Forward to the Past
A walk in the hútòng neighbouring the Forbidden City
In Běijīng, pining for the past often takes the curious form of pulling it down. A temple may be conserved by reducing it to rubble and starting again, while centuries-old vernacular housing that has grown organically into its site may be replaced with a form of purposely cultured petri-dish past. Blink once and the buildings you cherish vanish. Blink again and they’re back. See Hútòng Walking.
The following route takes you around the edge of the Imperial City, showing you the truly old, museums celebrating the truly old, and the future of a Běijīng ‘preserved’ for the purpose of image-building and for the convenience of the politically powerful and rich; an ‘old’ so new you can cut your fingers on the edges.
The Forbidden City occupied nearly one sixth of the total area of the Imperial City. The remainder of the space within its 12–18m-high walls was taken up with lakes and gardens, a few temples (and later a church), workshops, storehouses, and other administrative buildings such as the imperial archives.
Walking east from the Forbidden City’s Wǔ Mén main entrance and following the zig-zag route of the moat brings you past the Dōng Huá Mén (东华门), now again an exit, once used by officials entering the palace for an audience with the emperor, to the crossroads with Nán Chízi Dàjiē (南池子大街) to the south.
The margin of the Imperial City is one block further on where a lively market has been bulldozed to create a ribbon-like park running up the original route of the walls.
Huáng Chéng Gēn Yízhǐ Gōngyuán 皇城根遗址公园
t 8511 5114. Free. m Tiān’ān Mén East (Line 2) exit B and walk N up Běi Chízi Dàjiè. b to 东华门: 2, 82.
The ‘Relic of the Base of the Imperial City Walls Park’, which offers a green, shady and generally pleasant walk north (which will take you to the turning to the Lǎo Shě Memorial Hall. The scanty remains of a Míng gate and bridge are visible at the south end in a pit 2.3m below the modern surface, revealed by excavations in 2001. But returning to the previous junction and instead turning south into Nán Chízi then first left into Pǔdù Sì Xī Xiàng (普渡寺西巷) takes you forward in time to the past.
As recently as 2000 the purpose of taking this turning was to see if the Mahakala Temple, whose location was vaguely marked on some Chinese maps and which was a feature of early 20th century guidebooks, was still in existence. The alley wriggled its way through huddled traditional housing to the rear of a substantial hall atop a small hill, where the sound of scales practised on a piano accordion gave a clue to its modern use as a middle school. There was a gentle cooing of pigeons roosting on beams long free of lacquer or paint.
The path led round to a small gate house on the south side that had become a dormitory strung with telephone wires, and beyond that lay the modern gates. A polite request earned permission to view the outside of the magnificent main hall, which the proud teachers said was of Sòng dynasty (960–1279) construction. On further research the current hall turned out to be much later but its history was interestingly complicated. It was restored in the Qīng, they said, and was once the residence of an imperial prince, as the yellow trim to the green and grey roof did indeed suggest, its eaves in two layers and carved wooden dragons still intact at the top of bare wood pillars.
It had been a school since 1921, the interior filled with desks and false ceilings, but as one teacher had said with obvious affection for the ancient building, ‘If it hadn’t become a school, it probably wouldn’t be here at all.’ Surviving decoration included original carving in the marble base and later Qīng dynasty haxagonal green and yellow tiles, which the teachers referred to as wū guī (乌龟) or tortoises, and which they had echoed in paint on the walls of the surrounding modern classrooms.
By 2002 this whole area had been completely flattened, leaving the tottering hall isolated on its hillock. By 2005 its surroundings had mysteriously reappeared, although the modern lane you now follow meanders a little less, and just turns right down the west side of the hall, which may be seen above to the left, now gleaming and gilded.
By 2005 a new ramp had been constructed up the stubby hill on which the former temple sat, the gate house had been completely rebuilt, the main hall looked dazzling, and ancillary buildings and indeed the children and teachers had been swept away. The temple had been originally designed to fit in the space on the top of the hill, and was only missing two side halls to flank what was now a large open courtyard. But any attempt to cross this brought out an agitated guard, who neither knew nor cared where the children were now, and just wanted the foreigner out of his way. One security man in the street said that the old temple-school was going to become a tax office. He turned out to be nearly right.
In 2000 walking further south took you down Duàn Kù Hútòng (缎裤胡同, Satin Warehouse Alley), possibly named for a long-vanished imperial storehouse, past a tiny enclave of Muslim snack stalls. By 2005 all had been driven away and replaced by the brand new Míng dynasty sìhéyuàn courtyard houses visible today, perfect in every way except for old pillar bases built sideways into the walls as decorations and the anachronistic presence of up-and-over garage doors. There are also sìhé lóu (四合楼) — courtyard houses with two storeys and about as authentic as a Chippendale television cabinet.
