Peking

Peking is the capital of the Empire of China, the largest state in the world by population, and has been a capital for six centuries with one interruption of eight years. About twenty million people live in its metropolitan region, on a dry plain at the northern edge of the north China lowland, where the mountains come down to meet it and the road to Mongolia begins.

It is the only great imperial capital in the world whose dynasty never fell. The Compact of 1912 converted the Qing into a constitutional monarchy rather than abolishing them, and the consequence is visible from any street in the Inner City: a court still lives in the Forbidden City, behind a museum the public queues for; the household still endows temples; and the ceremonies of state are performed in courtyards built for an emperor who answered to nobody, by an Empress who answers to a parliament three streets away.

What the city did not keep is its walls. They stood through the Boxer rising, the fall of the old order, the warlord decades and eight years of Japanese occupation, and they came down in the 1950s and 1960s, gate by gate, for traffic and a railway and a metro, at the hands of a ministry that won every vote. The campaign against the demolition, led by a professor of architecture whose alternative plan is now taught as the road not taken, lost everything and was right.

What it kept, it kept because of that. The Capital Conservation Act of 1957 was passed by a Parliament that had watched the gates fall and would not watch the rest go, and it is why Peking has the best-preserved fabric of any great imperial city: the central axis from the drum tower to the altars, the courtyard lanes of the Inner City, the temples, the lakes and the palace. The law protects the buildings absolutely. It protects the people living in them not at all, which is the modern city’s hardest argument.

Name

The city is 北京, Pei-ching, the Northern Capital, and is written in English as Peking, the postal romanisation that the Empire adopted in the nineteenth century and has never replaced. Canton, Nanking, Tientsin and Chungking follow the same system, which is applied strictly inside the Empire and loosely everywhere else.

The name is a pair. Nanking is the Southern Capital, and the two names describe a relationship rather than two cities: the Ming moved the seat of government north in 1420 and kept the southern name, and the Empire’s institutions have been divided between the two ever since in ways that change with each generation.

The city has never been renamed. The seat of government has not moved since 1420, apart from the wartime years at Chungking, and the name has therefore never had to be altered to reflect a change in the city’s standing. The form Peiping, Northern Peace, occurs occasionally in foreign writing and has no standing in the Empire.

Geography and climate

Peking sits at the northern apex of the great plain, where the hills of the west and the mountains of the north close in and leave a passage to the steppe. That is the whole of its geography and most of its history: it is a city placed to watch a frontier, which became a capital because whoever held the frontier held the country.

Water

The plain is dry. Rainfall arrives in a short violent summer and the rest of the year takes it out of the ground, and the water table beneath the capital has been falling for a century.

The city is kept alive by the south-to-north transfer, a canal system bringing water a thousand kilometres from the Yangtze basin: the largest public work in the Empire’s history, the most criticised, and the reason the taps run. Rationing exists and is not called rationing. Industry has been moved out to save water. The fountains in the parks are supplied from recycled sources and the city’s own planners describe the arrangement, in published documents, as a loan against somebody else’s river.

Air

The air is bad and improving. Coal smoke from the plain’s towns, dust from the fields, and the exhaust of a city of twenty million sit under an inversion that the hills hold in place, and the daily air figure is read here the way other cities read a weather forecast.

A generation of measures has made a real difference: coal burning restricted, the heavy works moved to the coast and the north-east, the vehicle fleet changed. The figures were collected for decades before they were published.

And there is the spring dust, off the Mongolian steppe, which is older than any industry, turns the sky yellow for days, and cannot be legislated against.

Climate

A dry cold winter, in which the lakes freeze and the city skates on them. A short violent spring of dust. A hot wet summer whose downpours flood the road underpasses every year without fail. And three good weeks in autumn, which the city regards as its reward and photographs relentlessly.

The metropolitan region

The capital is not a city on its own. It stands at the head of a region that includes Tientsin, its port, an hour down the line to the south-east; the industrial towns of the plain, whose chimneys supply a good deal of the air the capital complains about; and the mountain districts to the north and west, which supply its water, its stone and its weekends.

That region is administered by three different authorities and planned by none of them, which is the planning argument of the present century. The municipality’s boundary takes in a great deal of countryside, several mountain districts and a number of towns that were villages when the line was drawn, so a map of Peking is much larger than a map of the built city and a good deal of what is legally the capital is orchard, reservoir and hill.

History

Origins

There was a city here before there was a capital: a frontier town of the northern kingdoms, then the secondary capital of the Liao, the central capital of the Jin, and then Khanbaliq, the great city of the Mongol Yuan, laid out on a grid with a palace at its centre and a canal brought in to feed it. The Mongol city is the ancestor of the present one, and the water system of the Inner City lakes is its inheritance.

The Ming capital

The Ming rebuilt it. In 1420 the third Ming emperor moved his capital north from Nanking and constructed, on the Mongol foundations, the city that still stands in outline: the Forbidden City at the centre, the imperial city around it, the Inner City around that inside a wall of some twenty-four kilometres, and, from the sixteenth century, an Outer City wall enclosing the suburb to the south.

The Ming also built the geometry. The central axis runs some eight kilometres from the bell and drum towers in the north, through the palace, to the southern gate and on to the Temple of Heaven and the Altar of Agriculture; the altars of earth, sun and moon stand at the other three quarters. The city is an argument about the cosmos rendered in brick, and it is the only such argument that survives anywhere at this scale.

The Qing capital

The Manchus took the city in 1644 and kept it exactly as they found it, which is the most consequential thing they did to it. What changed was who lived where: the Inner City was cleared of its Chinese inhabitants and given to the banner garrisons, the Manchu, Mongol and Chinese-martial companies of the conquest army, and the Chinese population moved south into the Outer City.

