A Brief History of Běijīng

Part of the Background section of A Better Guide to Běijīng

Běijīng, a city whose name is now synonymous with Chinese power, is nevertheless an odd choice as the heartland of Chinese self-admiration and conservatism. Founded by foreigners more than 700 years ago, it has spent over half of its history under foreign control and 70 years under the control of Chinese promoters of Marxism — a foreign ideology. Xī’ān, the capital during most of the rest of China’s history, and in particular during the golden age at the height of the Táng dynasty, would make a better choice; a more Chinese choice. But just as Běijīng was preferred by foreign dynasties, being closer to their northern points of origin, it subsequently became the choice of Chinese ones as the appropriate place from which to resist further foreign invaders.

Mongolian Beginnings

Probably the earliest predecessor of Běijīng was the nearby market town of Jì (蓟, thistle) 2,000 years ago, which for a few hundred years before the unification of China under the Qìn dynasty was the capital of the small state of Yān. It was also known as Yānjīng (燕京), a name still occasionally used for Běijīng today in literary contexts, as well as the name of one of its most popular beers. It does not, as often wrongly stated, mean ‘Capital of Swallows’. 燕 means ‘swallow’ only when pronounced yàn, not Yān.

The city was a secondary capital of non-Hàn (non-Chinese) dynasties, the Khitan Mongol Liáo (辽, 907–1125) and the Jurchen Tartar Jīn (金, 1115–1234), who ruled the north while the Sòng (宋) dynasty ruled the south, and it was under the Mongol Yuán (元) dynasty, which swept all the others away, that Běijīng finally became the chief city of a large empire on its current site. Captured by Genghis Khan in 1215, it was adopted as his chief residence by Genghis’ grandson Khubilai in 1264, and the new capital was founded in 1271. Known as Dàdū 大都, Great Capital) by the Chinese, it was called Khanbalik by its Mongol founders. All roads led to Dàdū in the winter and to the summer capital of Shàngdū (上都, the Xanadu of Coleridge, and today’s Dolon Nor in Inner Mongolia) when the Great Khan was there.

The Mongol design roughly gave shape to modern-day Běijīng, a rectangle with a north–south central axis on which lay the Imperial residence. An immense wall ran round the city with corner turrets and three gates to each side, topped with ‘palaces’ according to Marco Polo, although its construction was mostly of rammed earth covered with reeds to reduce erosion by rainfall.

After the expulsion of the Mongols, the Hàn Chinese Míng (明) dynasty set up its capital at Nánjīng, well to the south, and Dàdū was renamed Běipíng (北平, Northern Peace, or the Pacified North). The Yǒnglè emperor, the third of the Míng (reigned 1403–25), had previously served in the north fighting attempts by the Mongols to return, and rebuilt the city on the same site but on a slightly smaller scale, moving the capital back there in 1420. It was named both Shùntiān, (顺天, Obeying Heaven) and Běijīng (北京, Northern Capital). Yǒnglè repaired the existing walls but reduced their overall length by cutting off part of the northern side of the Mongol city with a new wall, leaving the traditionally central Bell and Drum Towers north of the new focal point. He also moved the southern wall slightly south to the line of the modern Qián Mén, and the original buildings of the Forbidden City and some other monuments date from his reign.

The broader enclosure south of Qián Mén, with lower walls, was begun in the reign of the Zhèngtǒng emperor (1436–49), and the whole system was clad in stone and brick by the Jiājìng emperor (1522–66), who added towers and enceintes. The result was a nest of walled enclosures bisected by a line that ran through the Yǒngdìng Mén (rebuilt in 2004) in the south wall of the outer city, the Zhèngyàng Mén (Qián Mén) in the wall between the Outer and Inner cities, the Dà Míng Mén entrance to the Imperial City, the Wǔ Men entrance to the Forbidden City, and through the throne itself, the east and west sides roughly mirroring each other in layout.

Although the next 400 years did not pass without demolition and new construction, Běijīng remained essentially the same in plan until the destruction begun partly in confusion and partly in the name of town planning under the Republic from 1912 became organised vandalism driven by politics and then pure greed under the People’s Republic from 1949. Even in the 1940s the gates were still locked against bandits each night, as in medieval Europe, and 50 years ago visitors could still see an essentially Míng and Qīng Běijīng.

Northern Barbarians

Corruption, ineptitude, and poor responses to a series of natural disasters brought down the Míng, who had also been weakened by the attacks of the mounted Manchus to the northeast and by vast expenditure on building and manning sections of Great Wall.

However, it was a rebellion of peasant Chinese that stormed Běijīng in 1644 and overthrew the Chóngzhēn emperor. The rebel leader Lǐ Zìchéng (李自成), a former shepherd and postman, declared himself the first emperor of a new dynasty, the Shùn (顺). This collapsed after only a month as Míng armies guarding the passes at Shān Hǎi Guān to the northeast allowed the Manchus into China and marched with them to Běijīng to expel the rebels.

To the consternation of Míng loyalists, the Manchus had come to stay, and they made Běijīng the capital of their Great Qīng Empire, into which they rapidly absorbed the remainder of Míng territory. They left the capital much as it was, a series of walls within walls.