Security men are everywhere, and some are forthcoming as to why. The occupants of the new housing are in many cases senior officials from the Dōng Chéng district government. As the conservation activist Fāng Kě (方可) remarked to then Wall Street Journal correspondent Ian Johnson, ‘All the top leaders live in the traditional siheyuan homes. They don’t want to live in high-rises, but they try to convince people that the courtyard homes are terrible and old-fashioned.’
Nine hundred houses were destroyed for this project in not only what was supposedly an area the city had marked out for heritage protection, but also actually within the buffer zone of the World Heritage-listed Forbidden City. UNESCO made a typically feeble protest and was, as usual, completely ignored.
A few residents were allowed to return to subsidised housing, but the newly-built courtyard houses appeared on the market for ¥8 million — several multiples of an entire lifetime’s earnings for all but a tiny number of Beijingers. Not far away, north up Běi Chízi, another sìhéyuàn was reportedly purchased by media mogul Rupert Murdoch for ¥30 million.
Turning right (west) at the hill’s southwest corner into Pǔdù Sì Qián Xiàng (普渡寺前巷, there’s a public toilet at the junction) and next left into Dēnglong Kù Hútòng (灯笼裤胡同, Lantern Storehouse Hútòng) brings you to an opportunity to see what one of these rebuilt courtyards looks like, as the second door down on the right is the entrance to the discreet boutique hotel, 96 Sìhéyuàn. The owner originally wanted a swimming pool in the basement (no original sìhéyuàn had a basement any more than it had a garage with an automatic door), but when digging down came across the remains of a section of Yuán dynasty wall. This ruled out the pool, but one end of the wall now doubles as a bar. The buildings are superbly fitted with both original carved screens and new Chinese art, as well as reminders that this site was originally an imperial saddlery. The number of available rooms is very small, so you’ll need to book ahead.
Mahakala Temple 普渡寺
普渡寺前巷 Pǔdù Sì Qián Xiang, m Tiān’ān Mán Dōng (Line 2) exit B and walk N up Běi Chízi Dàjiē. b to 东华门: 2, 82 and walk N then W along Dōng Huá Mén Dajiē.
The Mahakala Temple (玛哈噶喇庙, Mǎhāgálā Miào), later reincarnated as the Pǔdù Sì (普渡寺), found itself reborn yet again in 2007 as the Běijīng Taxation Museum (北京税务博物馆, Běijīng Shuìwù Bówùguǎn). So the redevelopment of the area led to the complete overhaul of the temple and actually opened it to the general public for the first time in 80 years, although the museum has now moved elsewhere.
The first small gate now contains an exhibition entirely in Chinese on the history of the temple, and bits of the original building. The site on top of this piece of relatively high ground in flat Běijīng has been significant for a long time.
The Míng Zhèngtǒng emperor (正统, r. 1436–49) was captured by the Mongols in 1449 and replaced on the throne by his half-brother. Upon his return to Běijīng he lived in a palace here originally built by his predecessor, the Xuāndé emperor (宣德, r. 1426–35), until he remounted the throne as the Tiānshùn emperor (天顺, r. 1457–64).
The Prince-Regent Dorgon (also known as Prince Ruì, 哉親珙) had a princely mansion built here after masterminding the take-over of Běijīng and establishing Qīng rule in 1644 and while he repaired the heavily damaged Forbidden City in preparation for the arrival of the young Shùnzhì emperor (顺治, reigned in Běijīng 1644–61), his nephew. This was one of only two princely mansions within the Imperial City, and Dorgon, having further consolidated his authority by marrying his brother’s widow, the emperor’s mother, took the imperial seals there and ran the country himself. He occupied the mansion until his death in a hunting accident near Chéngdé in 1650 at the age of only 38, and uniquely in imperial history was posthumously named as an emperor. But when the Shùnzhì emperor gained his majority in 1651 he labelled Dorgon treasonous and stripped him of all titles.
The mansion was left abandoned until the Kāngxī emperor converted it into a temple for Mahakala in 1691, and it became one of around 53 Tibetan Buddhist temples in the Tartar (Inner, Northern) City.
In 1755 the Qiánlóng emperor reappraised the dynasty’s early years, rehabilitated Dorgon and restored his titles, making him one of the ‘iron-hatted’ princes whose descendants would permanently inherit the most senior princely rank (see Princely Privileges). Mahakala was a deity related to the Hindu god Siva and important to Mongols, and since Dorgon had been made an emperor (albeit posthumously), under Qīng law his mansion could no longer be a residence and so remained a temple.
