INSIDE THE FORTRESS | August 3rd 2008

angus_mac_123/flickr

Throughout its history, China has constructed walls--and is still at it. James Miles on living in a city where exclusion is in the architecture ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, Summer 2008

Beijing, my home and workplace for more than half of my adult life, is not a city that embraces its residents. It is designed to exclude. Its architecture is intended to awe. Its layout, intentionally or not, reduces the human being to an ant-like scale in a giant matrix of boulevards and expressways.

Many of the more human parts of the city, the warren of alleyways flanked by grey-walled courtyard houses from pre-Communist days, have been razed. The remnants are still beguiling. Around Qianhai and Houhai lakes there is still a flavour of the old Beijing. Old men take their pet birds for walks, swinging them gently in their cages. In winter, the elderly swim in the freezing lakes to fortify themselves.

But the new Beijing is creeping in. Bars and restaurants are springing up along the water's edge. Bicycle rickshaws carry tourists through the winding alleys, the hutongs as they are known, which are becoming more of a theme park than the oasis of calm they once were. It is easy to feel nostalgic in this part of the city. But walking past the courtyard houses with their thick grey walls and their imposing wooden doors (quaintly scuffed and scarred by the passage of time) the visitor feels shut out even here in the "real" Beijing. There is another world behind the walls, inside the tranquil courtyards, that can only be imagined.

The colossal walls of the ancient Forbidden City, the vastness of Tiananmen Square, and the uncrossable breadth of Chang'an Boulevard form a seamlessly forbidding unity with the architectural wonders that Beijing's urban planners are imposing on the city to impress visitors to the Olympic games. There is the monster "egg" (as locals call it) that is the city's new opera house; the lurching twisted angular tower of state television's new headquarters, and an airport terminal building on a scale that even China's emperors would have found a little intimidating.

Many expatriates live well outside the city, across the treacly Wenyu River which a few miles downstream feeds into the ancient Grand Canal. Very few people, Chinese or foreigners, are aware that the river connects with this engineering marvel. Oddly it is China's defining symbol of exclusion, the Great Wall (hardly more than a vanity project that did little to keep out barbarians), that is the country's most celebrated engineering feat of pre-modern times. In recent years, a vast mural of the wall, meandering over precipitous mountains, has greeted international visitors as they arrive at the airport and join the immigration queue marked "Foreigners".

The foreigners formed their isolated gated communities out in the middle of dusty farmland because land was cheap (local governments seized it from peasants with a pittance for compensation) and houses could be built rapidly on it thanks to a bureaucracy that cared little for niceties such as planning permission.

Again there is a symmetry here with the old Beijing. Walk along Dongjiaominxiang (once called Legation Street), the now hauntingly quiet main road of what in pre-Communist days was the city's foreign quarter. It was then a city within a city, and a scene of terror in 1900 when fanatical Boxer rebels laid siege to the area. Its pompous and utterly incongruous Western-style buildings find their modern counterparts out in the foreigners' ghettos near the airport with their otherworldly names such as Yosemite, Chateau Regalia and Merlin Champagne Town.

The walled compound where I live with my family was among the first to be built in the Western style as China's booming economy began to suck in fortune-seeking foreigners in the late 1990s. The city is now developing fast around it: new residential tower blocks, a light-rail link to the airport and a profusion of restaurants. Even in these nondescript suburbs--just as everywhere in Beijing today--some of the world's best cuisine is no more than a couple of minutes' walk away. China's capital is omnivorous--everything from fiery Sichuan dishes to Korean barbecue and Mongolian hotpot can be found on any street. Restaurants are no longer a luxury for Beijing's citizens as they were 20 years ago. They have become a ubiquitous necessity.

If Beijing does not draw the outsider in (the greyness of its smog-laden skies does nothing to enhance its seductive powers), it at least provides an easy exit. The same determination and disregard for cost that produced the Great Wall and the Grand Canal have created a network of expressways rivalling that of America's interstate highways. And beyond the city proper, the roads of the rural hinterland of Beijing municipality (which covers an area bigger than Connecticut) lead motorists high into mountain passes and along village roads that are lined with peasant-run restaurants and guest houses.

It is surprising in a country of breakneck change, where construction rarely takes heed of aesthetic effect, human comfort or the environment, to find stretches of Beijing's countryside where time has stood still. Visitors to the Olympics will get little sense of this as they are bussed out to the Great Wall that snakes over the Yanshan Mountains north of the city. These officially designated tourist sections of the wall have been restored, depriving them of the charm of dignified decay. Whatever remaining appeal they have is offset by crowds and commercialisation. China is becoming more sensitive about visitors trampling on unrestored parts of the crumbling Great Wall. But their beauty is mesmerising even if it is technically illegal to walk on them.

Walls make Beijing forbidding (try walking around the vermilion walls of the Communist Party headquarters in Zhongnanhai to get a feel for what exclusion means). But they are also part of its allure. A few decades ago the city itself and many of the towns and villages around it were surrounded by high thick walls. Only a few still remain. Some of the best-preserved ones are deep in the Beijing countryside around what were once garrisons for troops guarding the Great Wall itself.