At the heart lay the walled Imperial Palace or Zǐ Jìn Chéng (紫禁城), ‘Forbidden City’, surrounded by the Imperial City, whose walls enclosed what is now Běi Hǎi Gōngyuán (park) and what is the still inaccessible Zhōng Nán Hǎi government compound to the west. It was occupied by Manchu nobility and the most senior officials (as Zhōng Nán Hǎi still is today) as well as imperial storehouses and administrative and maintenance buildings. Its Hòu Mén (rear gate) was halfway to the Bell and Drum Towers to the north, and its walls ran down modern-day Běihéyán Dàjiē to the east and halfway down what is now Tiān’ān Mén Guǎngcháng (Square) to the renamed Dà Qīng Mén, which survived in the middle of the square until it was pulled down for the construction of the mausoleum for Máo Zédōng in 1976.

Around all of this stood the towering outer walls of what foreigners later called the Tartar City, which the Manchus took for themselves and their troops, known as bannermen. They divided the area outside the Imperial City into eight sections, one for each army or banner as they were named for their differently coloured standards, and each guarded a separate gate. The Hàn Chinese were driven into the southern or outer city south of Qián Mén, which became the Chinese quarter of Běijīng.

In contrast to the highly detailed planning of the northern section, with its labyrinth of gated enclosures, the southern section developed more haphazardly, although it, too, was thoroughly gated. For security reasons almost all commerce was also driven from the Tartar City, so businesses of all kinds, guildhalls, and places of entertainment had to set up in the Chinese City, mostly beneath the southern wall of the Tartar City.

The gates and walls whose height gave them clear views across the city as well as the surrounding countryside were manned by more than a thousand soldiers, and out of bounds to anyone else until 1860 when foreigners were allowed to walk on them in a placatory move following the Anglo-French invasion. To ordinary residents the city was a series of enclosed spaces, and they had no overall view of its plan. The city gates closed at sundown, with only the three connecting the Inner and Outer (Tartar and Chinese) Cities opened briefly at midnight to allow officials to flow back to their residences and to prepare for the imperial early morning audience.

Western Ocean Barbarians

Two hundred years later, the Manchu-ordered suppression of opium imports gave Britain a flimsy excuse to go to war with the Great Qīng Empire, which had expanded as far as Central Asia. The Chinese had for many centuries regarded all foreigners as inferior, an attitude also adopted by the Sinicised Qīng, and all trade was seen as merely the offering of tribute, or spoken of as such to maintain face. The country was closed to outsiders, and going abroad was forbidden without special permission, as was the teaching of Chinese languages to foreigners.

The country’s Qīng-enforced purdah left it ignorant of foreign technological developments and militarily backward, so the Opium War of 1840–42 was largely a string of easy victories for the British. It ended with Qīng capitulation and the Treaty of Nánjīng, which forced the Qīng empire to open up yet further to contact with the despised foreigners at designated treaty ports.

This was also the agreement that gave Britain Hong Kong and marked the beginning of a century of so-called ‘unequal’ treaties with foreign powers.

The Qīng were reluctant to comply, and a petty incident in 1856 that involved the boarding of a ship suspected of piracy led to the Arrow War (named after the ship in question), or Second Opium War, in which further British military activity forced on the Qīng the Treaty of Tiānjīn of 1858. This opened up yet further areas for trade and compelled the Qīng to accept the residence of foreign diplomats in Běijīng. Another clause forbade the Qīng from using the character yí (夷), ‘barbarian’, in reference to the British.

The British Secretary of State for War, Sidney Herbert, prophetically described this agreement as ‘a Treaty of Peace with a casus belli in every clause’.

In a bluntly-worded letter of instruction of March 1859, British Foreign Minister the Earl of Malmesbury clearly anticipated problems, and told envoy Frederick Bruce that for now he should not insist on permanent representation in Běijīng but should reside at Shànghǎi unless the Chinese caused difficulties, in which case he should demand right of residence which had been agreed.

Her Majesty’s Government are prepared to expect that all the arts and which the Chinese are such adepts, will be put in practice to dissuade you from repairing to the capital, even for the purpose of exchanging the ratifications of the Treaty; but it will be your duty firmly, but temperately, to resist any propositions to that effect, and to admit of no excuses; and you will say that the effect of any persistence on the part of the Chinese Government in throwing obstacles in the way of your arrival at Pekin, and of your presentation of your credentials to the Emperor in person, will be that Her Majesty’s Government will insist on the literal fulfilment of the Treaty, and establish the Mission at Pekin.

Foreign Office Great Britain, Correspondence with Mr. Bruce, Her Majesty’s Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary in China, 1860.

Reluctance on the part of the Manchus to sign the treaty in Běijīng and to accept the permanent residence of foreign diplomats to which they had already agreed led to further engagements. After the imprisonment of some foreign emissaries sent to complete ratification, and the execution of others, the barbarians came to the gates: Anglo-French forces reached Běijīng in 1860 and forced access.

Realising that destroying the Forbidden City would lose the Qīng so much face that the house would fall, they instead burned down the Summer Palace and drove the Xiánfēng emperor into exile at his summer resort at Chéngdé, where he later died.

Another agreement, the Conventions of Běijīng, reduced Manchu sovereignty over China yet further, and added Tiānjīn, through which the invading forces had had to fight, as a further ‘treaty port’ where foreigners could reside and trade. See also Where’s the Loot?, Losing Their Heads, and Architecture and Xenophobia.

