The City of Heavenly Tranquillity
Introduction
An honourable defeat at the General’s Tomb
On a hazy damp summer morning in 1630, Ming soldiers dragged the loyal general
to a post where an executioner was waiting with a bright razor. The Ming dynasty had
lasted 260 years but was in its final days when a young emperor Chong Zhen, (16281644) heeded the advice of his eunuchs and ordered the execution of General Yuan
Chonghuan. His sentence was announced at the Meridian Gate, the southern entrance to
the Forbidden City. High treason merited the most cruel penalty in the criminal code, an
excruciating and slow death by a thousand cuts.
Five centuries later I stood before the General’s tomb on the festival of Clear
Brightness (Qing Ming). Two figures dressed in the long flowing robes of the Ming and
holding flowers in their hands bowed their heads in solemn reverence.
A group of migrant workers stood on the balcony of their dormitory on which their
washing, long red long johns, hung out to dry, looking down at the small crowd of
worshippers before the tomb. The building pressed hard up against the outer wall of the
tomb and as I crammed my neck to look up at them, I could see giant cranes and the
scaffolding of dozens of uniform and brightly coloured high rises in every direction. The
general’s tomb, a dome of concrete behind a six foot high stele, seemed much diminished
amid the rows of concrete giants, a tiny isolated island of history.
The tomb had once been much bigger and impressive, a complete shrine with halls
and statues set in a garden with a number of ancillary buildings. One of them was the
home of the She family who had guarded this site for 17 generations. Mrs. She Youzhe,
a frail small figure with a bun of untidy grey hair, made a speech, her arms held on either
side by two tall students from the Peking Arts School.
‘We passed on a promise that was made by my ancestors. If I did not keep my promise,
I would be unworthy of my ancestors,’ she pleaded as somewhere a pile driver started up
drowning out her firm voice. Three years earlier, she and her family had been evicted
from their home after 370 years.
‘Before dying, each generation told the next generation, ‘bury me next to General
Yuan’. My ancestor was a soldier, She Yishi, who served the General when he won his
famous battle and defeated Nurhuhaci in 1625. It was the only battle in which Nurhuhaci
was ever defeated.’
Nurhuhachi was a great warrior who founded the Manchu state north of the Great
Wall that later conquered the great Ming empire. His descendants went on to rule China,
double its size and population, absolute monarchs of the largest empire history has seen.
After his victory over Nurhuhachi, General Yuan wanted to press forward and take
advantage of his success but was recalled and replaced. He was promoted to minister of
defence but five years later, he fell victim to a trap. Jealous rivals framed him with
evidence that he was in secret negotiations with Nurhuhachi and about to switch sides.
‘The Ming was very corrupt but people respected him because they knew he was a
patriot who loved his country,’ Mrs She continued. ‘No other country has such examples
of loyalty and patriotism. Everyone should study and learn from him.’’
Yet Mrs.She knew she had betrayed her trust, helpless before the great grinding
machine of modernisation. This may be the largest infrastructure project in history,
costing hundreds of billions, and the swiftest ever carried out The whole old city,
including the shrine, had been demolished between 1998 and 2003. It is as if someone
had taken a sledge hammer to a Ming vase. In just seven years, the ancient capital
covering 25 square miles, have been torn up and millions of its inhabitants summarily
evicted.
Driving through Peking to find the remnants of this shrine, struggling to recognize
once familiar places, I felt first bewildered and then angry. I had loved Peking. Somehow,
miraculously, it had survived a century of bitter wars and bloody revolution. The capital
of four dynasties and a republic, Peking had seemed eternal, sacred even. It was China’s
history set in stone. The vast magnificent medieval walls had faithfully protected intact
an unequalled repository of temples, palaces and theatres. Along this its jumbled
assortment of narrow streets and hidden palaces that Marco Polo walked when Kublai
Khan caroused with his warriors. When I first came to live here in 1985, Peking seemed
old, anarchic, dusty and cob-webbed, an old curiosity shop filled with mysterious halfhidden trapdoors that sprang open dropping one into another time.