Two cities therefore lived inside one wall for two and a half centuries: a garrison quarter of Manchu households, princely mansions, temples and drill grounds in the north, and a Chinese commercial and theatrical city in the south, with its guild halls, markets, opera houses and inns. The distinction is legally dead and is still visible in the street plan, in the temples and in the way people talk about the two halves.

The princely mansions of the Inner City belong to the same arrangement and are the reason so much of the old fabric is grand. Imperial clansmen were kept in the capital rather than sent to provinces, endowed with houses on a scale between a courtyard and a palace, and forbidden to leave without permission. Several dozen of those mansions survive: some are museums, some are institutes, one is a hospital, and two are still occupied by the families they were built for.

The banner system decayed long before it ended. By the nineteenth century the garrisons were hereditary pensioners rather than soldiers, drawing rice and silver for duties nobody performed, and the reform ministries of the 1900s spent a decade trying to convert the stipends into training, land and trades. The Compact finished the work by converting the stipends into a fixed charge on the household, which is why the abolition of the banners appears in this country’s history as an item of public finance rather than as a revolution.

The war of 1860

In 1860, in the second war fought to open China to opium and diplomacy, British and French forces entered the capital and burned the Old Summer Palace, the vast garden and palace complex north-west of the city, after looting it thoroughly.

The ruins were never restored, and the decision not to restore them is deliberate and was taken twice, once in the nineteenth century and again after the second war. What stands is a field of carved stone fragments in a park, visited by school parties, and the restitution campaign for its dispersed objects is pursued by the Empire in foreign courts and museums to this day, with a success rate the Empire’s own lawyers describe as modest and improving.

The Boxer rising of 1900

The Boxer rising reached the capital in the summer of 1900. Foreign legations and Chinese Christians were besieged in the legation quarter for fifty-five days; the court declared war on the powers and then fled west; an eight-nation expedition relieved the siege, sacked the city, looted the palaces, and imposed an indemnity that took a generation to pay.

Two things were left behind. The legation quarter was rebuilt as a walled foreign enclave with its own guards, gates and garrisons, inside the capital of a sovereign state, and remained so until 1945. And a sentence entered Chinese political language that has never quite left it: that the capital is a place other people’s soldiers have walked through.

The reform decade, 1901 to 1911

The decade between the Boxer indemnity and the Compact was the most productive in the dynasty’s late history and is why the Compact was possible at all. The examinations were abolished in 1905; a ministry structure on European lines replaced the old boards; a modern police force was created for the capital; the Imperial University was refounded on a proper footing; provincial assemblies were elected; and a constitution was drafted, promised and postponed.

Most of the capital’s modern institutions date from those ten years rather than from 1912: the ministries in their quarter east of the palace, the municipal police, the university, the first surveys of the city, the first municipal water and electricity. The Compact inherited a state that had already been half-rebuilt, and the speed with which the settlement of 1912 was made owes a great deal to the fact that the machinery to carry it was already sitting in the capital.

The Compact of 1912

The crisis of 1911 and 1912 was settled in this city and takes its name from it. The Peking Compact converted the dynasty into a constitutional monarchy, established a parliament, and divided sovereignty between Crown and people, which is treated fully in the Empire of China article.

Its effect on the city was architectural before it was anything else. The court kept the inner courts of the Forbidden City and gave up the outer ones, which became the national museum and the setting for the state ceremonies of a constitutional order. The ministries of the new state moved into the old ministries’ quarter east of the palace, where they remain. And the imperial sacrifices ended, which is treated below under the altars, because it is the largest single change the Compact made to what happens in this city.

May Fourth, 1919

In 1919, students of the imperial university marched from the university quarter to the legation quarter to protest at the terms being imposed on China at the peace conference and at the ministers who had accepted Japanese demands during the war.

The movement that followed was the beginning of modern Chinese politics and, because this China had a parliament, it worked through it: the demonstrations brought down a ministry, forced an election, and produced a constitutional amendment on the ratification of treaties. It founded no party. It is remembered instead as the founding event of a Chinese public opinion, and both the Empire’s liberals and its conservatives claim it.

The march is re-enacted by students every year on the anniversary, which the university encourages and the ministries find tiresome.

The parliamentary decades

The two decades after the Compact were not peaceful. Governments rose and fell, the northern generals had more soldiers than the Cabinet did, and the capital changed hands politically more than once while parliament kept meeting.

The city’s memory of the period is domestic rather than constitutional. The ministries could not pay their clerks, sometimes for months together, and the capital acquired a whole economy of credit, pawnshops and quiet second employment that the ministries knew about and ignored. The currency would not hold its value, so the price of grain was a political fact and the municipality’s grain reserve was the most closely watched figure in the city. Soldiers were quartered in temples whenever a general was in town, and several of the buildings now protected under the Act were barracks within living memory. And the university argued more usefully than the Assembly, which is the period’s self-description and is repeated in this city whenever a government is unpopular.

Two consolations are recorded alongside the complaints. The press was extraordinarily free and extraordinarily rude, in a way later decades did not match; and the municipality, whatever the state of the national finances, acquired in those years its first proper water supply, its first bus routes, its first surveyed street map and the beginnings of the planning department that would fight and lose the battle of the walls a generation later.

The occupation, 1937 to 1945

Japanese forces took the capital in 1937. The government left in stages for Chungking, taking the Assembly, the courts and the Emperor with it, and the capital’s legal status did not change. Eight years of Japanese military administration followed, under a puppet municipality staffed by Chinese officials.

Four facts govern the city’s memory of it.

The city was not destroyed. No battle was fought in it, the monuments stood, and the occupier protected them deliberately, with survey teams and conservation orders. The Peking that survives is therefore partly the occupier’s doing, which is true and is not discussed.