As at the Qīng summer resort of Chéngdé, this was politics by religious architecture, affirming the superiority of the Manchus over the Mongols. A famous image of the god was displayed here until stolen during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, but even so, the 13th Dalai Lama paid a visit in 1908. The name was changed to Pǔdù Sì during the Republican-era campaign to localize place names, and according to Juliet Bredon’s Peking of 1922, at that time it still housed Dorgon’s armour.
When open as a tax museum, the main hall, magnificent in its almost completely rebuilt state, was reached across a courtyard lined with images of foreign and Chinese economists. It contained very early tax documents with heavy red seals and spidery calligraphy, early stamps, rubbings of text from stelae setting out taxation edicts, and the figure of a tax collector on a motor bike. There were no explanations in English, but for many that avoided having the beauty of these ancient papers defiled by knowledge of their dismal subject matter.
A side display was reached through a giant photo-reproduction of the Chóngwén Mén, the now-vanished gate where tax was levied on all imports to Běijīng. Dusty old documents, huge books, and large concertinas of paper sometimes carried imperial or governmental commentary in red characters over the black. There were abacuses, weights and measures, sheets of stamps, coins, and badges of office for tax collectors. (The museum has moved to a new building on the North Fourth Ring Road, opposite the north entrance of the Tàiyáng Gōng Sports Leisure Park (北四环东路临1号, 西坝河路太阳宫体育休闲公园北门对面) t 8429 9713, beijing.chinatax.gov.cn for details.) Collect the set of official badges by visiting the Běijīng Police Museum, and of mandarin insignia at the Forbidden City, and Běijīng Imperial Art Museum, see below.)
Some of the hall’s original ceiling is in place, with golden dragons disporting themselves on a green background, and in the southeast corner the original floor is revealed in the form of a circular pit with a stone rim that’s finely carved with dragons. This looks likely to have been the mount for a revolving sutra library similar to that at the Zhìhuà Sì — Bredon mentions the temple held a rare example of a complete Buddhist text written in Mongolian.
There’s an entertaining explanation for the design of the temple’s roof:
The contractor who was building the temple had made a mistake in his calculations, so the the slope of the roof was out of proportion, and seeing no way of putting it right had determined to commit suicide. On the evening when he took the fatal decision, the cook who prepared the workmen’s food suddenly fell sick and a stranger took his place. When the workmen came to partake of the meal that the temporary cook had prepared for them, they found that too much salt had been put in all the dishes. The strange cook was called to explain, but all he would say was: “Chia Chung Yen” [jiāchéng yán]. (By mistake I have put in too much salt.) They then complained to the contractor who also called on the man to explain his behaviour, when he again only repeated the same three words. Not another syllable could they get out of him. As the contractor was pondering over this strange reply, a light suddenly dawned on him, and he saw that it was a pun on three words which might mean — in different tones — “Add an extra set of eaves.” [盐, yán, salt; 檐, yán, eaves.] He sent for the man, but he was not to be found, although the gate-keeper said that no one had left the premises. The contractor realised that this must be Lu Pan [鲁班, Lǔ Bān] (The God of Masons)… So he burnt incense to him, followed his advice, and the proper proportions of the building were restored.
Arlington and Lewisohn, In Search of Old Peking, Běijīng, 1935
The side halls may be missing, but the gardens to either side are now among the most secluded bits of greenery in Běijīng. Down the right hand side of temple as you face it there’s a winding brick path through shrubs and trees, crickets, flowers, stone benches to sit on, and an ancient well carved with floral motifs, its stone lid to one side, and looking rather like a font.
Taking the alley directly south from the main entrance, you pass two-storey neo-courtyards containing some of the original occupants of the area who complain that relationships with their neighbours are not the same. Those few original residents still in single-storey buildings complain that the two-storey buildings block their light. It is obvious in many cases that materials are shoddy, and newly-made detailing is repetitious and lacking individuality, while certain decorative features once exclusive to princely mansions now appear at every doorway. Far from being the model of conservation it was supposed to be, the area has been a disaster for all but the developers and local officials, rendering sterile the life, symbols, and traditions once found here.
Turn right at the T-junction and the hútòng wriggles its way back to the main road of Nán Chízi Dàjiē, where you should turn left (south). This area has yet to be redeveloped, but clearly hasn’t much longer to survive. Coal briquettes of the kind that still contribute so much to Běijīng’s pollution are sold from the back of tricycles, whereas to the north they’re all on cleaner-burning gas. An old man sitting outside his shop says, ‘North of here they have money. Here we haven’t.’ If the little stores are still there you might pause for a yoghourt from a ceramic pot with a paper cover held on by an elastic band; ¥2. But owners expect to see the dreaded chāi (拆, demolish) character appear on their walls before long.
