SINOGRAPH Old Beijing lanes embody
a useful spirit By Francesco
Sisci
BEIJING - As China is leaving behind
millennia of peasant society and the imperial
system, as its dress, haircuts and habits are
taking on a seemingly inevitable Western style,
and as residents move up from the earthly comforts
of traditional one-story dwellings to heavenly
homes in skyscrapers, there is but one dwindling
link to the past, one thinning material thread
tying the present turbo-charged superpower-to-be
and the historical yawning or irate sitting
dragon: the hutongs, the lanes of Beijing.
Everybody from China and abroad knows and
recognizes them. Every day, countless tourists
from all over the world crowd the few remaining
quarters around central Houhai and search for a
trace of the waning, hazed identity of old China.
On their special role, one special book hit the
shelves recently, Beijing Hutong by Ma
Ling.
The volume - currently only in
Chinese, but hopefully soon also in
English - is unique
among the vast literature produced about Beijing's
lanes in recent years, a time when memories and
memorabilia of the hutongs increased even
as the physical houses vanished.
Most of
those books are technical reconstructions of old
Beijing or easy guides for the inattentive
tourist. Ma Ling's book is different. It tries for
the first time to bind together all that is
important about the hutong - and it is not
simply the architectural rules of a perfect
courtyard house, the siheyuan.
Ma
Ling employs her keen curiosity to give us the
many layers of life in those lanes. She tells us
of the old Manchu heritage of the birdcages, but
also of the recent dangers of coal heating.
She explores the stubborn resistance of
the people who refused to be evicted from their
old homes to make room for shiny mansions of glass
and steel, and of people's attachment to their
old-fashioned children's chairs.
She
investigates the houses of famous people who lived
in old Beijing, and the trendy shops of a century
ago, where the rich of the time bought hats, silk
dresses, and boots. The book has stories of noble
girls of the hutongs who had their feet
bound and distorted to fit the standard of beauty
of their time - and also tales of when the lanes
became the battlefield for Red Guards engaged in
the fierce Cultural Revolution.
It is a
treasure trove with all the different aspects of
those lanes richly illustrated with photographs.
It is very easy and pleasant to read or look at
while walking through the old lanes. Whether
during, before, or after passing time in Beijing's
hutongs, the book provides a comprehensive
introduction and preparation for a visit to
China's past.
Yet there is one more aspect
that is even more important in this book.
What defines Chinese culture? To a Chinese
person, the answer is obvious: he or she finds the
answer in his or her body, in the language he
speaks, and the sentiments he feels running
through his veins. But to a non-Chinese person,
the answer is less obvious.
It is
certainly the education, culture and customs - in
sum what comes out of the literature of ancient
wisdom, transmitted through books or oral lore. It
is a literary idea that allowed migrant Chinese to
recreate their home away from home, like the Jews,
loyal to their sacred text, who kept for centuries
their faith and traditions independent of a
physical space or environment.
In fact,
the tradition of the books, the classics, allowed
Chinese immigrants to build and rebuild Chinatowns
away from China and based on an ideal model of
Chinese cities - made simply of green-tiled arched
roofs, Chinese insignia, and writing splattered
around with neon lights in more or less beautiful
calligraphy.
But this urge to build a
physical space symbolizing and reminding Chinese
people of home also represents the importance of
creating a physical environment where people,
whether Chinese or not, can see and feel China,
rather than simply reading or hearing about it.
Actually, Chinese tradition recognized the
importance of physical space to determine and
influence people's thoughts and feelings. For this
reason, almost every dynasty insisted on razing
the cities of the previous dynasty to the ground,
and China developed a quasi-religion out of the
basic norms of architecture: feng shui.
The old architecture, embodying the old
demised power structure, had to be erased, and
people had to feel the new buildings around them,
which concretely represented the new political
environment. Furthermore, basic building criteria
(stay away from stagnant water, avoid drafts, et
cetera) came to imply good or bad luck, wealth or
poverty-it wasn't simply the standard prescription
for a house to be environmentally healthy.
Yes, there were also basic construction
issues. China lacked the Roman technology of
cement, which made buildings cheap to construct,
long lasting, and hard to tear down. Walls of
pressed earth and wood, the old Chinese
technology, were comparatively easier to pull down
and rebuild. But the ideology of building was
certainly a far more pressing issue.
In
just this spirit, the foreign Qing dynasty, which
needed to be legitimized through continuity and
not just as the successor of the deposed Ming
dynasty, held on to Ming architecture rather than
tearing it down. Similarly, Mao Zedong wanted to
symbolize the huge break he created in Chinese
history, so he made a point of pulling apart
almost all of the old city walls for the first
time in Chinese history. The walls were supposed
to hold the peasants out of the cities, something
rendered pointless as peasants had now taken
power, and he actually even tried to move
city-dwellers out and back to the countryside.
