Republican Beijing: The City and Its Histories (Asia: Local Studies / Global Themes) : China Rugs
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: Republican Beijing: The City and Its Histories (Asia: Local Studies / Global Themes)
The Times Literary Supplement July 14, 2006
Before Tiananmen
Jonathan Mirsky
Republican Beijing. The city and its histories. By Madeleine Yue Dong. 400pp.
Berkeley: University of California Press. $50; distributed in the Uk by Wiley.
Pounds 32.50. - 0 520 23050 7.
Remaking Beijing. Tiananmen square and the creation of a political space. Wu Hung. 256pp. Reaktion. Paperback, Pounds 19.95. - 1 86189 235 7.
Us: University of Chicago Press. $35. - 1 861 89235 7.
Lhasa. Streets with memories. Robert Barnett. 244pp. New York: Columbia University Press. $24.50. - 0 231 13680 3.
Kyoto. A cultural and literary history. John Dougill. 272pp. Oxford: Signal.
Pounds 12. - 1 904955 13 4.
Us: Oxford University Press. $55. - 0 19 530137 4.
Asian cities are a hot scholastic subject these days. Madeline Yue Dong, a historian at the University of Washington, must know as much as anything about Beijing during the past hundred years and the centuries long before. That may have saved her life. In 1989, during the army's charge on the capital's citizens, which extended far beyond Tiananmen Square, her knowledge of the city's alleyways meant that "I could always maneuver the streets and get where I wanted to be when the main arteries were blocked".
But her exquisite book Republican Beijing is not about the Chinese capital's most new history, despite a few pointed remarks about how the city's residents, forced out of their customary alleys by the demolition crews, no longer know their neighbours. Established by the Mongols as their capital in 1267, except for a brief duration during the Ming, Beijing remained the capital of China until 1928, when Chiang Kai-shek located his regime in Nanjing. In 1949, Mao reestablished Beijing's exalted status (which for many Chinese and foreigners it had never lost, except in name).
Professor Dong has read everything, it seems, from Mongol times to the most recent scholarship. She makes clear that she owes much to David Strand's Rickshaw Beijing: City and politics in the 1920s (1989), Sydney Gamble's Peking: A group survey (1921) and a vast array of Chinese sources, notably the great writer Lao She's stories and novels of the 1920s and 30s. Handling her sources competently and entertainingly, she surveys architecture, history, sociology, road life and literature.
Dong's main point is that nostalgia among Chinese and foreign tour operators for "old Beijing" and its food, shops, manners and entertainments, is based on a false premiss. "In many ways, what is today believed to be 'old Beijing' is not so old.
It is not imperial Beijing but the historically new Republican Beijing." Part of the nostalgia, she notes, is the supervene of the "commercialisation of history" that brings tourists to the few alleyways not yet mowed down by bulldozers and to the "folk art center" in the Tianqiao district, to which commonplace habitancy were allowed way only after the fall of the last Manchu Emperor in 1911. But Beijing residents themselves, once a kind of modernization began after 1912, and even after they were moved into "modern" buildings surrounded by noisy highways, clung to a past which is not so distant. Far from being a life to which they long to return, the city's past "provides a vocabulary and reference for the city's residents to criticise things they do not wish to see today". exquisite examples of this are the names of the old alleyways. The modernizing Republican city planners found that many of these 3,000 hutong had same names: of temples, walls, or shapes -"Carrying Pole", "Pants", "Pig Tail", "Pot Mender" and "Pimp" -and changed 300 of them. "Dog Tail", for instance, became "Old Man with High Morality": from vulgar, that is, to cultured. In 1934, new street-markers appeared on every hutong, but "the old names echoed in people's daily speech for years to come".
Apart from the occasional lapse into professional jargon, Dong is a vivid writer who makes not-so-old Beijing come to life. Wrestlers, food, stilt-walkers, four classes of prostitutes, missionaries longing to reform the city's wicked ways, novelists, and modern-minded intellectuals who scorned the old until they left the city, walk into and off her pages. an additional one of her central themes is "recycling".