Imperial Archive 皇史宬
Huáng Shǐ Chéng, 南池子大街, Nán Chízi Dàjiē just north of Dōng Cháng’ān Jiē. Currently closed. m Tiān’ān Mén East (Line 1) exit B. b to 天安门东: 1,
专1, 2, 专2, 10, 52, 59, 82, 90电车外环, 90电车内环, 99, 120, 126, 728.
A little further south a breach has been made in the west side of the high red wall surrounding the Imperial Archive. Since 2010 it has not been possible to enter the compound although you can peer in. The suggestion that this might indicate an imminent renovation, with the huddle of housing occupying the southern part of the site and blocking the original entrance finally removed, was laughed off by the security guard at a neighbouring building. ‘There are lots of old revolutionary cadres living there,’ he said. ‘No one can move them.’ The details are left here in case it does reopen, and the reputed 26 families of former employees occupying the south part given the same short shrift as ordinary people, with the same inadequate compensation.
Built in 1534–6, the handsome main hall, which has a several shrubs growing out of its roof, sits on a single layer terrace and is mostly of stone and brick, constructed without beams or pillars, and thus relatively fireproof. It cannot now be entered, but inside there are 150 dusty camphorwood cabinets covered in gold-plated beaten copper sheets with a pattern of dragons. The chests held historical records, genealogies (important since the emperors had numerous sons), edicts, and a copy of the Míng dynasty Yǒnglè Dàdiǎn encyclopaedia. Some of the chests have been roughly stacked in the right-hand stele pavilion as you face the building, which, as the gates behind you show, like almost all buildings of importance in China was originally approached from the south.
The side halls and a kind of Portakabin behind the main building have been converted into ‘free art galleries’, which, of course, means shops selling bad made-for-tourists pictures of pretty Chinese women and of hútòng under snow, replaced with fresh versions as soon as you and your wrapped-up ‘unique’ copy are safely out of sight. But you can sit under parasols in the courtyard drinking chilled drinks, although this adds little to the dignity of the site. There’s now controversy over a proposal to replace the temporary structure and fill much more of the courtyard’s perimeter with a permanent museum for the Guggenheim Foundation (by Běijīng architects Studio Pei-Zhu), which should certainly know better. Since the archive is officially listed as a National Level Heritage Site this would be illegal even in China.
Just south of here ten years ago there was another reminder of Lǎo Shě and the characters of his novel Rickshaw Boy. Modern rickshaw men, although they pedal rather than run, were to be found in cheap noodle restaurants such as one that stood here before the road was widened and it was replaced by more brand new old buildings. Here they sat talking in just the same manner as London cabbies — ‘I had a foreigner in the back the other day’. But although Lǎo Shě’s easy-going Happy Boy hated haggling and often told his passengers to pay on arrival, his non-fiction counterparts told each other stories of just how much they’d overcharged foreigners, yet saw no contradiction in inviting the foreigner present into the conversation. One rickshaw man owned his own vehicle (the aim of Happy Boy) and claimed to earn over ¥100 a day — significantly more than a skilled factory worker or teacher at the time, and nearly as much as an interpreter starting work with a foreign joint-venture company. On the other hand he worked 12-hour days, and commuted by bus from 30km outside Běijīng, far enough for his accent to be different.
Chāngpú Héyán Gōngyuán 菖蒲何岩公园
Free. m & b as Imperial Archive, above.
At the south end of the street there’s a remaining section of Imperial City wall, high and red, which runs east from the Tài Miào to the corner of Nán Hé Yán Dàjiē, one block further east of Nán Chízi Dàjiē. Housing along its base has been cleared to construct a long, narrow, but pleasant park, the Chāngpú Héyán Gōngyuán. The river (河, hé) for which the park is named was never much more than a stream, and once flowed past the front of the Tiān’ān Mén to connect with the the channel that ran south through the middle of the Legation Quarter to the Water Gate, through which the forces relieving the 1900 siege arrived. Now it has been revived as a series of long, thin ponds, stocked with goldfish and crossed in some places by brand-new traditional camel-back bridges.
Běijīng Imperial Art Museum 北京皇城艺术馆
Běijīng Huángchéng Yìshùguǎn, Nán Chízi Dàjiē, Chāngpú Hé Yán 9, t 8580 3051, www.huangchengart.cn, Tues–Sat 10am–12 noon, 2–4pm; closed public holidays, during the ‘two meetings’, etc. ¥100. nb Must book one day ahead. m & b as Imperial Archive, above.