Armies had trooped in and then marched out of its gigantic gates. British, French,
German, Japanese, Boxers, warlords, Nationalists, Communists, red guards – all had had
their entrances and exits. None had dared touch Peking. A glittering cast of khans,
emperors, concubines, eunuchs, imperialists, generals, kings, seers and sages, poets and
poseurs of every sort had had their moment and departed. Their stories adding to the pool
of memory, briefly stirring the surface waters, then settling to the bottom like autumn
leaves. This rich sediment nourished a tolerant unhurried cultured people with a knowing
humorous smile.
About a million people had lived in Peking since the 15th century when it was larger
than any city in Europe. Yet they were not really Chinese at all. Many Pekingers are tall
with strong robust physiques, descendents of the Mongols and Manchu’s, who for much
of its history formed the majority of the inhabitants. In fact, there is not city with a
history like Peking’s anywhere in China.
It lies at the northernmost extremity of China, close to the high grass plateau of
China’s enemies, home to nomadic tribes like the Manchu’s, Mongols, Urchin and Jin
who tribes preyed on the industrious Chinese. These peoples had established kingdoms
and empires of their own and Peking has served as their capital for 750 out of the last
thousand years
Today we are lucky. Spring can bring strong winds ladened with fine Gobi sand and
whipping up the dust from thousands of construction sites, and blanketing the city in a
stiffling miasma. Yet now the skies are high and clear with the bright blue of the open
steppes and the incense from the altar rises straight and sweet in the still air. Mrs.She is
here because it is Qing Ming when it is the duty of every Chinese to sweep the graves
of their ancestors and comfort the dead with offerings.
General Yuan came from a clan in the far south of the empire and the offerings lay
piled up on the small altar, bananas, mangoes and leeches from distant Canton. They
were brought by his descendants, clansmen in Dongguan, the delta now crowded with
factories churning out sneakers, toys and Christmas decoration, who still revere his
deeds.
General Yuan was a stranger in this city on the edge of the steppes, the homelands of
the Mongols, Manchus and other barbarian tribes. Peking was either a frontier garrison
for the Chinese or the capital of alien dynasties. China’s heartlands are in the rich fertile
Yangtze valley, home to great cities like Hangzhou, Suzhou, Nanjing and Shanghai. The
first Ming dynasty capital, established after the Chinese threw off the Mongol yoke, was
in Nanjing which means Southern Capital. When six centuries later, the Manchu dynasty
fell after the Chinese Revolution, Chiang Kai-shek brought the capital back to Nanjing
again. Beijing means northern capital but most Westerners tend to call it Peking because
when the first traders lived in Canton in the 18th century, the Cantonese pronounced
Beijing as Peking.
For the emperors who lived in the Forbidden City, Peking was many things; a military
headquarters, the administrative centre of the empire, and a sacred city. As the son of
heaven, the emperor naturally resided in the centre of the world. Peking enjoyed the
status of a Rome, a Byzantium or Jerusalem that the emperors filled with great state
temples. It was where the emperor fulfilled his duties, mediating between heaven and
earth, and guaranteeing that the world turned and the seasons followed their course.
Many nations – the Koreans, the Japanese, the Vietnamese, - also looked to the emperor
in Peking. The lesser kings and khans came here bringing tribute and pledging allegiance.
And along with the embassies and delegations, ordinary folk came too. Peking with its
thousands of temples and monasteries was one of Asia’s great pilgrimage destinations.
Before reaching the shrine, I had struggled to find Mrs. She’s new home. She had been
given a flat near the Temple of Heaven, one of the great state temples. Perhaps the most
famous architectural landmark in China, it has a round tower-like hall with a roof of
azure blue tiles. The architecture in this area was not so special, a higgledy-piggledy
juxtaposition of temples and factories, crooked alleys and ramshackle courtyard houses,
and although I had often been there, I had lost my way.
Try as I might, I simply could no longer call to mind just what had been here and what
it looked like before it had all been demolished. What was wrong with my memory ? In
Peking, it is easy enough to orient oneself. As befits a great imperial city, it had been
built to a plan and the key was simple enough. ‘Go North, then at the second street turn
East, and then North again,’ people would say. They knew, (even if I didn’t), where was
North because the whole city was aligned along a North- South axis. Even Marco Polo
had remarked how the city was laid out on a grid pattern.