The city was hungry. Grain was requisitioned for the army, the ration favoured the occupier and its collaborators, and people died of want in a capital without a scratch on it.

The university emptied. Students and professors walked out in 1937, went south and west, and taught in temples and sheds in the interior for eight years. The buildings were used as barracks. The walk-out is the proudest thing in the institution’s history.

And the municipality collaborated. Its officials ran the rations, the police and the registrations. They were tried within a year of the liberation, most were convicted, a few were shot, and the files of that administration are still closed.

Liberation and return, 1945

The government came back from Chungking in 1945, and the Emperor re-entered the city in a public procession from the southern gate along the axis to the palace, which is the most photographed day in the city’s modern history and is on the wall of every school in the Empire.

The crates of the imperial collections came back with him. They had gone south and west in 1937 and travelled for eight years, and they returned, complete, to the museum in the outer courts.

The legation quarter was dissolved the same year, its walls taken down, its buildings taken over as ministries and embassies, and a part of it kept as a museum of the period it represented.

The demolition of the walls

The story of the demolition has its own section below, because it is the central event of the city’s twentieth century and the origin of everything the city now protects.

Growth since 1945

Peking grew from about two million people in 1949 to twenty million now. It was deliberately kept from becoming an industrial city: the heavy works went to the coast and the north-east, and the capital was left to government, learning and trade, which is why its air, bad as it is, is better than it would have been.

The square before the southern gate of the imperial city was enlarged twice, once in the 1930s for the parliamentary quarter and once in the 1980s for a national ceremonial ground, each time over the objections of people who preferred the old forecourt, and each time producing a public argument of the kind every capital has about its ceremonial centre.

It has been used as squares are. The largest demonstration in the city’s modern history filled it in the 1980s over corruption and the price of food, and ended with the resignation of a government and an election.

The Olympic games came to the city in the present century, and are treated here as its coming-out and its largest single act of building: two metro lines, an airport terminal, a park north of the axis, and a set of venues that are in use, half-used and argued about in the ordinary way.

The growth itself is the postwar story. The city took in the provinces at a rate no plan anticipated, filled the courtyards first and then the fields, built ring road after ring road, and discovered each time that the traffic arrived to fill them. The work-unit compound was the characteristic form of the middle decades: a ministry, a university or a factory housing its own staff behind its own wall, with its own clinic, nursery, canteen and shop, so that a family’s employer was also its landlord, its doctor and its school. Most of those compounds have been sold, redeveloped or broken open, and the generation that grew up in them writes about them the way other countries write about pit villages.

The suburbs followed in the last thirty years: whole districts of towers with their own centres, built on farmland, connected by metro lines that arrived two years after the residents did. The question the city argues about now is not whether it will grow but whether the region around it can be planned as one thing, and the answer so far has been no.

The city walls and their demolition

The walls before 1949

The Inner City wall was some twenty-four kilometres round, fifteen metres high, wide enough on top for a road, with sixteen gates under towers of grey brick and grey tile, each with a barbican and an arrow tower. The Outer City wall enclosed the southern suburb. Together they were the largest and most complete city wall of any capital on earth, and they had stood, repaired but not replaced, since the fifteenth century.

The demolition

The demolition ran from the early 1950s to the middle 1960s, and it was not a decree. It was a sequence of ministerial decisions, each one reasonable on its own terms: a gate widened for trams, a stretch taken for the circular railway, a section removed for the metro begun in the 1960s, a barbican cleared for a junction. The Ministry of Public Works won every vote in the Assembly. The city grew, the traffic grew faster, and the wall was in the way of both.

The conservation campaign

Against it stood a campaign led by Professor Liang Ssu-ch’eng of the technical university, who proposed something else entirely: a new government quarter west of the old city, leaving the historic capital to be conserved whole, and the wall itself turned into an elevated linear park, planted, walkable, with the gate towers as pavilions and the moat below as water.

He lost every vote. The last gate came down in the middle 1960s. His plan is now taught in every architecture school in the Empire as the road not taken, and the final paragraph of that report is quoted so often that people who have never read it can finish it.

Surviving remains

Three gate towers, kept as monuments and photographed constantly. A ring road on the line of the wall, whose junctions and metro stations are named for the vanished gates, so that the city still gives directions by a thing that is not there. And one restored stretch beside the old observatory, rebuilt in the present century in the original brick as what the municipality’s own plaque calls, without qualification, an apology.

The Capital Conservation Act 1957

The Capital Conservation Act 1957 was passed in the middle of the demolition by a Parliament that had watched the gates fall and would not watch the rest go.

The last sentence is the whole of the modern quarrel. The Act binds a private owner absolutely and the state loosely, and the ministries hold the largest compounds inside the protected area.

Administration and enforcement

The Act is administered by a conservation commission of architects, historians and municipal officers, which approves or refuses every alteration inside the protected area and publishes its reasons. Its refusals are famous, its approvals are read closely by the trade, and its chairman is the only municipal appointment that the national press covers.

Enforcement is by the courts and by ruin. A demolition carried out without consent is an offence, the penalty is a fine and an order to rebuild at the offender’s cost in the original materials, and the orders have been made often enough that the trade takes them seriously. What the Act cannot do is compel an owner to repair, so a proportion of the protected fabric decays legally, and the commission’s annual report lists the buildings it is watching fall down.

The fourteen amendments have all been additions: temples, mansions, the guild halls, the surviving stretches of the canal, a group of reform-decade ministries that the 1957 draftsmen thought too new to matter, and, in the present century, the twentieth-century work-unit compounds, which was the most contested addition of all and was carried by a single vote.