But there is a general point in these
actions: Can China, or any country, be new without
the old or by removing the old? Or can it be new
and keep the old? The old, if not confronted in
the right way, will crop up again in mysterious
ways and stop or thwart the evolution of the new.
This is a fairly well known mechanism in Western
psychology, first described by Freud when
discussing memories that are hard to deal with. We
can also find this psychological process in
Chinese historical tradition.
Despite the
efforts of each dynasty to erase the memory of its
predecessor, the reminiscence of the old was a
standard measure to gauge the performance of the
new dynastic cycle. Dynasties were sized up
against each other, and the old was always a
better paragon of governance than the new-the old,
apart from the brief bad moment of its fall, was
considered perfect-and the new always had to prove
its mettle against the ancient perfection
enshrined and transmitted in the old historical
classics.
This might still work when there
was an idea and sense of cyclical history. That is
to say, when history was felt to be repeating
itself, compelling comparisons with past dynasties
were important, and therefore it was also
fundamental to reshape old history to present
needs and to erase physical memories of a history
different from the one preserved in current
history books, which were tailored to present
needs.
But as the sense and idea of
history moves from cyclical to progressive, as
occurred in China and in the whole world in the
past century, the erasing of past physical history
is a waste and has serious drawbacks. It is a
waste as there is currently a lot of physical
value inherent in the many forms that conversely
are simply destroyed.
The drawback is that
contemporary people fail to see important physical
proof of the new sense of history: the physical
change, the evolution, and the progress occurring
under their eyes. In fact, from this perspective,
history is no longer a drag, but it can be a
springboard, an inspiration for the evolution of
the new. Old memories and old traumas can be a
powerful force, if properly managed, to inspire
the evolution of the future.
This is true
in personal experience: one needs the old to move
on to the new. One can find it in the modern
Italian spirit and modern design: in many ways,
the real spearhead of innovation and modernity
comes from Italy, the country with the longest
continuous history in the Western world and
largest quantity of old monuments in the West.
These simple facts could be a reminder to China of
the importance of preserving antiquity as a
platform for constructing something new.
For these reasons, Ma Ling's book becomes
extremely important and serves as almost an
ideological milestone in the new conception of
modern China.
Ma Ling describes and
retells the history and features of Beijing's
hutongs, the tangible heart and soul of
China for centuries. In this way, she helps with
their preservation. She explains their value and
introduces them, for the first time, to a public
of non-specialists who have practically no
knowledge, no necessary feeling, and no
sentimental attachment to the buildings along the
old lanes.
In this way, she gives them
true value by providing a reference, almost a
textbook, to inspire both the preservation of old
Chinese traditions and, rather than the repetition
of the old, finding the roots for the new in the
old.
Over 20 years ago, when I first came
to Beijing, I loved to wander in the old Beijing
hutongs in my spare time. I'd put on a hat,
wear a mouth mask to conceal my Western features
so I could avoid inspiring too much curiosity and
perplexity in the people, and walked leisurely in
the hutongs.
I told some Chinese
friends about this hobby, and they complained that
the old houses were just old. Some of them went to
Italy and felt the same: why were Italian cities
so old? Wasn't it better to tear them down and
build tall skyscrapers like in Los Angeles or New
York?
To me it sounded sacrilegious, how
can you destroy your past, that beauty, something
that made you feel better just by looking at it.
Yet I came to think it was understandable. They
were eager to see and build the new, to push China
forward in a bold move of modernization and out of
the old imperial tradition.
Still, what I
saw by strolling through the hutongs is
what I see in Ma Ling's book now: a physical sense
of old Chinese tradition, a sense of space that
seeps into the body and helps one to understand
the old literature, which otherwise seems almost
arid and detached from a sense of physical
reality. I felt that the repetition of that old
tradition in the present did not make much sense.
The courtyards (siheyuan) built now
in Beijing's outskirts do not represent the
ancient culture, but a more or less admirable
imitation of the old and a more or less useful
preservation of old techniques and materials. The
old courtyards in the heart of the old cities are
a material inspiration to understand the spirit
and essence of the old and to use that spirit by
adapting it to present circumstances and for the
future.
In a similar way, I believe
readers of this book will find it amusing and
entertaining - almost a guidebook for old Beijing.
But they can also go back to it and find more:
they can look for the possible seeds of modern and
future China.
Francesco Sisci is
a columnist for the Italian daily Il Sole 24 Ore
and can be reached at fsisci@gmail.com
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