There’s much brand-new old building to either side, including on the west side of the street the Běijīng Imperial City Art Museum (also labelled Běijīng Imperial City Art Trading Centre), housed in a new mansion. This has both displays about the history of the Imperial City and a gallery showing imported fine art.
Past the large spirit screen at the entrance there’s a good general introduction to the Imperial City, beginning with a simplified yet vast table model of its layout in around 1750. This shows the entire path of its walls around the west side of the Zhōng Nán Hǎi (you can see the arrangement of the temples where the modern emperors live and work) and north of Jǐng Shān Park, enclosing Pǔdù Sì and the Imperial Archive as well as the satin storehouse that once stood to its south, and many now-vanished temples. The Tiān’ān Mén is revealed to be the last of seven gates to the Imperial City, the remainder now only existing as names on maps.
There are some fine early photographs of the approach to the Forbidden City, probably taken by the photographers with the foreign powers relieving the siege in 1900. Further displays are about the Imperial City itself, the sacrifices and ceremonies of the imperial calendar and the sites where these took place, the various storehouses (for satin, porcelain, wax, and more), workshops (for carving stone, etc.), and the gaudy woven breastplates used from 1391 onwards to indicate the rank of officials, the civilian ones using different birds and the military ones beasts, which perhaps reflected the degree to which one looked down on the other. Further displays concern bridges, rivers, and moats, and there’s a painting of Qiánlóng amusing himself on a frozen lake.
Turning right out of the museum gives you views of the stretch of remaining Imperial City wall opposite and to the west of the new museum, and you can walk through the park to the Tài Miào (see p.230) and Tiān’ān Mén. Turning left (east) out of the museum, re-crossing Nán Chízi Dàjiē and following the park along the base of the Imperial City wall, there’s a VIP tea house and assorted offices in a collection of new-old mansions to the left; people practise tàijíquán or feed the goldfish to the right.
The wall has been breached again at the next junction and comes to an end, but on the left there’s another newly-renovated temple, the Pǔshèng Sì (普胜寺, Temple of Universal Victory). Founded in 1651, it’s now the offices of a political association for Chinese students returning from studying overseas (not a large proportion of those who go) and not open to the public.
Left (north) up Nán Hé Yán, a right turn into Dà Tián Shuǐ Jǐng Hútòng (大甜水井胡同, Big Sweet Water Well Hútòng) would until mid-2007 have brought you straight to real Běijīng hútòng life. Now it leads eventually to the squeaky-clean made-for-tourists Wángfǔjǐng that’s part of the government’s ‘Beijing’s a match for any other capital’ message. Yet right in the centre of the city, perhaps 100 metres from its principal boulevard, tiny xiǎomàibù (小卖部) shops once competed for business, and a row of bustling restaurants, improvised from older spaces, offered snacks and meals for ¥2–¥10, considerably less than in the official food street parallel just to the south. But by October 2007 all was in ruins except for a couple of hold-outs (known in China as ‘nail houses’), their remaining walls stencilled repeatedly with the characters 还奥运还新颜 (Huán Àoyùn, huàn xīn yán), ‘To welcome the Olympics make things brand new’. Security men in camouflage gear, posted to prevent photography even of the slogans and willing to get physical if necessary: so much for civic pride and Olympic credibility. The authorities had clearly become sensitive to stories that welcoming the Olympics involved the displacement of an estimated 1.5 million people.
This hútòng was once the residence of Dr. G. E Morrison, ‘Morrison of Peking’, the Times correspondent with a (perhaps not entirely justified) global reputation as an oracle on China, and in whose honour Wángfǔ Jǐng Dàjiē was known as Morrison Street by late-19th and early-20th century expats. Among the buildings destroyed during 2007 was the one that once housed his famous library.
Now what was made ‘brand new’ for the Olympics is just straightforward commercial redevelopment, and a turning halfway down leads south to the tawdry made-for-tourists food street, with its mixture of some real Běijīng snacks at near-reasonable prices and épater-le-bourgeois scorpions on sticks, although this, too, is expected soon to vanish.
▶ See Hútòng Walking, and other Běijing walks: In Search of the Ice Houses, Out Clubbing, Legation Quarter, and In the Depths of Many Flowers. See links below for other sights around the Imperial City and Tiān’ān Mén Sq, or go to the Main Index of A Better Guide to Beijing (home page).
Next in Imperial City: Tiān’ān Mén Square
Previous: Zhōngshān Park
Main Index of A Better Guide to Beijing.
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