Now there were broad straight roads so wide they could only be crossed over
footbridges. On either side marched, rows of shopping malls, office towers blocks and
residential housing developments. None of them had any features and this cheap handme-down modernism made me first irritated and then indignant. Every new urban
development in China was identical to this. The mechanical regularity of the rectangular
blocks of concrete clad in plate glass had been imposed on a city which everywhere had a
special patina of living history. It was not the patina of some ancient Zhou dynasty
bronze cooking vessel that had been dug up and stuck behind a glass case with label.
Mrs. She understood this only too well. With a voice occasionally breaking with
emotion, she repeated a story to her audience of arts students. ‘Culture is very important.
Our culture lies in our roots. This represents our history. Our living tradition.’
One night after general’s death, her ancestor, the loyal soldier She Yishi, secretly crept
to the execution ground where his body was being displayed, cut off the head and took it
home. It was an audacious act of defiance which, if he had been caught, would have cost
him his life. In the grounds of a hospice used by visitors and residents up from
Guangdong, the family buried the head hoping to hide it in a place full of corpses.
No member of the family dared reveal the existence of this gruesome relic for 152
years by which time the Ming dynasty was long gone. Then the Manchus established
China’s new dynasty, the Qing which in the 18th century it was at its zenith. One of its
most remarkable emperors, Qian Long, heard the story and was so pleased by this
example of loyalty and courage, that he commissioned a shrine that would foster the
General’s virtues of bravery and honour.
The She family stayed and looked after the shrine. They lived there so long that the
street in front of it became She Jia Guan, the Shrine of the She Family. When after 1950,
the authorities built the No.59 Middle School the shrine was left untouched in the school
yard. The She family had written to Chairman Mao Zedong appealing for his help and in
1952, he responded, ordering the mayor, Peng Zhen, to ensure that the grave and the
shrine would be protected for ever.
After its victory in 1949 The Chinese Communist Party naturally wanted to build a
new capital for their new state. Why exactly Mao Zedong chose Peking or Beiping as it
was then known, has never been explained. Perhaps, Nanjing was associated with
Republican China, Shanghai was too associated with the Western ‘imperialists’. On the
other hand, Peking had endured the shame of being under Japanese occupation for over
seven years.
At first Mao’s government seemed inclined to preserve the gu du, the ancient capital.
As with the Japanese before them, the intention was to build a new administrative centre
outside the old city walls. In 1958, Mao changed his mind. He wanted to destroy
everything, including the Forbidden City. A blueprint was adopted in 1958 but the plan
was never carried out as the country plunged into economic turmoil and some 30 million
starved to death. Mao was forced into semi-retirement but came back with vengeance and
launched the Cultural Revolution, destroying his opponents and renewing his plans to
destroy the past.
At the shrine, the local school children became Red Guards in 1966 and obeyed
Chairman Mao’s orders to destroy ’the four olds’. They attacked the family and smashed
up the shrine.
‘They said we were landlords and they killed some of our relatives,’ She said. The
kids demolished the main temple, hammering the family graves and stele with its famous
inscriptions . They even hunted for the general’s head for they believed it was made of
solid gold. She and her husband were forced to live in one small building and 11 other
families moved in to occupy the rest of the shrine.
‘I was in hospital giving birth when it happened. When I came out of the hospital, I
crept out at night to see the graves but they were already destroyed. Of course, I felt very
bad, but at that time who would dare say something ? Anyone could be beaten to death,’
she said. The She family ended up living next to the family belonging to one of the most
violent red guards.
Some eighteen years later, she and their unpleasant neighbours were still there when
the local government of Chongwen District formally recognized the shrine as an
historical relic. In theory this meant the shrine was again under state protection. In the
1980s, the city government adopted plans to preserve old Peking and these were renewed
in 1992. During these years Mrs She went back and forth to government departments
pleading for money to restore the site but to no avail. However, she had managed to
recover fragments of the smashed stones and Yuan Clansmen Association in Hong Kong
helped her repair the memorial stele.
The situation changed dramatically after 1997 when a new plan for Peking was
adopted. It secretly called for almost the entire demolition of old Peking and the whole
area around the shrine was earmarked for redevelopment. The programme was
accelerated in 2001 when Peking won the bid to host the 2008 Summer Olympic Games.