The Boxer Rebellion

Foreign powers continued to gnaw both at China’s remoter inland regions and at its coastline. Territory was annexed by Britain, France, Russia, Germany, and Japan, and Portugal gained confirmation of its control of Macau, which it had occupied since the 16th century. The Japanese inflicted a major military defeat in 1898 and took control of the entire island of Formosa (Táiwān), which the Qīng had incorporated as part of their empire.

The foreign powers also fell out with each other, and in 1904–5 Japan surprised almost everyone except The Times correspondent G. E. Morrison by defeating the Russians and driving them from the Qīng ancestral homeland of Manchuria, over which the Russians had gained almost complete control. Further ‘unequal’ treaties allowed foreigners to travel where they pleased, responsible only to the laws of their own governments and not to those of China or to its officials.

Like the modern-day communist authorities, the Manchus, ruling a country of around 350 million people to whom they were greatly inferior in numbers, deliberately kept the population ignorant of the outside world. The average Chinese peasant may not have known of the scale of China’s military and diplomatic defeats, but he did encounter their effects in the arrival of foreign missionaries.

If the Manchu and Chinese elite were arrogant, superior, self-righteous, and intolerant, these ‘foreign devils’ were scarcely less so. Relying on officialdom to protect them, they seemed to common people to be allies of the often oppressive and corrupt local administrators. They preached against ancestor worship and took valuable land to build churches, whose pointed spires poked threateningly aloft in opposition to the otherwise harmonious fēngshuǐ (geomancy) of a town or village. Even more violence was offered to the gods by foreign railway construction and mining operations, and the new lines threatened the livelihoods of those operating water and land transport.

First heard of in 1898, the Yìhétuán (义和团, Harmonious Fists) or ‘Boxers’, as they were labelled by a missionary, seemed just another secret society in a country riddled with such peasant-level masonry, but one violently opposed to foreigners and in particular to missionaries. Its mumbo-jumbo rituals included stamping on a cross and were believed to induce a state of invulnerability to sword-cuts and bullets alike. In a rare moment of forthrightness, Yuán Shìkǎi (袁世凯), then governor of Shāndōng Province, lined up a few Boxers and had them shot. When they survived execution the watching crowd became wildly excited. Yuán then had them shot again, but this time used real bullets, not blanks, and in Shāndōng kept the peace, earning him the gratitude and support of the foreigners resident there.

Elsewhere the Boxers began with rioting, continued with looting, then moved on to the destruction of churches and the murder of Chinese converts to Christianity, until they finally dared to kill their first foreigner, an Englishman, on 31 December 1899. The perpetrators were executed under the eye of a consular representative, and official apologies were made. However, edicts from the court urging general restraint on local officials who wished to suppress the Boxers caused alarm amongst both the more far-sighted foreigners and the more steady of the Qīng government advisers. By May 1900 the Boxers were on the edge of Běijīng, and even the foreign diplomats, whose contempt for the Chinese was nearly as great as that of the Chinese for them, began to take note.

The foreign community in Běijīng lived mostly in what was known as the Legation Quarter, although not then formally organised as such, within the Tartar City wall east of Qián Mén, behind the location of the modern National Museum. In addition to the legations, there were two European-run shops with imported provisions, and the original Hôtel de Pékin, run by a Swiss.

The first Boxer activity near Běijīng was the firing of the railway junction at Fēngtāi in May, and during June all Europeans in the area and a large number of Christian converts withdrew either to the Legation Quarter or the city’s cathedrals. They were joined by a small body of troops from the foreign warships standing off the coast beyond Tiānjīn.

Reinforcements coming by rail later that month found the tracks damaged and were forced to retreat, but the chancellor of the Japanese embassy, riding alone to the station to greet them, was dragged from his horse and hacked to death.

On 13 June there was a general firing of foreign property outside the Legation Quarter, including the East Cathedral, and a massacre of Chinese converts to Christianity. Following the rescue of a party of nuns and converts from the South Cathedral, that, too, was put to the flames.

In the first few days non-Christian retainers wisely left, and occasional sallies were made to bring in groups of Chinese Christians who were being attacked. Imperial troops stood by and watched, yet messages were received from the Manchu court that expressed concern for the safety of the foreign community and suggested a retreat, guarded by the very troops who were currently doing nothing to protect them.

Nevertheless, a majority of the ministers was in favour of accepting this offer, which would almost certainly have led to a general massacre en route, but sent a reply requesting a meeting to discuss logistics. Tiring of the wait for a reply, the forceful German minister von Ketteler set out on 19 June for face-to-face discussions at the Zǒnglǐ Yámen (Foreign Office), only to be shot dead in the street by a Manchu soldier.

The next day the fight began in earnest. In the weeks that followed, the besieged withdrew into a moderately defensible area around the British Legation, expanding only to take over an area of city wall that overlooked it. The multinational defenders, after some jostling, fell under the overall leadership of the British minister Sir Claude MacDonald.

In the best civil service tradition, committees and sub-committees were formed to oversee everything. Instructions were issued and requests for reinforcements received in the form of polite written notes quite in keeping with the usual occupation of the more senior defenders.

