In Centro, the city’s most fastidiously cool live music lounge, we are hanging out amid groups of young western corporate workers and hip Chinese. The drinks here come in dainty triangular glasses and are served by spiky-haired girls sheathed in black. By the bar there’s an elevated platform, studded with leather sofas, that overlooks a carefully lit Japanese garden. Two black American musicians, a saxophonist and pianist, are picked out in a pool of white light. The night is young and Centro is open 24 hours. Outside, in the very swanky foyer of the Kerry Centre hotel, a group of revellers, also fashionably suited and booted, is leaving the Grand Ballroom. On the fringes are a gaggle of good-time girls (from Mongolia, I’m told) looking for some action.
Pinch yourself. Is this really Beijing? What, in the name of bourgeois decadence, would the Great Helmsman have made of it all?
Can it really be less than 40 years since Mao’s Red Guard took to the streets and ransacked cultural sights in Beijing, even searching private homes to root out ‘bourgeois’ or ‘feudal’ items? Can it be so recently that college-educated young Beijingers were sent into the countryside to ‘learn from the peasants’, and that a vast underground city was still being dug under the streets of Beijing in preparation for nuclear war with the Soviet Union? Now, that ‘former situation’ has been knocked into a fur-lined hat (with flaps and fetching red star, available from Cultural Revolution kitsch shops and stalls across town). Welcome to the new Beijing of signature architecture, sleek apartment blocks, glossy shopping malls and Olympic success. Here, popular entertainment is Super Girls, a television talent show derivative of Pop Idol in which a staggering 20 million people cast votes on their mobile phones. The new battle on the streets of Beijing is between the free marketers who have been made rich by dot communism, and the Party, still struggling to hold on to power amid inexorable change.
Transition
The modern visitor to Beijing must prepare for excitement – and vertigo. The pace of construction is giddying and relentless. Since 2007 when, by law, every crane and scaffold in the city came down, Beijing emerged as a strikingly modern capital city – one that befits China’s place at the ‘top table’ of nations. Paul Andreu’s Opera House has landed and opened, like a glassy spacecraft, on the edge of Tiananmen Square. The Central Business District has sprouted a forest of 300 towers, including a clutch of high-end hotels; the ring roads encircling the city now number six (the joke is that the tenth one will pass through Tokyo).
The planet’s most fashionable architects unpacked their black leather bags in Beijing, teamed up with local Chinese firms (as they must) and rolled out a spectacular succession of buildings. The world’s biggest airport, 3.5 kilometres long, is a Norman Foster project; the 100,000-seater ‘Bird’s Nest’ National Stadium by Herzog de Meuron is cradled in its giant lattice of steel; the transparent ‘Swimming Cube’, fashioned from a new material that resembles frozen bubbles of air, along with the vast trapezium ‘leaning’ skyscraper that is Rem Koolhaas’s new home for China Television, CCTV. Will Alsop is in there too with a big commercial development, Raffles City, all wild colours and shapes, which stands over the new transport hub of the city – seven layers of trains and buses and a fast, 11-minute express service to the airport. Beijing is set to become the most visited city on earth by 2020, and this is its bid to out-Manhattan, out- Hong Kong, out-Toyko all-comers as top modern metropolis.
Contradiction
And yet bicycle rickshaws exist alongside Audis, fried locust alongside KFC, night markets alongside shopping malls. Old Beijing still exists in pockets, especially in the vicinity of the Forbidden City and its surrounding parks and lakes. Beijingers are social and like to do things in groups. On a Sunday afternoon we found ourselves by chance in Jingshin (also known as Coal Hill) Park. We heard singing, like a rather good Welsh miners’ choir, unaccompanied and crisp. Off the path, on a rocky bank, 12 middle-aged men were singing their hearts out, waved on by the flailing arms of their maestro. We had no idea what their songs might be about, but the crowd of Chinese who had gathered round was rapt.
Further on, against the blood-red wall of the Forbidden City, a man and woman warbled out Peking opera on a home karaoke system; beyond them was a band of saxophonists, then a lone fiddler, and then a whole party dancing and singing unself-consciously, while an artist traced patterns of branches and birds across the path with a water brush.
We strolled back through neighbouring Behai Park, Beijing’s largest and a gift to the city from Kublai Khan in the 13th century. It’s a popular place for boating, taking tea in the exquisite fretted wooden tea house and, across the bridge on Jade Island, which is topped with a 40m Buddhist shrine, for enjoying an imperial banquet at Fangshan, an opulently painted waterside courtyard house which has been serving food of the sort that the Qing emperors enjoyed since 1925.
Parks are places for learning English too. Sunday clubs called ‘English Corners’ open for conversation classes for the many Beijingers who are determined to learn. To stumble upon one of these and confess you’re from the UK is to be besieged with new friendships and plied with tea for the rest of the afternoon.