Republican Beijing was not an commercial city. With its amazing habitancy of poor, it struggled through milling years of Japanese pressure and loss of face and wealth when the capital moved south. Poor as it was, very tiny was truly thrown away. Everything was reused: paper, clothes, metal, jewellery, leather, antiques -reappearing, often dodgily restored, in a hierarchy of markets, to which the poorest of the poor and the richest foreigners found their way.
Specialists for whom nothing was too worn or dilapidated collected cast-offs from every sort of dwelling. Old paper was transformed into shoe soles; primary articles ended up in the city's 240 old shops, with their 1,400 clerks. "Used objects underwent a complicated journey through a chain of commercial netherworlds before they reappeared on the open market."
Probably Lao She (who would die violently, decades later, in the Cultural Revolution) best grasped the essence of the nostalgia surrounding "old Beijing".
Dong writes that he "took the motionless, icy world captured by the collectors of the miscellaneous 'old Beijing' and brought it to life by inserting living characters into it". Dong's important book is illuminated by the kind of vivid information that many scholars ignore. It soars far above the ordinarily earthbound expert world.
Tiananmen, the "Gate of Heavenly Peace", rises on the south side of the Forbidden City, which faces on to what since 1949 has been a great square. The five centuries of the Gate and the relatively new square are explored by Wu Hung, an art historian at the University of Chicago, in his Remaking Beijing:
Tiananmen square and the creation of a political space, which is a well-informed history of the transformation of the rather small, crowded, asymmetrical space, partly flanked by timber houses, in front of the Forbidden City, into a vast 50-acre "guangchang", a square, the biggest man made space in the world. It arose from the accelerated wrecking of customary Beijing -just as Lhasa was to be wrecked -at the command of Mao Zedong (although the "modernization" of the square began in the Republican period, as Dong shows) and the city's metamorphosis into a socialist capital. There the army would parade and hundreds of thousands of citizens "spontaneously" display their adoration of Mao, who stood on the Gate, where Emperors had once appeared, and waved to the masses.
The square also became, against government wishes, the place where great crowds gathered, in 1976, to show their anger at the Gang of Four, and again in 1989, to interrogate greater freedom and an end of valid corruption. Professor Wu Hung sensitively intertwines his learned diagnosis with a personal list of how Tiananmen influenced him and his family.
He explains how the Communists decided to turn the area in front of the Forbidden City from a relatively incommunicable space into an overpowering group one.
There, too, as in Lhasa, Stalinist brutal buildings have been succeeded by triumphalist flashy ones. He explains as well why Tiananmen was the focus of the 1989 demonstration, why it attracted Chinese from all over the country -and why the leadership took the uprising especially seriously, because of where it took place. Wu Hung watched the killings on a screen in the United States.
"Tiananmen retained its power over me, but a power that threatened to destroy my existence. I was not freed from this repressive power even after I emigrated to America: watching students killed in front of Tiananmen on 4 June, 1989, I felt as if I were there, struggling under its shadow."
Lhasa: Streets with memories is literally three books, all by Robert Barnett, a important young Tibetanist at Columbia University, whose past publications are marked by originality and eloquence. He concedes the nearnessy of two books: one examines "underlying themes in Tibetan myths and histories that might give broad clues to the ways Lhasa's residents think about their city"; the second "looks at buildings and the layout of city streets". These constructions, he claims, are "a kind of concrete spelling out of the dreams and aspirations of the state or the habitancy who had them built".
He aims "to scrape a tiny of the topsoil off the affective history of a city" and posits "the primary illegibility of a city to its foreign visitors".
Despite his potential to speak Tibetan, many visits to Lhasa since 1987, and his more new house there for a few months every year, teaching foreign students, that illegibility affects Barnett himself: "A foreigner always has tiny way to the associations that hover around streets and buildings in Tibet; even visitors fluent in the language are left to guess whether their more political conceptions are shared by local people".