Ill-prepared for a siege, the community, mostly crammed into the British buildings, had before long to live on the meat of their Mongolian ponies, washed down with champagne from the ample cellars of one of the European shops. After only a few days the pretence that it was the supposedly uncontrollable Boxers who attacked the legations was given up, and both Imperial troops and a Muslim army from the northwest could be seen to take part in the attacks.

The Muslim army, in order to burn out the foreigners, set fire to China’s greatest library, the Hànlín Shū Yuán, just to the north of the British Legation, but the wind did not blow the fire in the right direction. It was the besieged who fought to save a few of the immense literary treasures inside, which therefore ended up in the libraries of European capitals. Among the volumes lost were most of one copy of an extremely rare 22,877-chapter compendium of Chinese learning, known as the Yǒnglè Dàdiǎn after the Míng emperor who commissioned it.

At one point the Qīng declared a truce, and fruit was sent in to the foreigners, together with news from home and messages of condolence when that news was bad. Some authorities have it that the Dowager Empress Cíxǐ merely wished to pass some time in Běi Hǎi (now a public park) without the sound of gunfire to disturb her.

Communication by telegraph was once again allowed with the outside world, enabling the foreigners to send messages concerning their plight, which directly contradicted those sent by the Qīng assuring their governments that every possible assistance was being given.

But of all the bizarre aspects of the siege, perhaps the strangest was that the besiegers, with the advantages of numerical superiority and of the high ground of the Qián Mén, did not press home the attack and massacre the besieged, which with a little firm leadership they might easily have done. An American woman who lived through these events, writing under the name Mary Hooker, put it down, without complaint, to a ‘national fear
of attacking’.

Relief eventually came from a multi-national force of Russians, Americans, French, Japanese, and British, which had been turned back once by damage to the railway line but subsequently encountered minimal resistance. Having been slow to set off, and not unreasonably fearing a need for far greater numbers than they could muster, they expected to be too late. Obituaries of Sir Claude MacDonald and others had already been published.

But as they progressed they met little credible opposition, and their tentativeness faded away. It was replaced by a spirit of competition among the various nationalities for the credit of being the first to relieve the siege, and for the political benefit of sitting at the table to negotiate a partition of China, one quite likely result.

The armies camped outside the city walls three miles to the east, planning a co-ordinated attack on five points on 14 and 15 August. However, the Russians got carried away and attacked during the preceding night, eventually taking the Dōngbiàn Mén (now the site of an interchange between Chóngwén Mén Dàjiē and the Second Ring Road, southeast of Běijīng Railway Station), with considerable losses, sometime the next day.

The Japanese were held up at a gate further north, halfway up the east side of the Tartar City. Like all the other major gates, it had two towers linked by an enceinte that proved remarkably difficult to penetrate, and it was not until 15 August that the majority of the Japanese entered Běijīng. The French got lost and entered Běijīng last through the Russian-reduced Dōngbiàn Mén. The Americans scaled the wall just south of the Russians.

The British found their gate, halfway down the east side of the Chinese City, undefended. Blowing it open with artillery, they advanced cautiously northwest through deserted streets until they caught sight of a signaller on the wall who semaphored a message telling them to break through a water gate beneath, leading directly into the Legation Quarter. Scarcely a shot was fired, and it was a joint Russian-American charge along the wall itself that later in the day cleared the opposition from the remains of the nearby Qián Mén.

A period of considerable confusion followed. The court had disintegrated, and the Empress Dowager and the Emperor had fled to Xī’ān. Boxers, Imperial troops, and private citizens all fell to looting, followed with gusto by members of both the besieged and relieving forces.

Many survivors published accounts of the siege, often conflicting and with widespread criticism of the ministers in charge. The diary of Sir Claude MacDonald suggests he was as clueless as many a modern expat, translating the Chinese name of the Imperial Palace as ‘Pink’ Forbidden City.

Settlement of reparations was not completed until the following year. The foreign powers insisted on the deaths of leading xenophobic ministers, who were duly instructed by the court to commit suicide. The indemnity claimed was £67,500,000, in yearly payments equivalent to half the Qīng annual budget. This took another 39 years to pay in full, and the British and Americans led the way in returning it to China in the form of educational schemes, university funding, and other aid.

The Qīng court probably considered itself to have got off lightly. The Dowager Empress, known by all to be the real power in the Qīng court, returned to Běijīng, journeying first by a Belgian train, then changing at the Fēngtāi junction near the Marco Polo Bridge to a British one. This brought her along a newly built line to just outside the Yǒngdìng Mén, still roughly the site of Běijīng South Railway Station (Nán Zhàn). She and the Emperor proceeded directly north by palanquin to the Qián Mén, where large numbers of foreigners had gathered on the remains of the gate to watch the Imperial progress. Their presence was acknowledged by the Dowager Empress with a series of little bows and waves, whose condescension so amazed them that a spontaneous round of applause broke out for the woman who only a few months before had connived at the murder of themselves and their compatriots.

The Manchus were also forced to agree to a permanent foreign military presence to guarantee the link to the coast and to protect a brand new Legation Quarter. The remains of the private residences of both rich and poor, as well as neighbouring temples and the remains of the ancient academy that had been set alight by the Huí (Muslim) troops, were absorbed into the area, which then became yet another walled sector. The section of the Tartar City wall between the Qián Mén and what is now known as Chóngwén Mén overlooking the Legation Quarter was also taken over and, while the rest acquired a covering of weeds, was kept in good repair. The streets were given foreign names (Legation Street, Rue Marco Polo), and most countries erected buildings in imitation of styles from home, like an early Expo. Instead of driving away the foreigners, the Qīng had succeeded only in giving them an even greater presence in the capital.

