TRAVEL
China’s capital seeks to rediscover its religious roots and traditions
Beijing is turning Taoist as the sprawling capital rediscovers its role as the sacred centre of China’s spiritual universe.
When I first came to Beijing in 1984, the city felt dusty and forgotten, a one-time 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 dieselbelching 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.
It wasn’t a holy city like Jerusalem, Mecca or Banaras, locations whose very soil was hallowed, making them destinations for pilgrims. Yet 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. It was a total work of art, epitomising the political-religious system that ran traditional China for millenniums. It was Chinese belief incarnate.
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, or hutong, were destroyed to make way for the new ideals of an atheistic, industrial society. The 1980s brought economic reforms and uncontrolled real estate development, which wiped out almost all of the rest of the old town. Lost was a vast medieval city of 40 square kilometres and also a way of life, just as the local cultures of the world’s other great cities have been swamped by our restless times.
Over the years, I have watched some of this transformation, first as a student, then a journalist and now a writer and teacher. Like many people who have fallen in love with this city, I was disheartened and felt Beijing’s culture was lost.
But in recent years, I have begun to think I was wrong. 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 as Chinese search for new values and beliefs to underpin their post-communist society.
For most of my time in Beijing, I have always lived within walking distance of the Temple of the Sun. A 50-acre park in the Jianguomenwai diplomatic district, the temple was built in 1530, one of four shrines where the emperor worshipped key heavenly bodies. The others are dedicated to the moon, the earth and heaven. The Temple of Heaven is easily the most famous, but the Temple of the Sun reveals more because it is less of a showpiece.
Like virtually every landmark in Beijing, the temple was badly damaged during the Cultural Revolution. This was a period of radical communist violence from 1966 to 1976, when every place of worship and many symbols of the past were attacked. The main stone altar, a flat disk about six metres across and raised about one metre off the ground, was smashed by Mao’s zealots. Later, the park became a dumping ground for rubble when the city’s walls were torn down.
I came to know the park eight years after that traumatic period ended. I studied 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. In the post-Mao era, China was opening up, and so it built embassies and modern apartment blocks to house foreign diplomats and journalists. This area became an international hub, with a “Friendship Store,” an International Club and a western-style hotel that had one of the city’s few bakeries. I came for the croissants, but stayed for the tree-lined streets and the Temple of the Sun.
In 1994, I returned to China to work for seven years 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.
Back then the park had an entrance fee that kept it relatively empty, especially in what was now a crowded, bustling city. It cost only 17 baht to enter, but China was still relatively poor and people weren’t inclined to spend their time on exercise. You worked, you went home, you rested. Parks were for special occasions.
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.
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. Besides aircraft carriers, the Olympics and
high-speed rail, it spent its money on parks and greenery.
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.
Best of all — or worst, depending on your selfishness — the authorities also got rid of the entrance fees. Suddenly the park was part of the city, embraced by residents eager for activity. Unlike years ago, many Chinese want to exercise, and so the park is filled with joggers in black spandex sprinting past restaurant workers in greasy smocks.
But this need for green space clashes with another trend in China: the surrender of public areas to the rich. Just as Beijing’s bike lanes have become turning lanes for cars and its sidewalks overrun with motorbikes delivering hot meals to the upper-middle class, huge swathes of the Temple of the Sun have been sacrificed to benefit a wealthy minority.
Since about 2000, I estimate, about 15% to 20% of the park’s area has been rented out to relatively high-end restaurants, an exclusive social club, a German beer garden, a yoga yard, a strange antique furniture store that is always empty (and smells of some sort of dodgy corruption scheme), a Russian restaurant and stores exhibiting wholesale wares for Russian traders — all commercial activities that don’t belong in this great old park.
With so much of the park’s area lost to these money-spinning activities, the Temple of the Sun has been reduced to the rebuilt altar in the centre, a small hill, a tiny lake and one main path. With no entrance fees and no space, the path is so crowded that it sometimes feels like a fast-spinning hamster wheel that one enters and exits at one’s peril.
And yet I still love the park.
When I follow the park’s counterclockwise flow, I keep an eye out for the skyscrapers peeking through the weeping willows, the Tai Chi master by the lake and the old pines that somehow have survived the tumult. I even listen for the screech of the tacky children’s amusement park with its half-broken choo-choo trains.
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. 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.
Looking for Chinese religion one autumn 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. Its main axis of five halls to various deities had been mostly untouched by the Cultural Revolution, and the incense and the old trees gave it a timeless feel. But 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.
But over the past decade or so, Chinese have been searching for meaning in their lives. After decades of adopting foreign ideologies like fascism, communism and neoliberalism, they wonder what remains of their culture. Temples like White Cloud are part of this search for answers.
And so, cleverly, the government has invested heavily in religions like Taoism (as well as Buddhism and folk religion, but less so in Christianity or Islam). The White Cloud Temple is trying to reclaim some of China’s traditional medical heritage by opening a clinic in a newly refurbished wing of the temple. The state also built a new Taoist academy to train priests. Slowly, a Taoist revival has spread across China.
You can sense this by walking through the temple. The admission fee of 220 baht does keep out many people, but the temple is still filled with priests heading off to class and preparing for ceremonies.
Today’s Beijing is a slightly out-of-control urban area of highways and high-rises, subway and suburbs. The old cosmological tapestry is in shreds.
But it is a place where places have meaning. Urban historian Jeffrey F Meyer, who wrote The Dragons Of Tiananmen: Beijing
As A Sacred City, points out that Chinese capitals always reflect the governing ideology. This is true of all capitals, of course.
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. 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.”