Officially, of course, a visit to the Forbidden City sits at the centre of everyone’s first visit to Beijing. No wonder Chairman Mao, whose smooth, unchanging face still dominates the Tiananmen Gate, chose this historic entrance to the imperial city as the auspicious place in 1949 to announce the Communist regime to the waiting crowds and the world: ‘The Chinese people have now stood up’. In the days of the emperors, decrees were announced from the top of this gate – written commands that were lowered in the beak of a gilded phoenix and received by officials waiting on their knees below.
For most of its five centuries of imperial life, the palace (although with 900 buildings, temples and endless gardens and squares, ‘city’ seems more appropriate) was utterly out of bounds for ordinary Chinese. They were not even allowed to approach its moated walls, under pain of execution. Only now are the Chinese discovering this fabulous place of great beauty and grotesque privilege. At weekends they come in their tens of thousands, many still in the military-style jackets of the Cultural Revolution but wearing matching coloured baseball caps to show membership of a tour group. Ironically, the new signs which help English speakers identify the Palace of Heavenly Purity, the Hall of Preserving Harmony and the rest each have a little addendum in small print telling us that the scheme has been ‘made possible by American Express’.
But nothing, not even the hilariously hammy audio tour by Roger Moore, can detract from the awesome scale of the Forbidden City. It was always intended as much more than a palace. The emperors, Sons of Heaven, regarded themselves as divinely appointed intermediaries between heaven (yang) and earth (yin). The whole court, from the emperor himself down to the eunuchs, concubines and serving girls, were caught up in a relentless litany of ritual and ceremony. The alignment of buildings, their iconography, design and colours were part of a complex cosmology that provided a necessary backdrop to the drama.
Some of that taste for immense grandeur is played out in Tiananmen Square, the world’s largest public gathering space, which is, of course, etched in our memories as the site of the pro-democracy demonstrations that were brutally crushed in 1989. The square is huge and could swallow a medium-sized English market town. Around it are ranged the bulky behemoths: The Great Hall of the People, the Mao Mausoleum (his embalmed body lies in state in a crystal coffin) and the National Museum where, in the waxwork gallery, the leaders and dignitaries of China have been joined by a solitary western star – David Beckham.
Restoration
It was Mao who tore down the magnificent city walls of Beijing. There are still a few remnants to be seen with isolated gatehouses (one behind the main railway station in Beijing has been turned into an art gallery). But these days it is the disappearance of Beijing’s humbler buildings that people mourn. In the hutongs (alleyways) that were once everywhere in the city, people lived in courtyard houses. Opening from the alley by a discreet door, these homes opened out into one or a series of interlocking courtyards, depending on the size of the family. Over the years as the population grew, the yards filled with makeshift housing to accommodate the burgeoning numbers, but there was no indoor sanitation and eventually the hutongs became slums.
Now, centimetres from the blade of the final bulldozer, streets are being saved. It’s possible to take a rickshaw tour of courtyard houses, and many westerners and savvy Chinese have restored these houses beautifully and live in them. Several restaurants have opened in courtyard houses (you eat in pretty private dining rooms), and there’s now a famous hutong hotel.
One of the best restaurants in the city for Chinese food is The Courtyard, which is owned by a Chinese-American lawyer with family roots in Beijing. It’s in a restored courtyard-style house next to the Forbidden City, and while the house’s grey-brick exterior blends with the old surroundings, inside it’s a different world: modernist white and glass, with tall art-hung walls and a beckoning staircase that leads to a contemporary art gallery in the basement. The food is genuine fusion – cashew-crusted lamb chop, for example, and Alaskan black cod with baby bok choy (a kind of lettuce) are established favourites. The tender grilled chicken breast in lemon grass and coconut curry is among the best poultry dishes the city has to offer, and afterwards you can visit an old-fashioned cigar lounge upstairs that looks out across the Forbidden City’s eastern moat.
In fact, despite the recent invasion of fast food, traditional Chinese cuisine (especially Sichuan, Mongolian, Cantonese and Muslim) is alive and well. There’s less street food than there once was (the authorities have made a concerted effort to clear away the breakfast stalls that serve jidan guan bing – egg pancakes), but it’s still possible to eat cheaply and well. Or, if you choose, in sumptuous style at imperial-style restaurants. Imperial food of the royal court was cooked, over the centuries, by the finest chefs, the best of whom could expect to be given the rank of minister. They would prepare scores of exquisite delicacies for the royal party to nibble – exotic foods such as phoenix in the nest, mandarin fish, lotus prawns and thousand layer cake.
Many restaurants serve up imperial-style cuisine, but my personal favourite is Source, a splendid small courtyard restaurant where diners are treated to their own small dining rooms which let on to a tree-filled garden. The food is a sequence of small dishes (sushi-like) from traditional meat-filled dumplings to stir-fried Jizong mushrooms and stuffed mandarin fish. Chrysanthemum tea is a real treat with this food, but I also grew to like the Chinese beer Tsingtao and Chinese wine (made now in co-operation with French growers) – especially Great Wall and Dragon Seal.