Cíxǐ was probably astonished that once again a successful foreign invasion of Běijīng had nevertheless left the Qīng in power. But then as now, foreign big business preferred stability, under which profits might be made, to democracy or other unknown alternatives, however murderous and distasteful the current government might be. The allies decided not to occupy the Forbidden City, partly because the Qīng court might never return, and instead set up a new capital somewhere less convenient for foreign purposes.

The End of Imperial Běijīng

The 20th century brought further uprisings and rebellions following those that had plagued the Qīng in the 19th century. After her return to Běijīng the Dowager Empress began a number of conciliatory reforms of the kind started decades earlier by the Guǎngxù emperor, which she had then crushed, retaking power in a coup. She was now forced to consider moves towards a written constitution and perhaps some more limited form of monarchy. There were steps, too, continued after her death in 1908, to dissolve the remaining barriers of status between Manchu and Hàn Chinese, and inter-marriage was allowed for the first time. But the Qīng’s failures were too many and too longstanding. As Lord Macartney, George III’s emissary to the Qiánlóng emperor, had put it in 1793–4:

The Empire of China is an old, crazy, first rate man-of-war, which a fortunate succession of able and vigilant officers has contrived to keep afloat for these one hundred and fifty years past, and to overawe their neighbours merely by her bulk and appearance, but whenever an insufficient man happens to have the command up on deck, adieu to the discipline and safety of the ship. She may perhaps not sink outright; she may drift some time as a wreck, and will then be dashed to pieces on the shore; but she can never be rebuilt on the old bottom.

Lord Macartney, An Embassy to China, J. L. Cranmer-Byng [Ed.], 1962

Although there had been a succession of undistinguished captains since the Qiánlóng emperor of Macartney’s day, the ‘insufficient man’ turned out to be a forceful woman. The greatest failure of the Qīng throughout the 19th century, and especially during the serial regencies of the Dowager Empress Cíxǐ, was the failure to throw off the anti-foreign prejudice they had absorbed from the Chinese and deal realistically with the challenges and opportunities presented by the high-tech, expansionist West. These failures were to be repeated both by those who rose against the Qīng and by those who finally took power over the whole country in 1949.

Foreigners remain to this day a handy scapegoat for the failures of government policy, much teaching at school and much media comment is severely xenophobic, and the Communist Party whips up anti-foreign sentiment in order to unite the Chinese behind itself at any sign of domestic discontent.

The Qīng’s failure to control the Western barbarians was held against them both by those Chinese who despised the Qīng themselves as foreign and barbarian and by those who accepted their rule but criticised their failure to resist other foreigners by means of adopting foreign technologies and institutions.

A Qīng duke who was going overseas to study foreign methods of government was wounded by a bomb thrown at him on the platform of the station at Qián Mén. In 1907 the foreign-educated Sun Yat-sen (孙中山, Sūn Zhōngshān) launched an uprising in the south which quickly failed, and he returned to exile.

In 1910, the Prince-Regent, the infant emperor’s father, issued an edict announcing the creation of a two-chamber parliament to begin work in 1913, and in the same year survived an assassination attempt. His assailant, to whom he generously gave only a life sentence, survived to become a Nationalist Party official.

The regency’s biggest mistake, however, was to summon former Shāndōng governor Yuán Shìkǎi back from banishment to suppress a rebellion that almost accidentally took the industrial tri-city complex of Wǔhàn in 1911, and spread rapidly from there.

Yuán had earlier betrayed the Guǎngxù emperor’s attempts at reforms, which might have spared the Qīng their current dangers, and had been banished from the court following the accession of the infant Pǔyí. He was the only credible military commander the Qīng had, however, and the troops under his control were the most disciplined.

Had he wished to do so, he could have saved the dynasty by crushing the rebels. Instead he reduced the rebel forces just enough to show who was in charge and brought them and Qīng representatives to a peace conference in Shànghǎi at which he negotiated the Articles Providing for the Favourable Treatment of the Great Ch’ing Emperor after his Abdication. The Emperor was to continue living in the Forbidden City for the time being before moving to the Summer Palace, powerless but assured of an annual government stipend of four million taels of silver. (He remained in the Forbidden City until driven out by another warlord in 1924.) Yuán’s price to the rebels for completing their revolution was that he, not Sun Yat-sen, was to become the first President of China.

The term ‘the Chinese empire’ was one used by foreigners rather than Chinese, who referred to the Great Qīng Empire, and before that the Great Míng Empire. The Qīng might easily have retired to their ancestral homelands in Manchuria, never under Chinese control, and the revolutionaries might have found them very hard to dislodge; indeed, it might not even have occurred to them to try. But thanks to Yuán the Qīng lost everything, although Europeans hailed the terms as remarkably generous compared with those offered to their own deposed monarchs in recent centuries.

Yuán subsequently looted what funds he could and borrowed sums from the imperial house he never repaid, and the imperial stipend was itself never paid in full. The Republic also took on loan from the emperor a vast collection of treasures until such time as it could afford to pay an agreed seven-figure purchase price. The treasures were subsequently confiscated without a penny being paid, and most can now be seen in Taipei, not Běijīng.

