of man with nature .
I moved over to a large plate-glass window and down below could see the white marble of the Grand Canal, built in the Yuan dynasty some eight hundred years ago, and fed by water piped from the ancient Jade Spring. Many emperors, reclining in a dragon barge en route to the Summer Palace, had come this way. A little further along stood the red walls of the Wanshou Temple, or Longevity Temple, built in the sixteenth century by a powerful eunuch during the reign of the Ming emperor Wan Li. It became a favourite stopping place for the great Qing emperor Qianlong (1711-99), a prolific poet. In one of the 20,000 verses he composed during his sixty-year reign, he describes stopping at the lock for a few moments one year, and noting the green fragrant crops growing on either side of the canal, before celebrating the sixtieth birthday of his revered mother, a devout Buddhist, in the temple.
Beijing was once full of corners like this where you could at once find traces from more than a thousand years of history all jumbled together. A few years earlier, there were no high-rises, but intimate courtyard houses, built in the Ming dynasty and occupied by families whose ancestors had manned the lock with its dragonhead waterspouts in earlier dynasties. They had erected a small shrine to burn joss sticks and call on the protection of the Dragon King who controls all waters. Now the courtyard houses had been bulldozed and the last rubble was being cleared away. The canal had been cleaned up, widened and straightened out. In just ten years, starting in 1997, millions of Beijingers were relocated and scenes like this became everyday sights. You passed by a well-loved spot to find the houses and people gone, and a fenced-off construction site with workers scattered about a gigantic hole in the ground, the foundation pit for the mega-construction that would be ready a year later.
From here you can see the Summer Palace and the Fragrant Hills, Sunshine Xiao explained after she came and stood next to me at the window. That day the city was blanketed in whitish smog that reached up to the twentieth floor. For a week the low monsoon clouds of July had trapped the dust and the exhaust from the millions of cars, creating a thick haze. The serene natural beauty and historical background has won praise all around the city, she continued, undaunted. The rumble from the traffic was muted by the thick double windows, but above the low hum of the air conditioners, which made the sticky temperatures bearable, piped classical music was playing.
Vivaldi? I asked.
If you look from the master bedroom, you can see why this is called the royal residence of Silicon Valley, she pressed on, and led me up the circular stairs past a bathroom with a black-and-white marble jacuzzi set into the floor. The master bedroom had a handsome teak bed, a modern version of a medieval four-poster. Waking up, one would see through the bedroom window an assortment of square tower blocks that made up the Zhongguancun high-technology park.
Nearby are shopping malls at Chengxiang, Shuanguan, and Dang-dai which offer a leisurely shopping experience. And also Beijing University, Qinghua University, numerous renowned high schools with cultural surroundings that are best for children s growth, she said. After we walked around the two smaller bedrooms, inspected the kitchen, the maid s alcove and the downstairs toilet, she gave a garbled explanation of the decor: The whole design fully exudes a modern European style. We have boldly adopted the European three stages of architectural influence: neo-classical columns, french windows with light green double-decked glass and high-class sprayed aluminum alloy frames. The walls are made with bricks that imitate marble.
Heavy brocade curtains in purple cascaded down to the floor. Fussily gilded rococo chairs stood ordered round a dark-polished dining table. The coffee table was made of glass that had been tinted ocean blue and rimmed with bronze; it stood on a white pile carpet. A curvy chaise longue stood opposite two stiff eighteenth-century chairs with curved wooden legs that ended in talons and balls. On the walls hung some familiar prints in large frames - Constable s Hay Wain, Giacometti s Women of Venice - and on another wall, above a fake fireplace, was a Rubens, or so I assumed from the fleshy, half-naked women.
I like it, especially the fake fireplace. This is real luxury, I said politely.
Later, I will show you the landscaped garden, the vast lawn, the children s playground, the European fountains, the stylish sculptures, the beautiful flowers, and the underground car park, she said.
Is there a club house, satellite TV?
Ownership of a penthouse duplex automatically entitles you to membership of the prestigious private club where there is everything you need to relax your body and soul - indoor swimming pool, tennis court, golf simulators, sauna, gym, karaoke room and caf , she finished. Oh, we also provide twenty-four-hour security.
How much is it? She nodded and we sat opposite each other on two rococo chairs. Sunshine pulled a large calculator from her leather briefcase and punched out some figures. At 16,000 yuan per square metre, a duplex penthouse with a high ceiling cost 3.2 million yuan or US$ 400,000. The original residents had been made to accept compensation of a mere 2,000 yuan per square metre. Sunshine told me that the developers could help arrange a 60 per cent mortgage from the China Agricultural Development Bank.
And who are the developers, exactly?
Sunshine said the site was owned by China Overseas Holdings Ltd., a Hong Kong company, and showed me an organization chart. It revealed very little.
I heard the main investor is a Singaporean businessman, is that right?
Sunshine looked uncertain, and a small frown creased her fine arched eyebrows. Hong Kong, I think.