In this short book, Dr Barnett does not begin to narrate Lhasa today until page 61. Before that, he surveys, as have many other authors, the views of foreigners who saw Tibet and Tibetans variously as happy, dirty, mysterious, simple, customary and backward. Tibetans could also be cruel, and Barnett supplies customary twentieth-century examples of what happened to modernizers or to the politically over-ambitious. He sums up, too, the complicated but involving history of early Tibetan relations with China, especially that of the seventh-century Tang dynasty. Princess Wencheng was married off to a Tibetan King. The Chinese still imagine that she brought civilization to Tibet; probably she was a sort of security currency, to buy off Tibetan pressure on China's borders. Barnett unravels the scholarship on how customary Tibetans viewed Lhasa as a place coterminous with an outstretched pre-Buddhist goddess.
He describes the journey to Lhasa in 1903 by the Imperialist Colonel Francis Younghusband who used Maxim guns to massacre 3,000 to 4,000 ill-armed Tibetans who confronted him. This was such a dastardly deed that at least one of the British gunners pretended, during the slaughter, that his gun had jammed.
Barnett gives this awful and shaming moment in British history a monumental significance: Colonel Younghusband was "the man most responsible for the chain of Chinese invasions that beset Tibet in the following half century".
Perhaps he means to propose that, after the Younghusband episode, the Chinese felt so threatened by Britain that they moved into Tibet in force in a way they previously had not. Although they were forced to depart in 1912, the Chinese never abandoned their conviction that Tibet is an integral part of Chinese territory; Barnett perhaps piles too much on the savage Younghusband's shoulders.
The remainder of Barnett's book is about what the Chinese occupiers did to Lhasa after the invasion of 1951. He discerns six styles of architecture, fluctuating from the dormitory and the garage-like shop, to the less Stalinist but still Sino-chauvinist fantasies of today, inappropriate and designed as venture that will benefit the occupiers. These new styles violate customary Tibetan ones, which look good and suit both cold and hot weather.
Such buildings are being steadily destroyed, as previous studies and many visitors contend. Barnett believes that "The indigenous styles are part of a conversation with the Tibetan past and a dream about the time to come . . . . Within the world and unworld compounds of the city . . . Live habitancy the archaeology of whose lives can scarcely be read from their exteriors". But a simpler explanation would emphasize that these six styles, and this destruction, have been inflicted on all China's cities, as Dong shows in Republican Beijing.
Then there is the third book within a book, not specified by Barnett, but perhaps the most stunning and baffling. It is a vivid list of his first visit to Lhasa, undated but roughly literally in 1987, when, a few days after his arrival, he witnessed a sudden uprising and the amazing and violent response of the Chinese security forces. He came to the aid of at least one shot person, and ultimately walked out to Nepal through snow and avalanches. He did not return for seven years, and at least once more was obliged to flee abruptly. He provides no explanation for this.
Strangely, Barnett gives the impression -and he must know this is not so -that it is only recently that the Chinese have attempted to suppress Buddhism. His own important earlier book, Poisoned Arrow (1997), provides the text of the tenth Panchen Lama's letter, in 1962, to Premier Zhou Enlai, condemning the Chinese for attempting to eradicate Buddhism, the very heart of being a Tibetan.
As Robert Barnett has shown over the years, and even at times in this book, he knows a great deal best than most other Tibetanists what is happening in Tibet.
There is no need to give the impression that his readers must imagine the actual situation in Lhasa. A tough editor could have made this unusual, revelatory -and irritating -book less puzzling.
John Dougill's Kyoto introduces a tiny history of the old capital of Japan, its architecture, gardens, handicrafts, food, literature and entertainments, and the world of the geisha. Dougill is very good on food. Kyoto: A cultural and literary history is something in the middle of a good guidebook, which these days must furnish much of what Dougill includes, and cultural studies. It is a slim and informative book, and a traveller can pocket it along with the Rough Guide.
Copyright 2006 The Times Literary Supplement Ltd.
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