The reform bill to remove the exemption in the last sentence of section 2 has been introduced in seven parliaments by members of four parties and has never been given time. Every Minister of Public Works since the 1970s has professed support for it in principle. No government has ever found a day for it.

The Forbidden City and the court

Division of the palace

The outer courts are the national museum: the great halls on the axis, the gates, the courtyards and the collections, entered by ticket, walked through by tens of thousands of people a day.

The inner courts are a working palace. The Empress lives there, in a complex of courtyards that is smaller, greener and less grand than the outer city of ceremony, with a household, a guard, an office, and a gate through which she leaves to open Parliament.

Foreigners find this arrangement astonishing and Chinese find it obvious. The public queues in the front of the house and the sovereign lives at the back of it, which is roughly what the Compact of 1912 did to Chinese sovereignty rendered as a floor plan.

The court in the city

The opening of the National Assembly, the New Year audience, the reception of ambassadors and the investitures are held in the outer courts and are televised. The household employs several thousand people, maintains the palaces and the endowed temples, and is audited by Parliament, whose annual debate on its budget is conducted in terms the palace finds humiliating and has never successfully objected to.

And there is the ordinary sight of it, which is what most people in the city actually experience: a closed vermilion gate, a guard change at fixed hours, and traffic diverted along the eastern side of the palace twice a week.

The imperial household

The household is an establishment of some hundreds: chamberlains, secretaries, the keepers of the collections that did not go to the museum, the ceremonial officers, the Manchu ritualists, the archivists, the gardeners of the northern lakes, and a private office that handles the sovereign’s correspondence with the Empire’s citizens, which arrives in sacks.

It is paid for by a vote of the Assembly, debated annually, published in detail, and smaller in real terms than it was fifty years ago. The household also holds private property of its own, the produce of which it is required to disclose, and the disclosure was itself the result of a parliamentary row in the middle of the last century.

Its permanent difficulty is the boundary with the museum: two institutions in one building, one of which admits nine million visitors a year and the other of which is a family’s home. The line has been renegotiated three times since 1912, has moved a few dozen metres in each direction, and is patrolled by a joint staff whose seniority relative to one another is the subject of a standing instruction that runs to four pages.

The Palace Museum

The Palace Museum occupies the outer courts, and it is the largest and most complete imperial collection in the world because nothing ever divided it.

It holds what the Qing held: bronzes and jades from the dynastic collections, the painting and calligraphy assembled over eight centuries by successive courts, the porcelain of the imperial kilns, the clocks and automata sent by European embassies, the archives of the Grand Council, and the furnishings of the palace itself, in the rooms they were made for.

The crates are part of the story. In 1937 the collection was packed into some twenty thousand cases and sent south and west by rail, river and road, ahead of the Japanese advance. It spent eight years in temples, caves and warehouses in the interior, was inventoried twice under conditions the curators described as impossible, and came back complete in 1945 to the courtyards it had left. The museum keeps a room about the evacuation, with the original crates, the route maps and the inventories, and it is the exhibit visitors remember.

The museum’s ordinary problems are those of any institution with too much and too many: nine million visitors a year through courtyards built for a court of a few thousand, a ticketing system that rations entry to the inner halls, a conservation department with a permanent backlog, and an argument with the household about the boundary between the museum’s courts and the residence’s, which has been renegotiated three times since 1912 and moved a few dozen metres each way.

The central axis and the altars

The central axis survives intact from the bell and drum towers to the southern altars, and is protected by the Act as a single monument. It was extended in the present century by a modern ceremonial avenue running north and south beyond the old city, which purists dislike and the city uses.

It is crossed, at right angles and at speed, by the avenues that the walls came down for. That crossing is the compromise the city lives in, and photographs of it are the standard illustration of the city’s condition.

The axis

At the northern end the bell and drum towers, which kept the city’s time and closed its gates, sounded until the reform decade and now sound once a year. Below them the old wharf where the grain canal ended, then the lakes to the west, then the imperial city and the palace.

South of the palace the square, the southern gate, and the long approach to the two enclosures that complete the composition: the Temple of Heaven to the east of the avenue and the Altar of Agriculture to the west, where the Emperor ploughed a furrow each spring to open the year.

Off the axis but tied to it stand the four quarter altars and the observatory on the old wall line, with its Jesuit-built instruments still on the platform, which is the point the restored stretch of wall was built to reach and the reason it was built there.

The imperial sacrifices

The altars are museums, and the reason is constitutional.

Under the old order the Emperor sacrificed at the Temple of Heaven at the winter solstice, as the one person who could address heaven on behalf of the realm. The Compact of 1912 ended it, and the reasoning, argued at the time and restated whenever a traditionalist proposes a revival, is exact: a sovereign who shares sovereignty with the people cannot mediate between heaven and the people. The mandate that the rite performed was the undivided mandate the Compact had just divided.

So the temples were transferred to the state, opened to the public, and are visited by twelve million people a year. The altars of earth, sun and moon are parks. The household endows a Lamaist temple in the north-east of the Inner City, which functions, has monks and receives a private endowment, because a private person may patronise a religion and a constitutional sovereign may not perform a rite of state.

Proposals to revive the solstice sacrifice as a national ceremony are made every few years, usually by people who want something else, and are defeated on the argument above.

National institutions in the capital

Peking is a capital first, and the institutions of the Empire occupy it physically in a way the municipality has no say over.

The ministries stand east and south-east of the palace, in the quarter the old boards used, rebuilt twice: once in the reform decade in a heavy foreign manner, and again in the postwar decades in a heavier native one. They are compounds rather than buildings, walled, gated and staffed by their own security, and together they hold a great deal of the most valuable land in the protected city without paying a penny in rates on any of it.