The village of Yulin on Beijing's northern border, once a staging post for horses carrying the imperial mail, still has bits of its old walls standing. But the outer cladding of bricks has long since disappeared. What is left is not quite enough to cash in on the tourism boom it had hoped for as China's fast-expanding middle classes take to the roads in their new cars. It takes walls like those of Jimingyi, another imperial postal town farther along the expressway in Hebei province north-west of Beijing, to bring in the visitors. But even picturesque Jimingyi struggles. Expressway tolls are expensive and Beijing's new car owners, still nervous of long-distance driving, prefer to keep closer to home.

Beijing misses its walls. Hosting the Olympics has spurred the city government to try to rebuild part of the old fortifications, which were destroyed in the 1960s to build a ring road. A semi-restored section in the south-east near Dongbianmen has been turned from a slum quarter, with shanties built up against (and built using bricks from) the wall's remains, into a pleasant park.

The Olympics are likely to revive the city's compartmentalised traditions and officialdom's ancient suspicion of outsiders. The Olympic village will be the new Forbidden City, strictly off limits to ordinary mortals. Security will be intense to keep protesters at bay. Foreigners will be kept under close observation to ensure they do not spread subversive ideas (none of the proselytising by Christian groups on the margins of the games that has been a tradition at previous such events). Some visitors will groan at the restrictions, but residents will not be surprised. Such has been the city's nature for centuries. It will take more than the Olympics to change Beijing.

GOING NATIVE

EAT:

Walls box people in at home as well. Architects design poky little kitchens for Beijing homes, but that is because many Chinese eat out very frequently. Strike up conversation with a stranger and the talk often turns to food--which province uses which type of chilli, how the climate has shaped that provincial cuisine. Beijing offers a smorgasbord of specialist restaurants, many exquisitely decorated. Only the swankiest are hushed and elegant, and you want to avoid those. Stay away from the private VIP rooms too--more walls--and eat in the noisy public dining rooms. The Chinese treat their restaurants like pubs., so they are full of conversation and laughter. Traditionally, noodles are energetically slurped, and bones chewed and abandoned on the tabletop. You will know you are in the right place if you hang your jacket on the back of your chair and the waitress protects it from hot oil splashes with a special fabric cover. If you make the mistake of putting your bag down on the floor, she will rescue it and insist you put it on a chair. Take a look at the floor and you may understand why. Try these, and drink beer with everything.

Donglaishun: a chain serving Mongolian hot-pot, Beijing's winter speciality. Diners dip wafer-thin slices of lamb and cabbage into boiling broth. 5th floor, Xindongan Guangchang, Wangfujing Dajie, Dongcheng district, and many other locations. Tel: 6528 0932 (all numbers local; if calling from abroad, put +86 10 in front)

Han Na Shan: There is a large Korean population in Beijing, and barbecues throughout the city. In smart restaurants the waitress does the barbecuing for you at your table. My children prefer the restaurants where you do it yourself. Both options are available here. 11 Chunxiu Lu, Dongcheng District (and many other locations). Tel: 6417 8377

Dintaifung: A Taiwan chain specialising in the Shanghai dumplings called xiaolongbao. Another favourite with the children. Eat with care, because boiling soup explodes all over your shirt as you bite into them. No 24 Xinyuanxili Zhongjie, Dongzhimen, Chaoyang District (and many other locations, see www.dintaifung.com.cn)

SHOP:

For the past few years the world's retailers have been trying to sear their brand names into the hearts and minds of urban Chinese. Designer brands fill shiny new malls. But often Chinese first encounter designer brands in the many markets which sell knock-off clothes at knock-down prices. These all started out as street markets but the authorities have now built...you guessed it...walls around them.

Yaxiu Market at 58 Gongti Beilu, Chaoyang District, for shoes, bags, hats, silk, tailors, electrical goods, underwear, children's clothing, you name it.

Hongqiao Market next to the Temple of Heaven at Tiantan Gongyuan Donglu, Chongwen District for all the above, plus toys and real fresh-water pearls.

For knock-off antiques and genuine crafts, go to Panjiayuan Market, 200 Panjia Lu, Chaoyang District, on a Saturday or Sunday morning. For more authenticity (this is where Chinese collectors hang out) go to the market at Baoguo Temple, Guanganmennei, Xuanwu District, on a Thursday morning.

For therapy after the crowds and haggling, go to Spin for affordable contemporary ceramics. 6 Fangyuan Xilu, Lido area, Chaoyang District. Tel: 6437 8649

ESCAPE:

Beijing is a great place to get out of. Drive out of the city on one of several pay-as-you-go expressways and find yourself rapidly in the mountains, with the Great Wall winding its way across precipitous heights. A day out in the countryside used to mean a picnic, but the rural population is busy making money out of city tourists. They are setting up roadside restaurants, often with outside seating areas and great views. They rent out rooms, too, so you can make a weekend of it. Avoid Badaling, where tour groups are commonly taken, and head for Simatai, Huanghuacheng or Mutianyu.

To get a feel for the "wild wall", as unrestored sections of the Great Wall are called, contact William Lindesay, who offers weekend hikes and accommodation at his farmhouse. He knows more about the wall than just about anyone and is passionate about its conservation. http://www.wildwall.com/or e-mail william@wildwall.com

Image sources: "Peking street scene" by William Henry Jackson, 1895 (LOC) Pingnews/flickr
The Long Long Corridor, Summer Palace (Yiheyuan) Fukagawa/flickr

(James Miles is the Economist's Beijing correspondent. Our last "Being There" piece was about buying a house in Marrakech.)