From the Fragrant Hills to the Forbidden City, stolid Beijing seemed like an antidote to the bustle, brio and all-consuming avarice of modern China. Instead, the capital is tearing itself down and trying again, with the help of some of the world's best architects
Writer Richard Cook. Photographer Daniel Traub
Naturally, in the circumstances, I expected some bunting: ticker tape; perhaps even a couple of dancing girls. By coincidence my plane had touched down by the shiny new terminal at Beijing Capital on the same morning and at precisely the same time as the capsule containing Yang Liwei, the nation's first parachuted down onto the Mongolian desert a thousand miles to the west: the moment that China belatedly entered the space age.
More than 30 years after Alan Shepherd pulled out a golf ball and driver and teed off on the moon-Houston having run out of actual scientific experiments as long ago as 1971-the Chinese had finally sent a man out of the earth's atmosphere and returned him safely. He even made a discovery. The Great Wall of China, he reported, was not actually visible from space. Or if it was, he deadpanned, he hadn't seen it.
As I sat watching a local karaoke channel playing on the headrest TV in the black Audi my hotel had sent to collect me from the airport, I was fully expecting to encounter massed crowds around every corner. They would perhaps be striving manfully to hold their emotions in check or else, tiring of the ceaseless stoicism we in the West like to ascribe to them, be weeping uncontrollably with delight at Liwei's exploits. I expected to see so many of the faithful gathered that the whole 40-hectare expanse of Tianan Men Square would appear as a shimmer sun, as we labored through the crowds and past Mao's old vantage point at the northern gate.
In the event, the square was spotted with the usual mix of hawkers and kite flyers, hustlers and tourists. Only the advertisers seemed to have noticed what day it was. The city's billboards had already conspired to add a token extra-terrestrial motif to their regular features. One advertisement, for an energy drink, featured an attractive young woman wearing a silver space suit and carrying a shiny silver helmet, a combination that ads for washing powder, trainers, a soft drink and Beijing's largest car dealership had also stumbled upon. In the hotel, mention of the world's newest space programme prompted something very like embarrassment.
Beijing might once have been the place where breathless public endorsement was given to every government initiative, however barmy (Mao's ruthless pogrom against the humble sparrow springs to mind), but apparently no longer. Local papers led on the space story the next day, but the news had to share front page space with what it was instantly apparent has become the real source of national pride-the news that, depite SARS, China's economy is growing at over nine per cent a year and the country's trade surplus with the US is up to $120 billion and growing. The capital's citizens, it seems, are these days much too busy making money to celebrate.
But if Beijing is no longer China's enthusiastic cheerleader, it's still not exactly clear what its role now is. What it certainly is not, is another brash, go-getting Shanghai. But then the latter's borrowed architecture, swollen foreign enclaves and brutal capitalism have never had their equivalent here. This, after all, is the capital of what was once the world's richest and most advanced civilization. As befitted that status, the old walled city of Beijing was a symbol of beauty, power and unity to China's one billion people. A symbol to a nation divided by the eight mutually unintelligible dialects of Chinese and by more than 50 other languages.
At the heart of it all stood the imperial palaces, the so-called Forbidden City, with its vermilion walls and golden roofs. Around the Forbidden City were innumerable other palaces and the more modest houses of the princes and top officials. Framing this whole complex on the points of the magnetic compass were temples of Sun and Moon, Heaven and Earth. Their emperor wasn't just an emperor, he was actually the very son the heaven.
The architecture of these vast palaces had their equivalents in the tiny little streets, the hutongs, that radiated from the Forbidden City. Just as the eye was led through the massive gates of the imperial city to the squares within, son in these little alleyways, with their matching gray roof tiles, the doors gave out onto their own little courtyards. These were the homes of most of the city's residents.
This whole socially enlightened, cheek by jowl, mix of vast palaces and uniform gray public housing was contained within city walls more than 6oft high and 3oft wide, punctuated by colossal gates and watchtowers. Beijing's glorious reputation was such that even when the Communist forces-not notable patrons of the heritage industry-reached the city in 1949experts about its most valuable cultural sites and then carefully tiptoed around them with their heavy artillery.
Fifteen years later, Beijing had completely vanished. The 800-year-old city walls had been bulldozed to build a subway below ground and a ring road on top. The new subway stations were given the names of the vandalized watchtowers and gates. Factories were moved into the center of town and temples cleared to make way for them. And then, once Mao had irrevocably spoiled the city, things took a turn for the worse. In the 1980s, money flooded into town from foreigners looking to secure their own sliver of the Oriental booty. The then-mayor of Beijing, Chen Xitong invited developers to pull down such remnants of the historic city as had been left by the Communists. He urged them to build the progressively bigger and more unpleasant shopping centers and office blocks that today contribute to a typically disappointing first impression of the city.