The National Assembly sits west of the square in a parliamentary quarter laid out in the 1930s, when the square was first enlarged for the purpose. The chamber is open to the public, the committee corridors are the working part of the building, and the pavement outside it is the constitutional venue of Chinese protest: a demonstration at the Assembly is a petition, a demonstration at the palace is something else, and the distinction is understood by everyone including the police.

The courts are scattered, which is deliberate. The supreme court sits in a converted ministry of the reform decade; the constitutional jurisdiction that decides cases against the Crown and the government sits in a smaller building nearby; and both are separated from the executive quarter by more than a street, on the argument, made explicitly when the buildings were allocated, that the judges should not be seen walking to work with the ministers.

The diplomatic quarter is not the old legation quarter. After 1945 the embassies moved east into a new district built for them, with wide streets, walls, gardens and a police presence, and the old quarter became ministries and museums. The change of address is itself a statement, and was intended as one.

And the household occupies the inner courts of the palace, the northern lakes and a group of buildings around them, with its own establishment, its own budget voted by the Assembly, and its own quarrel with the museum about where one ends and the other begins.

The consequence for the city is the one the mayor complains about. Something close to a fifth of the Inner City is occupied by bodies that the municipality cannot tax, cannot plan for, cannot police and cannot compel, and the capital’s finances, traffic and conservation law are all shaped by that fact.

Government and administration

The municipality

Peking is a special municipality directly under the Empire, with an elected council and an elected mayor, and the balance between what the mayor may do and what the mayor may pay for is the permanent condition of the office.

The powers are genuine: planning, transport, water, schools, the municipal police, the markets, the parks. The budget is not. The ministries, the courts, the Assembly and the household occupy a great deal of the most valuable land in the city and do not pay rates on any of it, so the capital of the largest state on earth is financed by a tax base with a hole in the middle of it. Every mayor for sixty years has raised this, and the Treasury’s answer has been the same for sixty years, which is that the ministries are the reason anybody is in Peking at all.

Ho Wan-ju has been mayor since her first election and is in her second term. She is an engineer by training, was elected on water and air, and spends most of her political capital fighting the ministries about land.

Relations with the ministries

Land. The ministries hold compounds of enormous size in the middle of the protected city, answer to no local authority for what they do inside them, and are exempt from the conservation Act in respect of their own occupation. Two ministries have demolished protected buildings within their walls in the last thirty years, lawfully, and the municipality’s only remedy was publicity.

Traffic. Motorcades close streets, and a municipal by-law limiting them was struck down as an interference with the business of the Empire.

Conservation. The Act’s exemption for the Crown and the ministries is the standing scandal of Chinese conservation, and the reform bill to end it has been introduced in seven parliaments and has never been given time.

Policing

Three forces share the city and the arrangement works better than it sounds. The municipal police under the mayor keep order, investigate crime and police demonstrations. The imperial guard holds the palace, the ceremonies and the processional routes. A gendarmerie guards the ministries and the courts.

That the municipal force, and not the guard or the gendarmerie, polices demonstrations is a provision of the municipal statute, and it is the provision that decided how the protests of the 1980s ended: a mayor answerable to the electors of the city, using a police force answerable to him, in front of cameras belonging to a press the constitution protects.

Districts

The Inner City is the old banner quarter: the palace and the imperial city at its centre, the ministries to its east, the chain of lakes to its west, and around them the hutongs, the grey-walled courtyard lanes that the Act protects. It is the most desirable and most crowded ground in the Empire.

The Outer City, south of the old wall line, is the old Chinese commercial quarter: the theatres and opera houses, the guild halls of the provincial merchant communities, the great markets, the mosque and Muslim quarter, and the altars at its southern edge.

The former legation quarter, east of the square, is ministries and embassies in the foreign architecture of the 1900s, with a museum in one of the old buildings about what the quarter was.

The university quarter in the north-west lies among the old princely gardens, and holds the Imperial University, the technical university, the academies of the sciences and the research institutes, which makes it the intellectual centre of the Empire and the origin of most of its political trouble.

The eastern business district is towers, traffic and money: the banks, the headquarters and the offices that want to be near the regulators.

And the outer districts, beyond the ring roads, are where most of the twenty million actually live: blocks of flats in their thousands, malls, schools, markets, hospitals and metro stations, built fast and mostly well, with the ordinary problems of new districts everywhere, which are that the schools arrive before the clinics and the clinics before the parks. Almost none of the conservation law applies to them, and almost everybody in the city lives there.

Language

The dialect of this city is the basis of the standard spoken language of the Empire, which is a fact of enormous consequence and modest local pride.

Why it happened is administrative. The capital’s speech was the speech of the court and the ministries, the officials who came up from every province learned enough of it to work in, and the reform decade and the parliamentary decades after it turned that working compromise into a taught standard, with dictionaries, a pronunciation commission, school readers and eventually broadcasting. The Empire’s broadcaster did more to spread it than any ministry.

What the standard is not is the street speech of Peking. The taught language is the capital’s dialect with its rougher edges filed off: the local speech has a heavy retroflex ending that the standard uses sparingly, a vocabulary of its own, a fondness for swallowing syllables, and a tone that other provinces describe, with affection and without much of it, as the sound of somebody explaining something to you.

The other languages of the capital are real and audible. Manchu is taught, used in the court’s ceremonial and written on the palace’s older signboards beside the Chinese, with a small body of genuine speakers and a larger body of people who can read it aloud. Mongolian and Tibetan are heard around the institutions that serve the Empire’s northern and western peoples. The Muslim quarter has its own vocabulary and its own Arabic. And the provinces are everywhere: a building site in this city is a chorus of Hopei, Shantung and Honan, and a ministry canteen is the whole Empire at once.