Interpretation
As a visitor it’s easy in Beijing to miss the pleasures of the city that insiders enjoy. Language is a barrier and while taxis are reassuringly cheap, drivers often need your destination written down in Chinese characters before they’ll understand. Staying in a good hotel (ours was the Shangri-La) means that staff will speak English and be able to advise you and write instructions.
This is vital. How else would we have managed to get out to Dashanzi, on the road to the airport, to visit Factory 798, the hottest arts quarter in China? 798 is a disused Fifties munitions factory and, from the outside, a hulking, monochrome reminder of the ‘former situation’. But it has become what Soho once was to New York, the home of Beijing’s cultural entrepreneurs, its edgy fashion and furniture designers, experimental architects, and keepers of cool bars and performance spaces. Vitally, it is where Chinese artists, who have become hugely fashionable and popular with international collectors, make and show their most challenging work.
Wander into Chinese Contemporary, one of more than 40 galleries on the site, and you might see sculpture by Sheng Qi representing Tiananmen Gate surrounded by models of rusty tanks, some of them broken and upturned. Can this really be China where we are led to believe that freedom of expression is still pretty low on the state’s wish list? 798 pulls the rug on some serious preconceptions. The groups of young people eating Happy Together Union Pizza at the Old Factory Café, getting kitted out at the Yinshu Jewellery Studio, hanging out in 798’s art bookshop fashioned from the old workers’ canteen and in Vibes nightclub, were mostly born after the collapse of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Now – dressed in something between working blues and fake Prada – they are witnessing their own.
Young Beijingers are drawn to this Dashanzi suburb because the Factory is so emphatically not the official face of the city – and because it looks like a film set for a movie about Mao’s Great Leap Forward. 798 once employed 20,000 workers making electronic components for the People’s Liberation Army. The buildings, in Bauhaus style, were constructed with the help of comrades from East Germany on a vast site that included housing, sports halls and a place where the factory orchestra could belt out revolutionary hymns to the workers. The factory was top security and had its own little army equipped with anti-aircraft guns. Now, a solitary soldier stands at the gate. The revolutionary graffiti, ‘Mao Zedong is the Red Sun in all Our Hearts!’, has faded on the factory walls. You can buy ‘Mao kitsch’ clothing inspired by the revolution, but the only ‘Zhongshan’ uniform on show is a massive freestanding Mao jacket, a sculpture that is, significantly, both overbearing and hollow. At 798, without missing a beat, Beijing’s past has become the future.
Where to eat and drink
– Fangshan Beihai Park (00 86 10 6404 1879). This originated as the kitchen that served the Dowager Cixi. There are 800 dishes in its imperial-style repertoire, including the familiar favourites bird’s nest soup and shark fin, as well as assorted slivers of camel hump! Set banquet menu around £15.50.
– Family Li Imperial Cuisine 11 Yang Fang Hutong, De Nei Jie, Cheng (00 86 10 6618 0107). Founded by Li Shanlin, a maths professor, this is a homely place where they also speak English. Set banquet menu around £15.50.
– Quanjude 44 Dong Jiaominxiang (00 86 01 6512 2265). Quanjude is a group of restaurants offering the best Peking duck; this ancient branch is at the south-east corner of Tiananmen Square. It has four robed chefs theatrically slicing duck in front of a stone oven. Service is at marble tables and the duck and pancakes are followed with a soup made, apparently, from the bones of the bird. Set dinner around £12.50.
– Huang Cheng Lao Ma 3 Changchun Jie, Xuanwu (00 86 10 6317 3369). A good place to sample a popular dish which is a Sichuan savoury version of fondue. Raw foods chosen by you are brought to your table and cooked in a bubbling broth. Lamb or beef are added and there’s a dipping sauce as accompaniment. Dinner for two costs around £18.
– The Courtyard 95 Donghuamen Dajie (00 86 10 6526 8883). A restored courtyard-style house next to the Forbidden City with a modernist interior and serving genuine fusion food. The Sunday brunch set menu is good value at ¥150 (£14) for three courses.
– Source 14 Banchang Hutong (00 86 10 6400 3736). Small courtyard restaurant with a series of small dining rooms which give onto the pretty tree-filled garden, serving imperial-style food. Dinner for two costs around £30.
– Alameda in Sanlitun Bar, North Street (86 10 6417 8084). Set in a street lined with restaurants and music bars, this is a Brazilian eaterie though its menu of good fish, salads and vegetables is classic Mediterranean. Two-course set dinner around £9.
Where to stay
– Lu Song Yuan Hotel, 22 Banchang Lane, Kuuanjie (00 86 10 6404 0436). An historic hotel fashioned from five courtyards, furnished in traditional Chinese style with a tea-room, study, restaurant and 58 bedrooms. From here you can tour the hutongs and other courtyard houses. From £40 for a double room.
– Kerry Centre Hotel, 1 Guang Hua Road, Chaoyang (00 86 10 6561 8833). An effortlessly contemporary five-star hotel with excellent pool and sports facilities, and the home of the ultra-cool Centro bar. Rooms from about £110.
Susan Marling travelled with the help of Thomas Cook Signature (0870 443 4580; tcsignature.com)