These developments fostered, in their turn, the six-lane, urban motorways that have reduced the former bicycle capital of the world to a state of constant gridlock. In 50 years, one of the most gracious cities in the world had become one of the grimmest. The few historic buildings that have survived are relics, marooned in a sea of undistinguished skyscrapers. Their brightly colored walls are now grimy from traffic fumes. In many cases, flyovers pass feet away. At night a succession of car headlamps serve chiefly to illuminate the detailing to temple architraves.
The Forbidden City itself has lasted largely thanks to Unesco and to the enticing prospect of the tourist dollar. The hutongs are vanishing by the day, their inhabitants being rehoused in ghastly apartment blocks further and further from the center of things. Today a sense of the impersonal and unfinished permeates the whole city. But if the overall impression is of a colossal building site, then if nothing else, that at least offers the prospect of a better-looking future.
To find the first signs of this, we had to grope down a dark street in a district of shabby blocks of flats. In daylight the verandas of these flats are a commotion of hanging birdcages and cabbages and suspended washing swinging in the dusty wind that whips down from the Gobi Desert, choking the city. The air is noisy with colorful machines provided by the government on street corners for exactly that purpose. Everywhere is the smell of cooking and the sound of children crying. With Chinese children, the trousers are slit to allow them to excrete the instant it is required. At the busy market we pass en route, that seems to be disconcertingly often. And then, crossing the brutal flyover that connects the 3rd Ring Road and Jian Guo Road, we suddenly found ourselves amid acres of gleaming white stone and glass in a place called Soho. All around us teams of builders were putting the finishing touches to what was a vast mixed business and residential development. Hundreds of similarly tasteful schemes are now springing up all over the city. Beautifully realized billboards that show impressions of what they might look like appear on almost every corner of the city. The names the developers have chosen betray both their aspirations and the direction Beijing is increasingly looking: Central Park, Park Avenue, Palm Springs, Soho. They are not without their teething troubles-at Soho, for instance, they have struggled to find valet car parkers who actually know how to drive-but the will to create an appropriately chic 21st century city is undoubted.
Today a sense of the impersonal and unfinished permeates the city
Soho is perhaps distinguished from many of the rest of these schemes by virtue of its architecture, an understated plan by Japan's Riken Yamamoto and by the fact that what the developers are selling here is squarely in the center of Beijing's architectural front line. A little further along the same road Rem Koolhaas has signed to build his biggest ever project, a new hedgehog-shaped headquarters for local TV station CCTV. Back towards the city center, the ground is about to be broken on another vast mixed-use development four times the size of Soho's 700,000 sq m. Ten international architects will be involved in different parts of the project, Zaha Hadid among them. And that's just the private initiatives.
The city has already embarked on its wildly ambitious pre-Olympic building frenzy. It plans to develop in total 25 million sq m of property, to build 19 entirely new facilities and renovate a further 13. At the center of their plans is Herzog&de Meuron's remarkable 80,000-seater National Stadium. Meanwhile, Paul Andreu's egg-shaped National Grand Theater, a home for the Beijing Opera, is rapidly taking shape, punctuating the otherwise endless succession of dour, Communist-era facades that line Chang An Avenue, one of Beijing's main thoroughfares.
"Because of our experiences with socialism, people here now typically hate the gigantic and actually love buildings that are intimate and individual," says Zhang-Xin, the co-CEO of Soho. Her company was also responsible for the "Commune By The Great Wall", the showcase development of 12 modernist homes by architects such as Shigeru Ban and Kengo Kuma 40 minutes out of the city. "The trouble is that against that we have grown up with an aesthetic where importance was very much identified with size. But Beijing actually now has a chance to avoid some of the mistakes that Shanghai has made in just throwing up buildings. This city has been messed around with over the years, but the signs are that it is now starting to make the most of this opportunity. All the building will, at the very least, provide some interesting contrasts between old and new."
Indeed, life in Beijing in this, the adolescence of the new China, has already taken on some curious contrasts. Should you venture under one of the porches in the hutongs, you are still most likely to see a scene hardly altered in decades: a courtyard piled high with panniers and pot plants, rusted bicycles and rotting bird cages, redolent with the smell of urine and rotting fish. The grimy bare rooms leading off the courtyard will be the home of a handful of families. A week later you might be confronted with a completely different scene in the same alleyway: a whitewashed restaurant serving fusion titbits to a techno soundtrack, perhaps, or a minimalist apartment.
Beijing was always different: conservative, slower paced, a stage-managed ideal of Chinese fervor that could be presented to the West. In the future, as the scaffolding and building sites make clear, it is still going to be a showcase city but a better-looking one.