Housing and population

Housing

Peking houses its people in three ways, and a family’s life is largely determined by which.

The courtyard lanes, protected, sought after, expensive and crowded at the same time. A courtyard house built for one family commonly holds six, with shared water, shared lavatories and rooms subdivided twice. The Act protects the building and does not protect the people in it, and restoration in the Inner City routinely means the removal of the six families and the return of the house to one.

The postwar blocks of the 1950s to the 1980s, walk-up flats in work-unit courtyards, which house most of the settled middle of the city and are now being redeveloped in their turn.

The towers beyond the ring roads, where a young family that wants three rooms goes, an hour from work.

Population

The provinces built this city and service it: labourers, drivers, cooks and cleaners from Hopei, Shantung and Honan, without whom nothing in the capital works.

The examined come from everywhere in the Empire, recruited by competition into the ministries, the courts and the academies. This is the oldest migration in Chinese history, older than the city’s present walls, and Peking is built around it.

And the Empire’s peoples come with business at court or in the ministries: Mongols, Manchus, Tibetans and Muslims from the north-west, who give the capital a mixture that no other Chinese city has and a set of institutions, hostels, temples, restaurants and schools, that exist to serve them.

There is no household registration system of the kind that would tie a family’s access to schools, hospitals and employment to a registered birthplace. The constitution guarantees movement and residence, so the capital cannot exclude the poor by law. It excludes them by rents instead.

The Manchu population

The banner system is long dead and the banner quarter is not forgotten. The dynasty survived, so Manchu identity here was never a vanished thing to be recovered: the language is taught and used in the court’s ceremonial, the old Manchu families are a recognisable stratum of the capital’s society, and a Manchu aristocracy exists with titles that are honorific and a place in the household that is not.

What that means politically is the awkwardness the Compact settled without ending. A Manchu court in a Chinese capital was the whole argument of 1912, and the answer given then, that the dynasty would become constitutional and Chinese in its obligations while remaining Manchu in its person, is still the answer, and is still argued about by people who find it either insufficient or unnecessary.

Economy

Government above everything. The ministries, the courts, the Assembly, the household and the enormous trades that live off them: printing, law, lobbying, hospitality, security, and the industry of being near power.

Learning. The universities, the academies, the publishers and the examination industry that prepares candidates for entrance and for the civil service competitions.

Finance and headquarters, in the eastern district, drawn here by proximity to regulation rather than to ports, which is the reason a city four hours from the sea holds the Empire’s banks.

Technology. Research institutes, software and the companies that grew out of the university quarter, which is the fastest-growing part of the city’s economy and the reason its property prices are what they are.

Tourism on a scale that the conservation Act both enables and suffers from: the palace, the altars, the lanes, the hills and the wall an hour to the north, taking tens of millions of visitors a year through a protected fabric built for a fraction of them.

Cost of living

Peking is the most expensive city in the Empire and the gap is widening. A courtyard room inside the protected city sells for a sum that bears no relation to the wages of anybody who works in the district, a flat beyond the outer ring costs what a comfortable house costs in a provincial capital, and the salaries that most justify living here, the ministerial and academic ones, are fixed on national scales that take no account of where the holder has to live.

The state’s answer is accommodation: ministries, universities and the household house a proportion of their staff, which keeps the machinery running and produces the odd result that a middle-ranking official may live better than a prosperous merchant and own nothing. The municipality’s answer is a building programme that has never reached the scale of the problem. Everybody else’s answer is the metro, and an hour and a half each way.

Limits of the city’s economy

It does not manufacture at scale, by policy. It is not a port and has to borrow Tientsin’s. It grows very little of its own food and is supplied by the plain and by the railways. And it does not mine, refine or smelt anything, which was the decision of the postwar planners and is the single largest reason the capital is habitable.

Transport

The metro, begun in the 1960s and now among the largest systems in the world, which was the other argument for taking the walls down and which runs, in part, on their line.

The ring roads, on the line of the vanished walls, whose junctions carry the names of gates that no longer exist, so that a driver in Peking navigates by an absence.

The railways: the Empire’s northern hub, the trunk lines south and west, the line to Manchuria, and high-speed services that put the coast within two hours and the Yangtze within five.

Two airports, the older inside the ring roads and a vast new one to the south, and an air network that makes this the busiest set of runways in Asia.

And bicycles, still, in numbers that other capitals gave up on, on lanes that the Act’s street lines happen to have preserved.

The buses, which carry more people than the metro and are the transport of the outer districts, the old, the poor and anyone going somewhere a line does not reach.

The canal, which brought the capital’s grain from the south for five centuries and which ended at a wharf beside the bell tower. Its northern reaches are now a park and a drainage channel, the southern ones carry barges, and the whole line has been restored in parts as a walk, which is the gentlest thing the municipality has done to its own history.

Tientsin, an hour down the line, is the port: commercial, foreign-built, a treaty port in origin, and the place through which the capital buys and ships. The two cities are one metropolitan region in fact and two administrations in law, which is the planning argument of the age.

Education and learning

The Imperial University of Peking was founded in the reform years at the end of the Qing and is the Empire’s most political institution. It produced May Fourth, produced the walk-out of 1937, produces the demonstrations that fill the square, and is where every second minister was educated.

Beside it stands the technical university, from which Liang Ssu-ch’eng argued for the walls, and around them the academies of the sciences and the research institutes.

The National Library holds the imperial collections of books as the museum holds the objects: the surviving volumes of the great Ming and Qing compilations, the rubbings, the maps, and a reading room that any citizen of the Empire may use on production of identity, which was a deliberate provision of the reform decade and is still quoted at ministers who propose restrictions.

