Zhōngshān Park 中山公园

西长安街

The park offers a pleasant alternative route from Tiān’ān Mén Square to the Forbidden City’s main entrance. It was the site of a Liáo dynasty temple, and then from 1421 the Altar of Land and Grain (社稷坛, Shèjì Tán), where the emperors made important sacrifices in thanks for good harvests. It was considerably expanded under the Míng Jiājìng emperor’s overhaul of state ritual in 1530. Under the Republican government after 1912 it fell into disrepair and was used by guards to raise pigs and sheep until it opened to the public as Central Park in 1914, the first and most successful of several conversions of previously forbidden spaces to public use.

Income from ticket sales and restaurants within the park was put back into stocking gardens and building pavilions and walkways that became meeting places for both bureaucrats and artists. Some of that atmosphere still remains, with different traditional arts practised in different corners.

The writers who visited or lived in Běijīng during the ’20s and ’30s were lyrical about the colourful use of potted plants in courtyards throughout the year. These are still everywhere, the park also being used for a special exhibition of tulips and other imported plants in season. It was renamed for Sun Yat-sen (孙中山, Sūn Zhōngshān in Mandarin) after his death.

In the park there’s also a monument to long-forgotten German minister Baron von Ketteler, assassinated in 1900 at the beginning of the Siege of the Legations. It was originally erected as part of the reparations at the spot where he was shot. Gate-like structures of wood or stone called páilou, usually translated as ‘arches’, were put up to commemorate filial children, widows who refused to remarry, and other exemplars of Confucian virtues. In 1901 the representatives of 11 allied powers forced a settlement that, in addition to annual compensation payments equivalent to half the Qīng budget, shrewdly demanded the commemoration of von Ketteler, murdered as he rode to the Qīng Foreign Office, in a form that the Chinese would view as a high honour. It bore an inscription rather vaguely expressing the emperor’s contrition in Chinese, Latin, and German: ‘This monument is erected in order to point out that what is good, is good; and what is evil, is evil. Let all our subjects learn from the past occurrences and never forget them. We order this.’

Local people, mostly both illiterate and foreigner-hating, assumed it to be in honour of the assassin rather than the assassinated. After the defeat of Germany in 1918 and at the suggestion of former Times correspondent G. E. Morrison, by then an employee of the (northern) Chinese government, the handsome triple-arched blue-roofed stone páilou was moved here. Its expression of apology was replaced by a general comment on peace, and in 1952 replaced again with another version in the calligraphy of palatable-to-communists author Guō Mòruò (see Guō Mòruò Museum): 平和卫保, read right to left as bǎowèi hépíng, ‘defend peace’. Note that, written before the introduction of simplified modern forms, the second character from the right required 15 strokes as opposed to the modern version’s three, as shown here.

Poor von Ketteler: although the strangled rhetoric of the nearby sign admits he was killed by the Boxers (义和团, Yìhétuán), it can’t even get his name right, calling him ‘Kolind’, and labels the article of the treaty dealing with the memorial ‘traitorous’. Perhaps the almost forgotten Legation Quarter is itself a better memorial. It was expanded after his death as the victorious foreigners received the right to own land outright, and to station their own military forces within a walled area on the very doorstep of the Imperial City itself.

The Altar of Land and Grain is a raised marble terrace enclosed in a square wall with white gateways on each side. Low and square, it is covered with earths of different colours from the five points (East, South, West, North and Central). The yellow-roofed Zhōngshān Táng (中山堂) behind, formerly the Hall of Worship where the emperor robed and sheltered from wind and rain during ceremonies at the altar, was a stopping point for Sun Yat-sen’s hearse after he died during his third visit to Běijīng in 1925. It now contains hagiographic displays on the life of the ‘father of the revolution’, reaffirming the Party’s claims to be the just inheritor of his revolutionary mantle, threadbare though it may be — he wasn’t even in China in 1911 and was as much taken by surprise as everyone else by the events of that time.

Despite their supposed veneration for the man, many Chinese visitors to the park seem remarkably reluctant to pay just ¥2 to learn anything about him. There’s another unpopular museum to him, the Sūn Zhōngshān Xíngguǎn (孙中山行馆) at Zhāng Zìzhōng Lù 23 (张自忠路23号), where he lived from 1924 until his death in March 1925.

Of more interest than his pen, two walking sticks, and hat are views up to the complex beam structure of the roof, and photographs of old Běijīng, including ones of the funeral procession to the railway station at Qián Mén. Towards the northeast corner of the park you can find not only the tàijíquán practitioners, èrhú players, and opera singers common to public green spaces across Běijīng, but also groups of 20 or so retirees, each group adopting a pavilion as a miniature concert hall to sing the great rousing revolutionary songs they grew up with and which haven’t been much heard since the Cultural Revolution, accompanied on the piano accordion. Some of these make the Marseillaise sound like a love song. This activity has become so popular there’s some competition for space, and they’re now joined by others tending more towards Viennese opera and Beautiful Dreamer.

Just east of the altar and south of the singers there’s professional music available at the Forbidden City Concert Hall, including both imported classical performers and traditional Chinese music. A tea house just to the south is open 9am–midnight. On Sundays the park becomes an odd matchmaking service. Hundreds of parents whose children have yet to find mates converge on the park with photo albums and papers describing their offspring. These either have disabilities, are divorced, or are too busy to find a partner for themselves and, in the case of the daughters, their parents are worried that they will become ‘leftover women’ (剩女, shèngnǚ­­­­­) — too well-educated, too successful, too demanding, or too independent in the eyes of some dinosaur-like Chinese male opinion. In many cases the children aren’t even aware their parents are here, cross-checking notes on height, educational level, Party membership, and current salary. In other cases they are happy to let parents put an introduction list together and take it from there themselves. Sometimes they show up in person to browse through the data available, and ask and answer questions from parents.

▶ Zhōngshān Gōngyuán, immediately west of the Tiān’ān Mén, t 6605 2786, www.zhongshan-park.cn, 6.30am–8pm, Nov 1–Mar 31; otherwise 6am–9pm, ¥3, more for seasonal floral displays, and ¥2 for the Zhōngshān Hall. m Tiān’ān Mén West (Line 1) exit B. b to 天安门西: 1, 专1, 专2, 5, 10, 22, 52, 90电车外环, 90电车内环, 99, 728.

The northeast end of the park has an exit next to the Forbidden City’s main entrance.

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