Everything had to be done in time for the games to showcase the new modern China.
Mrs. She pulled out notebooks listing all her visits and the interviews given to the
foreign and domestic press. Her neighbours mocked her as a mad woman, she said for
trying the impossible. When the Chaoyang Jiu Ding Kaifa Gongsi, a property
development company part owned by the district government, began demolishing the
whole neighbourhood, it saw no need to preserve the shrine at all. It did everything to
force her and the other families to leave. Finally, the She family were the only ones
hanging on in the middle of the construction site with their water or electricity cut off.
She’s individual campaign formed a part of a resistance that took place all over
Peking. It was a low intensity war, just small scale guerrilla actions fought hand to hand
in the trenches and worksites by people like Mrs. She, with limited means. They faced a
government that brooked no opposition or dissent and with a horrible and terrifying
history of violence behind it. Few Pekingers dared try to organize collective resistance
and what individuals like Mrs.She achieved in the circumstances was magnificent.
Mrs. She mobilised the Chinese and foreign media to report her story to the extent that
in Hong Kong, her supporters even wrote and performed a play An Eternal Promise.
There was even talk of a making a full length feature film. In response the developers
said nothing.
‘I told them - this is our property. You do not have the right to tell us what to do. We
have stayed here for five centuries through invasion and occupations by many armies.’
On May 20th 2002, the developers gave notice of the final deadline for her to leavve.
The company promised her the right to return when the building was over. The next day
she had no choice but to retreat defeated. In the circumstances, it was a fairly honourable
defeat. General Yuan’s shrine would be preserved even though most of the land
belonging to it was lost. The authorities never made good their promise to allow her to
return and live in the shrine but it became a state museum.
‘They told me that no one could live here because it is now a museum and there are
regulations for museums. In a museum you are not allowed to prepare foods or to cook.
But we lived here for 17 generations without harming it,’ she snorted.
All they now had left of the past was a small fragment. Her husband brought forth a
cardboard box to show me a couple of broken pieces of an enamel street name plate; one
piece was blue and the other red and the characters said She Jia Guan – She Family
Shrine. It was all that they had rescued from 500 years of history.
The authorities however could claim to have spent money preserving Peking’s history
and as they demolished the city, they announced plans to build 150 museums. This is
preservation but in the sense that the British Museum preserves dead cultures like the
Assyrians or the ancient Egyptians. By destroying private memories like those of the She
family, the state has completed its control over the past. It can now interpret the past as it
sees fit. The museum at the shrine nowhere mentions the She family and to get .
in, she has to buy a two yuan ticket like anyone else other than on Qing Ming.
If that judgement sounds too harsh, consider the political context in which this
destruction has taken place. It started in earnest eight years after the uprising of 1989
when the Tiananmen Democracy Movement brought over a million Pekingers on the
streets. The protests came close to ringing down the curtain on Chinese Communist Party
rule. Such protests brought down the Soviet Union and Communist dictatorships all
across Eastern Europe.
Jiang Zemin who ordered the rebuilding of Peking had no popular mandate to rule let
alone to order Peking’s demolition. He was installed after tanks crushed the student-led
protests and stayed in power by ruthlessly nipping dissent ‘in the bud’. In many instances,
he retreated from the liberalisation of the 1980s by suspending civil liberties through a
‘strike hard’ crackdown on crime. In the pervasive climate of fear, it was easy to force
through the relocation of several million from within the boundaries of the old capital to a
dozen or so new satellite towns some twenty or thirty miles away.
Perhaps the motive was not punish, the citizens of Peking for daring to revolt but the
new inhabitants are unlikely to repeat such a similar political challenge to the authority of
the state. They are by and large beneficiaries of the new order. The newcomers moving
into their luxury apartments or villas are party loyalists and their families who had made
quick fortunes trading on their influence and stripping state assets or appropriating land.
Others are entrepreneurs from the south who had built new factories and rode the export
boom and now wanted a place in the capital.
As Bertold Brecht wrote after the 1953 uprising in East Berlin, ‘The people have
caressly lost the confidence of the government. They can only regain it through hard
work. Wouldn’t it be easier if the government dissolved the people and elercted another ?