The archives are the other half and are the reason foreign historians come here. The records of the Grand Council and the old boards survive in quantity, were catalogued rather than burned, and are open to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries without restriction, to the twentieth with a thirty-year rule, and to the occupation years not at all.

The academies of the sciences and of the social sciences sit between the universities and the ministries, advise both, and are the route by which a scholar becomes a policy-maker in this country, which is an arrangement the Empire regards as continuity and its critics regard as capture.

Underneath the whole system lies the shadow of the old one. The classical examinations were abolished in 1905 and the examination culture was not: entrance to the universities and to the civil service is by competition, the preparation industry is enormous, and everybody in the Empire says, with varying degrees of irony, that the examinations never ended and simply changed their syllabus.

Health and schools

The capital’s hospitals are the best in the Empire and are used by the whole of it: patients travel from every province for appointments in Peking, which produces queues at dawn, a trade in appointment tickets that is illegal and universal, and a chronic argument about whether the Empire’s medical capital should be its political one.

Schools are municipal, competitive and unequal. The Inner City schools that feed the universities are the ones families move for, and the housing market follows them exactly as it does everywhere else, which is one of the reasons a courtyard room costs what it does.

Markets and trades

The Outer City is where the capital shopped, ate and argued for three centuries, and enough of it survives to be legible. The guild halls built by provincial merchant communities, Shansi bankers, Fukienese shippers, Cantonese traders, are among the finest buildings in the city and were the accommodation, dining room, temple and courtroom of a province’s men in the capital; two dozen survive, as theatres, museums, restaurants and one hotel.

The markets are the other half: the covered halls, the animal and plant markets, the street of antiquaries where everything is a reproduction and everybody says so, the paper and ink shops that supplied the examinations and now supply calligraphers, and the food streets the municipality regulates in theory.

And the trades that live off government are the quiet economy of the place: the printers of official forms, the makers of seals, the mounters of scrolls, the tailors of court and academic dress, the flat agents who know which ministry is moving, and the restaurant proprietors who know which official may not be seen dining with which.

Parks, hills and the Great Wall

The lakes

A chain of artificial lakes runs through the Inner City, dug and enlarged from the Mongol period onward to hold the water the city drank and the emperor boated on. The southern lakes belong to the imperial city and are closed; the northern ones are public parks, and they are where the capital actually lives out of doors: rowing in summer, tea houses along the banks, old men with birdcages, and in January the whole city on skates.

The hills

The western hills begin where the plain stops, twenty kilometres from the palace: temples in the folds of them, imperial tombs in the valleys beyond, and an air that the city has gone up for since the Ming. The railway built to carry summer residents still runs. The Summer Palace and the ruined Old Summer Palace lie between the hills and the city, one a park of lake and colonnade, the other a field of carved stone that has been left as it fell.

The Great Wall

The Great Wall crosses the mountains an hour and a half north of the capital, and the relationship between the two is the oldest thing about the city. Peking is where it is because the passes are where they are: a capital placed against a frontier, at the point where the road from the steppe comes down onto the plain.

The nearest sections are restored, crowded and managed; the unrestored lengths further out are walked by people who prefer them, under a conservation regime that the Empire enforces unevenly and that the municipality has no authority over at all. Every guidebook notes the irony: the capital that could not keep its own walls spends a great deal of money maintaining the Empire’s.

Culture

Opera

Peking opera was born in this city’s theatres in the Qing period, was patronised by the court, and is still performed in the old houses of the Outer City and in the state academy’s theatre.

It was never suppressed, never reformed into model works and never banned, which is the plainest cultural consequence of there having been no revolution here, and which makes the Peking repertoire the most continuous performing tradition in Asia.

Its audience is older every year. The academy trains performers well for a public that is shrinking, the state subsidises the houses, and the argument about whether subsidy preserves an art or embalms it is conducted in Peking exactly as it is everywhere else.

Food

The roast duck, with its own restaurants, its own apprenticeships, its own fuel and an unresolved argument about which house is the original.

Court cooking, which survived because the court did: dishes cooked for the palace, served in restaurants staffed by people the household trained, in a line of descent that is documented and disputed.

The Muslim quarter’s lamb and bread, the mutton hotpot of the winter, the noodle shops, and the street food that the municipality keeps trying to regulate and cannot.

Religion

The temples of heaven and earth are museums, which is what the Compact made them.

Living religion goes on beside them: Buddhist and Taoist temples with congregations, the Lamaist temple endowed by the household, the mosque of the Muslim quarter, and the cathedrals of the missions, which have been Chinese-run for a century and are full at Easter.

And popular religion: incense at the old shrines on festival days, burned by people who would not describe themselves as believers and who would be surprised to be asked.

Literature

The capital is where modern Chinese prose was argued into existence, in the magazines and lecture halls of the May Fourth decade, and it has been the Empire’s literary centre ever since: the publishers, the literary magazines, the writers’ association that is funded and resented in equal measure, and a tradition of the capital novel, set in the courtyards and the lanes, which is a genre with its own shelf in every bookshop in the country.

The city’s writers have a recognisable subject, which is displacement: the courtyard that is no longer the family’s, the lane that is now a hotel, the relatives in the outer districts, the grandfather who remembers the gates. The criticism of this, made regularly and fairly, is that a literature about losing a courtyard is written by the people who still have one.

Museums and theatres

Beyond the palace the capital holds the Empire’s national museum of history on the square, the capital museum of the city’s own past, a military museum, a museum of the legation quarter in one of its own buildings, and several dozen smaller collections in old mansions and temples.

The theatres run from the restored opera houses of the Outer City to a modern national theatre that the city disliked on sight and has grown used to, and the argument about that building is conducted in exactly the terms of every other argument about new work inside a protected city.

