BEIJING
“People think China is still undeveloped, but look at the sophistication here,” said Maggio. We were in Beijing’s Indigo mall, of all places. A mall was not on my painstakingly devised itinerary. But according to ancient Chinese belief, bad energy follows straight lines and good energy meanders. I was going with the flow. La La Land was playing in the mall’s theatre. The bookstore was well— and internationally—stocked: Gabriel García Márquez, Paul Auster, Salman Rushdie. We passed shops with designer baby clothes and organic Korean beauty products, packed with “happy middle-class wives!” said Maggio.
Multitudes have been lifted out of rural poverty at startling speed—hence the ubiquitous monster apartment towers. As AnneCecile Noique, a China expert and gallerist, would tell me, “Time has another dimension here. What you’re able to do in China in 20 years is immense. Twenty years in Europe and America? Not so much.” We passed a glittering Tesla showroom. “Teslas are huge here,” Maggio said, their owners the first generation of China’s megarich and their so-called “millionaire babies”. But eco-consciousness now crosses economic strata and is government-incentivised: buyers of all plug cars receive a rebate of up to USD19,000. Small wonder: China shares a border, one is repeatedly reminded here, with more countries than any other—14.
I climbed the Great Wall, at its Ming-era Mutianyu section, 90 minutes by car from Beijing. The misty mountain ridges and the crenelated ramparts snaking along them were beautiful. But what struck me most powerfully up there was the futility of walls. The regime blocks all social media, but back in town barriers of all sorts seemed to be falling. At the new Christie’s auction house in Beijing, a multigenerational crowd had assembled for the first-ever showing of a Mark Rothko painting in China. “Because Asian participation in global art sales has now reached 31 percent,” Jinqing Cai, president of Christie’s China, told me, “we no longer bring leftovers here for preview, but the tops.”
Beijing’s latest must-see edifice, developer George Wong’s Parkview Green Museum, a glass-encased Louvre-on-steroids, is a startling mashup of art (Wong’s collection), commerce (shops, restaurants, bars, hotels), and sustainable constructions. Mia Yu, the architectural historian showing me about, could not resist quibbling about the art, which includes a striped revolving Buddha, a mechanised bull’s head, and a giant model of a submarine.
I had arranged through Abercrombie & Kent to see a restored private courtyard home in a hutong, as the city’s few remaining neighbourhoods of narrow streets and traditional one-storey houses are called. Its owner, Yang Jing, an elegant woman who once ran a coal company and now owns the boutique Jing’s Residence hotel in the historic town of Pingyao, served me smooth, 40-year-old pu’er tea while I took in the beauty all around: upturned rooftops, Chinese antiques, two red metal chairs positioned beneath a leafless tree, a recumbent contemporary white sculpture of two giant lotus flowers. Jing explained the spirit of the Chinese courtyard house. “It is designed to make you feel the seasons,” she said. “That is why the rooms are not connected—so you have to walk outside into the courtyard to get from one to another.”
In the chill of the February evening I found myself at the Yan Whiskey Bar, one small room in a tucked-away courtyard house. Just a polished wood counter, a few sleek bar stools, three black-tie-attired bartenders, and behind them, a wall of imported whiskeys and Scotches from Japan. Nightcap nirvana.