‘
As the capital, Peking is a model so its destruction sent a powerful signal to the rest
of the country. Officials in every city followed suite. Thousands of miles away in Lhasa
or Kashgar, the architectural heritage of rich and diverse past has vanished in an orgy of
hurried vandalism.
Many people, especially visitors, find this hard to grasp. Chinese people seem
inordinately, indeed often irritatingly, proud of their history and culture. You can’t have a
conversation for long before some one will seek to assert their superiority by boasting
that they belong to a great 5,000 year old culture. How could a government so fiercely
nationalist deliberately set out to destroy this glorious legacy ?
Often the explanation put forward is to blame it all on powerful market forces and the
understandable wish to help the inhabitants escape from the quasi slums they lived in
without the benefits of modern sanitation. Western architects employed in designing new
buildings would explain that it was impossible to restore the old city and that the
inhabitants were only too glad to move to bigger and better accommodation.
Yet what happened to Peking constitutes a great crime, a premeditated act of
vandalism undertaken without debate or consultation. All existing planning laws,
property rights, and urban development plans were thrown out. Even when the state
decided to flood the Three Gorges on the Yangtze, the National People’s Congress at
least discussed the project and a record number caste votes against it. By keeping the
scale of the plan secret, most people, even architects, were completely taken by surprise.
Imagine the outcry in London or Paris if an unelected mayor installed by tanks after
massive anti-government protests ordered the removal of four million inhabitants and
levelled most of the city in five years. Imagine if the West End, Notting Hill,
Knightsbridge, Holland Park, and the City of London were to vanish and replaced by
giant residential and commercial blocks. If every landmark, Oxford Street, Piccadilly,
Pall Hall, Regent Street, Covent Garden, the courtyards of the Temple, the alleys of
Soho, were to disappear at once, or to survive only as islands dwarfed by giant express
ways and monolithic blocks.
Itr is useful to compare Peking’s fate with say Warsaw. After the Second World War,
the Poles rebuilt the old city brick by brick, copying every detail from photographs and
maps. It was a defiant act that said that although the Germans had promised to utterly
destroy the Poles as a nation, they had failed despite the total destruction of Warsaw after
the uprising.
Peking had survived almost intact in 1949. It was never bombed flat like Seoul or
Tokyo, Dresden or Berlin. It was peacefully liberated after Japan’s surrender in
September 1945. When in 1948 the Communists besieged the KMT forces trapped in
the city, they declined to fight, partly because it would imperil Peking’s great
architectural and historical heritage. Even though the Japanese occupied Peking for eight
years, far longer say than Germans were in Warsaw, the Japanese had left it untouched.
Indeed, they even drew up plans to build a new administrative capital outside the walls.
The same project was taken up again and promoted in the early 1950s by many members
and advisers to the new Communist government. After Mao’s death, the Party still
intented to preserve the city as much as possible.
China’s leaders could easily have spent money on restoring the old city and
constructed new ministries and housing elsewhere. The city’s growth is not restricted by
any rivers, coast or mountain because it lies in a flat plain limited only in one direction
by the Western Hills.
I doubt if there is another example in history of an ancient capital being destroyed and
rebuilt so thoroughly and in such a short space of time. Even Baron Haussmann left 40
percent of Paris untouched when it was rebuilt in the 1860s while in Beijing less than ten
percent has beern left. Beijing was levelled in eight years but in Paris was rebuilt over 20
years and the new buildings, built to last in the classical style had a cultural continuity
that Peking’s cheap and shabby blocks entirely lack.
In this book the retelling of Peking’s history aims to record both what made Peking so
delightfully unique but also how and why the leaders of China came to destroy. This city
was after all the birth place of the modernisation project which Chinese intellectuals
embraced in the last years of the Manchu’s Qing dynasty. By the 1920s they believed that
to save China, they had first to destroy it. But this is also the story of those who like Mrs.
She tried everything in their power to protect Peking’s great heritage and to salvage as
much of China’s grand inheritance as possible from those gripped by a profound selfloathing.. The Chinese are the inheritors of the greatest non-Western culture to have
survived intact into the 20th century. Peking is the story how the Communist Party has set
about fulfilling its mission to complete the biggest, and perhaps most brutal effort, ever
undertaken to change the fabric of a nation.