Media

Peking is the Empire’s press capital: the national dailies, the Empire’s broadcaster, the news agency, and a tradition of political journalism that the constitution protects and that ministers dislike in every generation. The court correspondents are a recognised trade with rules of their own, and the rules are older than broadcasting.

Sport

Football clubs with old followings and modest records. The Olympic venues, in use, half-used and argued about. And the city’s real sporting culture, which is morning exercise in the parks: the lakes at six in the morning in any weather, and skating on them in January.

Festivals and the civic year

The capital keeps three calendars at once and they do not line up.

The old year is still the one the city celebrates. The lunar new year empties it: the provinces go home, the building sites stop, the metro is quiet for a fortnight, and the temple fairs open in the parks with their stalls, their wrestling, their sugar figures and their crowds. Qingming takes the city to the graves in the hills and to the tombs of the dynasty. The mid-autumn and the dragon boat festivals are public holidays and family occasions. None of these are state rites and all of them are older than the state.

The court’s year is ceremonial and constitutional. The Emperor opens the Assembly’s session; receives ambassadors; holds the investitures, the audiences and the household’s own commemorations; and appears at the fixed points of the national year. What the court’s year no longer contains is the thing it was built around: the sacrifices at the altars ended in 1912 and were not replaced, so the Temple of Heaven is silent at the solstice and the museum sells tickets.

The political year belongs to the Assembly and the ministries: the session, the budget, the estimates, the committee seasons, the party conferences, and the examinations, which fill the city twice a year with candidates and their families and which the hotels, the restaurants and the stationers plan their trade around exactly as their predecessors did when the examinations were imperial.

And over all of it lies the ordinary year of a northern city: the coal and the heating season, which begins and ends on fixed dates the municipality announces; the dust; the flooding; the three good weeks; and the ice.

Failings

The walls. The largest surviving work of Ming architecture was taken down for traffic by a ministry that won every vote, against a campaign that was right, and the only restitution is one restored stretch beside the observatory with a plaque that calls itself an apology.

Protection without tenancy. The Act protects buildings and not the people in them. Restoration in the Inner City means the removal of families who have lived in a courtyard for three generations, compensated at rates set for the room and not for the district, and the law provides no remedy because the law was drafted to save architecture.

The migrant city. The people who build, clean, drive and cook for the capital cannot live in it. No law excludes them, which is the constitutional achievement; rents exclude them, which is the practical result; and the municipality’s housing programmes have never reached the scale of the workforce they depend on.

The water. A capital of twenty million on a dry plain is kept alive by a canal from a thousand kilometres away, taken from basins with their own droughts and their own people, and the Empire’s own inspectorate has published what it costs the south to supply the north.

The occupation files. The records of the puppet municipality of 1937 to 1945 are closed. Successive ministries have declined to open them on the ground that they contain the names of people whose families are living, which is true and is also the argument for opening them, and the historians have been asking for eighty years.

The air. The figures were collected for decades before anybody published them, and the decision to publish came only after a foreign embassy began publishing its own.

The region. The capital plans its own territory well and the region around it not at all, so the air comes in from towns it does not govern, the water comes from a basin it does not answer to, and the commuting belt is administered by three authorities that meet, when they meet, without power to bind one another.

The compounds. A great deal of the Inner City is behind walls that the public does not pass and the municipality does not inspect. What is inside them is the state’s business, and what that means in practice is that the most closely protected townscape in Asia has, at its centre, a substantial area nobody outside the ministries has seen.

Symbols

Peking has no municipal flag and no arms of its own, and has never wanted either. The city uses the imperial arms on its public buildings and its own municipal seal on its documents, and proposals for a civic emblem have been made twice and defeated twice, on the ground that a capital does not need to advertise itself.

What the city has instead of symbols is its plan. The axis, the gates, the altars at the four quarters and the palace at the centre are the emblem, and the fact that the wall which completed the composition is missing is the reason the argument about emblems keeps returning.

Assessment

Peking is the best-preserved great imperial capital in the world and it did not preserve itself on purpose.

What it kept, it kept because of what it lost. The walls came down in a decade of ministerial decisions that were each defensible and cumulatively indefensible, and the shock of that produced the Capital Conservation Act, which is why the axis, the lanes, the altars and the temples are still there. A city that had not lost its wall would not have passed that law, and would have lost the rest of it in the same way, a junction at a time. The conservation of Peking is a monument to a failure.

What it has kept is genuinely extraordinary, and the reason is political rather than aesthetic. The dynasty did not fall, so the palace was never a symbol to be erased, the court was never a class to be liquidated, the opera was never a feudal remnant to be reformed, and the collections were never divided by a civil war. Peking is what a Chinese capital looks like when nobody has needed to repudiate its past in order to govern its present.

The failings are the ordinary failings of a successful capital and are none the better for that. The Act protects the fabric and evicts the families; the constitution guarantees movement and the rents do the excluding; the ministries exempt themselves from the law they impose on everybody else; and the water arrives from a river a thousand kilometres away belonging to people with droughts of their own.

The question the city’s own conservationists ask at every anniversary of the Act is the obvious one. A city that protects its buildings absolutely and its inhabitants not at all, and that has priced out the people whose great-grandparents built the courtyards now being restored, may reasonably be asked whether it has conserved anything except the buildings. The honest answer is that it has conserved the plan, the fabric, the court, the opera and the collections, which is more than any comparable city, and that the people who lived in the lanes while they were falling down are mostly not the people living in them now.

Chronology

See also

• Empire of China
• The Kingdom of Korea
• Hong Kong
• Empire of Japan
• Berlin
• London

Trivia

Categories

Land & Nature · Cities & Places · The Empire of China · Capitals · Conservation