Beijing’s attempt to bring back culture
WHEN I first came to Beijing in 1984, the city felt dusty and forgotten, a onetime capital of temples and palaces that Mao had vowed – successfully, it seemed – to transform into a landscape of factories and chimneys. Soot penetrated every windowsill and every layer of clothing, while people rode simple steel bicycles or diesel-belching buses through the windy old streets.
Then, as now, it was hard to imagine this sprawling city as the sacred centre of China’s spiritual universe. But for most of its history, it was exactly that.
Beijing’s streets, walls, temples, gardens and alleys were part of a carefully woven tapestry that reflected the constellations above, geomantic forces below and an invisible overlay of holy mountains and gods. Beijing’s cosmology changed in the 20th century, especially after the communist takeover in 1949. Its great city walls and many of its temples and distinctive alleys were destroyed. The 1980s brought economic reforms and uncontrolled real estate development, which wiped out almost all of the rest of the old town. I have watched some of this transformation, first as a student, then a journalist and now a writer and teacher.
But Beijing’s culture is not dead; it is being reborn in odd corners of the city and in unexpected ways. I see this in two places in this city where I now live. One is the Temple of the Sun neighbourhood in the eastern part of the city, and the other a Taoist temple in the western part. These are places that seemed forgotten and irrelevant, but they have slowly taken on a new importance in recent years.
For most of my time in Beijing, I have always lived within walking distance of the Temple of the Sun. A 20hectare park, the temple was built in 1530.
I came to know the park when I was studying Chinese language and literature at Peking University from 1984 to 1985 and biked over to this area because it had become the country’s chief diplomatic district and one of the few places where homesick Westerners could buy chocolate and postcards. I remember walking through the park, its altar recently reconstructed, but many of the buildings so dilapidated that the grounds seemed abandoned. A few Beijing residents ventured in occasionally to fly kites, and diplomats’ children would run around the altar’s low peripheral wall testing its acoustics. If you whispered into it, a friend could hear your voice a dozen feet away.
In 1994, I returned to China to work as a journalist, first for the Baltimore Sun and later for the Wall Street Journal. I ended up moving into one of the diplomatic compounds, and the neighbourhood became my home. Again, I was drawn to the Temple of the Sun.
The Temple of the Sun wasn’t just empty of people but looked barren. This was a time when Chinese parks rarely had grass. Instead, the hard-packed dry earth of arid Beijing was raked by crews every few days. It was odd but had an austere beauty that set off the ginkgo and persimmon trees that lined the paths.
By the time I returned to China in 2009 to work as a writer and teacher, all of this had changed. China had enjoyed three decades of fast economic growth, and government coffers were overflowing.
The Temple of the Sun gained grass, new trees, beds of tulips in the spring and geraniums in the summer and stands of bamboo that are so foreign to this colder part of China that they have to be laboriously bundled up against the cold each autumn. Suddenly the park was part of the city, embraced by residents eager for activity.
But the park is more than a window into people’s daily lives; for the government, it is once again a way to increase its legitimacy. The authorities run a tiny museum that exhibits, as if real, recreations of the smashed altar pieces. It has also put a big steel fence around the altar to show its earnestness in protecting cultural heritage.
Recreating traditional values is one of the Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s key domestic policies, but anything like a return to the past seemed impossible in the 1980s. Being raised in a fairly religious household, I had been curious what Chinese believed.
Looking for Chinese religion one afternoon, I rode my bike for an hour down to the White Cloud Temple, the national centre of China’s indigenous religion, Taoism. This religion coalesced in the second century out of folk religious beliefs and the teachings of philosophers like Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu. The White Cloud Temple dates from the 13th century and is the headquarters of the national Taoist association.
The temple was beautiful but seemed inconsequential. It was empty of worshippers. The halls and courtyards felt like those token places of worship in communist countries that were more like museums than functioning centres of a living religion. Surrounded by communist-era housing and a belching power plant, the temple was much like the Temple of the Sun, a relic of a bygone era.
Compared with the sacred city of the past, today’s Beijing is a slightly out-of-control urban area of highways and highrises, subway and suburbs.
But it is a place where places have meaning. Urban historian Jeffrey F Meyer points out that Chinese capitals always reflect the governing ideology.
But unlike open societies, which are messier and where the official message is often lost or at least softened by competing voices, Beijing is still the capital of an authoritarian state. Beijing’s message is still the state’s message, perhaps not perfectly but still audibly. This state once despised tradition but now supports it. And so the city changes – not back to the past but into something made up of ideas from the past – of filial piety, respect for authority, traditional religions, but also privilege for the rich. As Meyer put it, then as now, “Beijing was an idea before it was a city.”