In the early period of the Republic there was widespread looting by soldiers who largely went unpaid (Yuán alone had one million men under arms) and who recompensed themselves by force instead.

Foreigners found themselves being offered great treasures for minimal sums, and vast quantities of texts and objets d’art left China forever to join private collections and those of museums. The Chinese authorities, even if they had shown interest, would have been unable to pay in funds the owners would accept, and while the current regime wishes to portray this as yet another period of foreign plunder, many express thanks that at least the items were preserved.

Republican Běijīng

Yuán’s final betrayal was his own decision to mount the throne just three years later in 1915. Upon becoming president he had immediately banned Sun Yat-sen’s supporters, the Nationalist Party, but a revolt in the south, Sun’s ‘second revolution’, forced him to cancel his plans for a new dynasty and he died the following year. The new revolution was nevertheless crushed and Sun once again fled to the safety of Hong Kong and Japan.

Yuán’s original betrayal of the Guǎngxù emperor’s reforms had strengthened opposition to ineffectual Manchu rule, and his betrayal of the Manchus for his own ends cost them China, vast territories they had acquired in Central Asia, and Manchuria itself. His subsequent betrayal of the ideas of the Republic weakened its own already insubstantial authority, and it is he, as well as Cíxǐ, who must take some of the blame for the subsequent chaos of 20th- and 21st-century China.

After Yuán’s death other presidents came and went, parliaments and cabinets were summoned and dismissed again, and control of Běijīng changed hands between various warlords, whose loyalty to a democratic Republic also came and went at their convenience.

One pro-monarchist even restored the emperor to authority for 12 days in July 1917, but he was almost immediately defeated by another warlord who had the military advantage of aeroplanes and who dropped three bombs on the Imperial City. One fell in a lake and another failed to explode, but it was enough.

In late 1924 Féng Yùxiáng (冯玉祥), the ‘Christian General’ (who, it is said, forcibly baptised his men with a fire hose), took advantage of battles between other warlords to seize control of Běijīng, and on 5 November he expelled the emperor from the Forbidden City and placed him under arrest at his father’s house. On 29 November his foreign tutor, Sir Reginald Johnston, engineered a daring escape to the Legation Quarter. He was never to visit the palace again.

Intermittent civil war between the north and south followed. The Nationalist government in the south declared the return of the capital to Nánjīng in 1928, and restored Běijīng to its old name, Běipíng. There was very little industry, and the city’s economy was still based on crafts and various sources of income derived from being the home of government. So with the departure of the nation’s administration the city went into further decline.

The authors of one 1930s guide book complained that many ancient buildings had been vandalised, allowed to fall into disrepair, or were now covered in political slogans, and some had been destroyed on official orders.

The loss by vandalism and utter neglect has been proceeding at such a rate that, on repeated occasions, buildings and historical monuments have actually disappeared while the authors were still writing about them.

L. C. Arlington and William Lewisohn, In Search of Old Peking, Běipíng, 1935

The same has happened during preparation of editions of this book.

The Japanese occupied the city between 1937 and the end of the Second World War but did little damage, revering its remaining palaces and temples, still far more numerous than today, although the occupying forces treated the Chinese themselves with callous contempt. They started construction of a new administrative district well to the west.

Elsewhere in China civil war between the forces of the Communist and Nationalist Parties was temporarily suspended so as to drive out the Japanese, but at the end of World War Two hostilities were resumed where they had left off.

The Republic went from bad to worse and, with illiteracy the norm, only a tiny proportion of the population had the first idea what a republic was, even less than the number that really has any idea what ‘democracy’ is today. Despite the constant repetition of the idea ‘serve the people’, few have any idea of putting the state above the needs of their immediate family and those with whom they have connections (guānxi), and so it was then.

Communist Capital

The communists inherited a city that was economically moribund, producing, they claimed, merely ¥380 million in annual economic output, and with 300,000 able-bodied citizens lacking employment.

Máo Zédōng announced the creation of the People’s Republic from atop the Tiān’ān Mén on 1 October 1949. He returned the city to capital status, adding about ¥190 million annually in government expenditure, but he nevertheless proceeded to drive the national economy downhill and to destroy much of what was left of the city.

During the years that followed, ancient temples and halls were turned into military camps and factories. A huge influx of people turned courtyard houses that had once held single families and their servants into homes for dozens. The city walls that had stood since Yuán and Míng times were torn down, leaving only the odd gate tower standing isolated and pointless.

The stone from the walls was used to line a system of tunnels into which the population could theoretically run in case of nuclear attack, and no doubt be tidily vaporised all in one place, as well as a secret system connecting the Great Hall of the People and the government residential compound of Zhōngnán Hǎi with an escape route to the west.

The line of the walls of the Tartar City was replaced below ground by more tunnels, those of the metro’s Line 2, several of whose stops are named after now-vanished gates. Above ground the perimeter line of the Tartar and Chinese Cities is now followed by the Second Ring Road, still clearly showing the wider bulge of the Chinese city in the south.

The few English signs at Běijīng’s sights are loquacious in their indictment of the foreign troops who inflicted damage in 1860 and 1900 but remarkably reticent about the rather more large-scale efforts of the Chinese themselves who were mobilised in political campaigns aimed at ridding the country of its heritage. These campaigns destroyed artefacts, buildings, and people with any sympathy for traditional culture, particularly during the 1966–76 Cultural Revolution.

