Old Beijing lanes embody a useful spirit

2012-04-26Asia Times

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.  (2012-04-26 Asia Times)


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