Since 2000 there have been frequent announcements of plans to make the city one of the world’s top tourist attractions. While many of these plans consist of vague intentions to improve the environment and infrastructure, socialism is never seen to advance without concrete figures. These include the restoration of 45 ancient sites at a cost of ¥200 million, and bringing the number of officially designated tourist sites from 105 to 150 (24 of ‘national level’). Even the most obsessive visitor will have difficulty finding that much of interest, unless they include such joys as the Dōngbiān Mén Overpass hymned in one Chinese guide book: ‘821,000 square metres of road surface along with 60 bridges embracing a total length of 97,290 metres’.

New highways have been smashed through the city centre, demolishing vast areas of tumble-down historic courtyard housing lining the city’s atmospheric if sometimes malodorous hútòng, or alleys.

Preparations for the 2008 Olympics added significantly to the city’s increasing stock of fabulously expensive buildings by foreign architects, at the same time driving an estimated 1.5 million citizens from their homes — something about which foreign commentators had shockingly little to say. Between 2006 and 2009 alone about 500 million square feet of commercial property was erected in addition to further government-owned developments, much of which, both office and retail, was surplus to demand and remained empty for some time.

The sprucing up of the city’s top monuments included replacing the roofs of several Forbidden City halls with identical inauthentic yellow tiles in a complete if commonplace flouting of UNESCO World Heritage rules.

For more on the destruction of hútòng housing and the creation of fake replacements, and on the impact of modern architecture, see Hútòng Walking, The Shock of the New, and the hútòng walk Forward to the Past.

In 2010 it was announced that the number of restored sites had suddenly tripled to 350, and, although none of these figures can be trusted, this perhaps indicates what a treasure house pre-communist Běijīng must have been.

New museums include a Capital Museum to display treasures previously stored beneath the Forbidden City, supposedly bringing the city’s total to 110, although many are of little or no interest even to the Chinese. Perhaps most spectacular is the fusing of the hoary Museum of Chinese History and Museum of the Revolution into the vast National Museum, now finally meeting modern environmental standards.

The modern guide book writer is also faced with the same problem as Arlington and Lewisohn, quoted earlier. But it’s not only that sights disappear no sooner than described (indeed whole streets may do so) but that numbers of ancient buildings emerge from obscurity as factories, storehouses, and dormitories, and new museums sprout faster than the research and publishing process can follow.

Modern Běijīng

The streets are so straight and wide that you can see right along them from end to end and from one gate to the other,’ reported Marco Polo, but if the gates still stood they would now be invisible. Rapid industrialisation has made Běijīng one of the world’s most polluted cities.

The number of vehicles on its streets has been growing by 15% per annum, and a decade ago it was estimated that 50% of them would fail even the most basic emissions test. There have since been some improvements, and the most polluting vehicles are now, at least in theory, forbidden within the Fifth Ring Road.

There are still plenty of bicycles on Běijīng’s streets, but while as recently as the late ’80s ownership of a bicycle was a matter of pride and privilege, these are now linked in the minds of the population with the idea of an inability to afford to travel any other way. Increasingly modern and efficient public transport is crowded, and the aspiration is for a car, despite the increasing immobility of traffic.

In 1997 it was claimed that one million Běijīng people owned cars, a figure that must have included those with use of a vehicle from their work unit. By 2003 this was two million, and it had risen to five million by 2011. Bicycles now account for only around 16% of journeys, about half as many as in 2005, and many of those are electrically assisted.

The gap between rich and poor has widened to a gulf far greater than in 1949, when the Communist Party took power on the promise of equality for all. Even by 2000 the richest 20% of urban households owned 7.85 times the property of the lowest 20%. By 2011 one academic report claimed that the top 10% controlled 56% of income, making Chinese society even more unequal than that in the USA. Since 2001 the government has annually refused to publish China’s ever more embarrassing Gini coefficient, which expresses the gap between rich and poor, and other foreign and domestic organisations have published conflicting figures ranging from 0.438 to 0.48. Zero would be perfect equality, and 1.0 a situation in which one person earned all income.

In March 2012 now-imprisoned politician Bó Xīlái (薄熙来), publicly the promoter of a return to the straitjacketed society of past Communist orthodoxy while himself extremely wealthy, announced that China’s Gini coefficient had ‘exceeded 0.46’. A figure of 0.3 to 0.4 is considered reasonable, while over 0.4 indicates an untenable income gap and is a predictor of social unrest, such as the tens of thousands of demonstrations and riots seen across China annually. Party mouthpiece People’s Daily put the actual figure at 0.73, making nominally socialist China vastly more inequitable even than the US.

According to The World Economy: Historical Statistics, published by the OECD, in the year 1 CE, the per capita income of China was the equivalent of US$450 in 1990 values. By 1950, the per capita income had actually fallen slightly to US$439 on the same scale. By 2001, it had risen to $3,583, and now the government claims the average annual income in Běijīng in 2011 was ¥56,061 (a little under US$9000 recently). Even if true this figure is skewed by the skyrocketing incomes of a small minority. Urban incomes have grown at between 2.7 and 3.3 times rural ones, and even the government admits that 13.4% of China’s population, around 128 million people, live on US$1 per day, and hundreds of millions more on US$2. If this much is admitted, the situation is certainly worse.

The government’s excuse for not publishing its own assessment of inequality is its inability to track the well-hidden riches of the wealthy, an admission that means that everyone else’s Gini estimate is likely to be too low, too.

According to the locally compiled Húrùn Report (胡润百富), Běijīng is now home to the greatest number of wealthy people in China, including 179,000 millionaires and 10,500 people considered super-rich (¥100 million or more).

It makes sense for those with wealth to live close to those who control their ability to acquire that wealth, but often these are anyway the same people. It is estimated that the richest 70 members of the National People’s Congress collectively own the equivalent of US$89 billion and are richer than the entire 541-member US Congress. Meanwhile the top 70 members of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Congress (both are face-saving rubber-stamp bodies) own an average of US$1.5 billion each and saw their wealth increase by 14% in 2012.

In a speech of massive hypocrisy given at a meeting during the 2012 CPPCC, now-disgraced Bó Xīlái announced to his fellow multimillionaires: ‘If only a few people are rich, then we’ll slide into capitalism. We’ve failed. If a new capitalist class is created then we’ll really have turned onto a wrong road.’

The closest you’ll get to seeing these people is the passing of a limousine with smoked glass windows, but you’ll have plenty of contact with Běijīng’s vast migrant worker population, a labouring class widely despised by Běijīng’s permanent residents and accused of responsibility for most small-scale crime.

The same permanent residents are quick to curse when the migrants return home for Spring Festival, leaving them without maids and with their favourite kerb-side snack stalls closed.

You’ll see the migrants at work on ubiquitous construction sites, working all the hours they can get and often living on site in the most basic conceivable conditions in order to make as much money as possible to send back to their villages. They are frequently cheated of their wages by unscrupulous employers, against whom they have no recourse except occasionally threats of very public suicide.

You’ll also find migrants serving your food at lower-end restaurants, running small street stalls in terror of the thuggish and often violent chéngguǎn (城管) officials who enforce local by-laws, and otherwise doing the work Běijīng people decline to touch. Běijīng is rimmed with satellite shanty villages, each occupied mostly by arrivals from one particular part of China. Lacking Běijīng hùkǒu (户口, household registration) and thus without official permission to live in Běijīng, migrants are denied many public services including education for any children with them, although these are commonly hundreds of kilometres away being cared for by their grandparents, and are seen by their parents only once a year.

Běijīng’s rim is also the territory of the ant tribes (蚁族, yǐzú) of graduates from the city’s many universities who have been unable to find proper employment. Unwilling to reduce their prospects still further by returning to the countryside, they live in little more than cubicles.

Only a little further out, in marginally greater greenery, lie the security-patrolled gated communities with foreign names like Central Park and Versailles, containing freestanding houses with kitsch European detailing, each US$1 million or more.

Crowded Běijīng is becoming more so, as permit-less migrant labourers pour into the capital to work on the never-ending construction, and visitors become more and more numerous. UN figures give Beijing’s population as nearly 1.7 million back in 1950, and 15 million in 2010 (with more than a third of these migrant workers from other parts of China). In 2016 the Party promised to limit the population to 23 million by 2030.

Běijīng tourism administrators claimed over five million overseas visitors in 2011 and announced plans to double that by 2016. Domestic tourists already amount to around 100 million. One day during the national ‘Golden Week’ holiday in October 2012 the Forbidden City registered 180,000 visitors.

Surveys reveal that Chinese increasingly identify themselves with their home towns and don’t trust those from other parts of the country. Government-approved research showed that while people from Shànghǎi are regarded as astute and stingy, those from Guǎngzhōu as involved in shady deals, and Hong Kongers as smooth and slippery, Běijīng people are rated by others as frank, passionate, and cultivated, but they consider themselves lazy.

Shànghǎi considers itself far more sophisticated and trendy than Běijīng, but new regulations and changes in the social order are first detected on the capital’s seismometers. Běijīng is always the first to see new regulations in operation, sometimes the only place, and sometimes the writ runs little further than Tiān’ān Mén and the neighbouring streets directly under the eyes of senior party officials.

These days air pollution, rising prices, corrupt officials, the wealth gap, food safety, the quality of goods, business corruption, pensions, the safety of medicines, healthcare, education, working conditions, and traffic are the Chinese people’s greatest concerns, and they are cynical about the government’s various campaigns, most rarely or never talking about politics.

There’s little point. Western businessmen like to justify their investment in the planet’s largest-scale repressive regime by suggesting that once everyone can choose between a hazelnut latte and a cappuccino the idea that their leaders can be chosen will gain unstoppable momentum. But foreign businesses actually prefer the known status quo to the unknown effects of a further revolution that might put their investments at risk.

Just as in the past, the rich now run everything, and the middle class that foreign investment is helping to expand is ever less likely to give a voice to the poor and see its own influence diluted and its own luxuries redistributed.

The West’s investments in China haven’t pushed the country towards democracy, but continue to move it ever further away. The results are all around you on the streets of the capital.

Next in Background: Emperors Ruling from Yuán Dàdū or Míng and Qīng Běijīng
Previous: Introduction to Běijīng
Background Index
Main Index of A Better Guide to Běijīng.