Oracle Bones (30 page)

According to Old Mr. Zhao, the home was more than three centuries old, although the exact age was unknown. But the authorities had never designated the compound as a historic relic, and in 1998 the district government had informed Old Mr. Zhao that they needed to tear it down. He filed a lawsuit against the district Cultural Relics Bureau for failing to add the courtyard to the list of protected properties. For Old Mr. Zhao, it was particularly infuriating because they wanted to tear it down in order to build the most mundane of modern structures: a branch of the China Construction Bank.

“For more than a year, nothing happened,” he said. “Before October 1 of 1999, they were careful about tearing things down, because it was the fiftieth anniversary of the country and they didn’t want trouble. But after that, they started up again. With some of the people in this area, they just cut off the water or electricity, to make them leave.”

In July of 2000, the case went to court. Old Mr. Zhao’s lawyer accused the Cultural Relics Bureau of shoddy research—twice, officials had visited the home, and each time they had spent only a few minutes wandering through the buildings before declaring that the compound shouldn’t be designated a relic. In court, independent experts testified that the home dated at least to the early Qing, and possibly the Ming (the dynasty that ended in 1644). They even located the complex on a map from the eighteenth century. But none of that evidence mattered: the court decided that the definition of a cultural relic depended strictly on the Cultural Relics Bureau’s definition. If the bureau said it could be torn down, then nothing else mattered.

But the old man refused to give up. He was well connected—this was one reason why he acted so fearlessly—and he filed a second lawsuit against the district housing office. This department, in accordance with the rules for demolition, had offered to compensate Old Mr. Zhao according to the quality and size of his home. The settlement came to nearly three million yuan—over three hundred thousand American dollars. Old Mr. Zhao’s suit claimed that the figure was too low, although he told us that this was just a legal tactic.

“It has nothing to do with money,” he said. “This house is mine. My father bought it, and I’ve lived here for more than fifty years. Listen to what the famous architect I. M. Pei says—he says that Beijing has already razed too many courtyards. Ask any foreigner what he remembers about Beijing, and he’ll say the
hutong
. Now, if the foreigners want to protect places like this, why don’t the Chinese? Right now, in all of China, there are only two cities that are still intact: Pingyao and Lijiang. That’s all that’s left after five thousand years of history!”

He referred to two small cities, one in the north of China and the other in the southwest. Now the old man shifted back to English, speaking the words clearly. He held his head back—jutting jaw, flashing eyes.

“As a Chinese person, I have a responsibility to protect this place. I won’t leave willingly. The court can come, the police can come, the ambulance can come. They can force me to leave, but I won’t sign my name and agree. For them, I have just two words: Not moving.”

IN CHINA, OTHER
former capital cities had a longer history than Beijing, but none was so deliberately and carefully created. The city bore the imprint of the Ming emperor Yongle, who had a flair for big ideas. The fleets of Yongle’s reign sailed all the way to Indonesia, India, and the southern tip of Africa. In Nanjing, the original Ming capital, it was Yongle who had attempted to carve out the largest stone tablet in the world.

His plan for Beijing was even more ambitious. In 1421, Yongle moved the capital north from Nanjing, to a city that had formerly been a center for northern people such as the Mongols. In the past, there had been cities on the site, but Yongle approached it more or less like he did the massive slab of limestone—as a blank slate. He organized the new capital along traditional Chinese notions of geomancy; everything was arranged on a strict north-south axis, with the imperial palace facing south. The city reflected a vision of a holy body: certain temples and landmarks corresponded to the head, hands, feet, and other organs of the god Nezha. Over the centuries, the city expanded, but it never lost its original layout.

In the first half of the twentieth century, as modernity transformed so many cities around the world, Beijing remained relatively intact. Political instability stunted China’s growth, and then Nanjing became the capital once more, under the Kuomintang. Even during the Japanese occupation, Beijing’s physical layout wasn’t threatened. In fact, the Japanese planned to preserve the old city, concentrating all new development in a separate satellite district. This plan was never implemented, and in 1949, after the Kuomintang fled to Taiwan, the Communists made Beijing the capital of their New China. There was nothing else in the world quite like it—a major capital city, designed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, that had hardly been touched by modernity or war.

But Mao Zedong, like Yongle, was a ruler with big ideas. He envisioned Beijing as an industrial center, and the city’s old gates and walls were considered an impediment to progress. One by one, they were torn down, for various reasons. In 1952, Xibian Gate was destroyed, in order to harvest bricks. From 1954 to 1955, the Gate of Earthly Peace was demolished, in order to build a road. Chaoyang Gate, in 1956: condemned because of disrepair. Dongzhi Gate, 1965: a new subway line. Chongwen Gate, 1966: subway line. Before the Communists came to power, the fifty-foot-high city wall and its gates had been among the city’s most distinctive features, but by the end of the 1960s virtually all of the structures had been torn down. During the Cultural Revolution, most of Beijing’s remaining temples were either destroyed or converted to other uses.

But many
hutong
survived Mao. His vision of industrial development was basically just a vision: there wasn’t an economic reality behind his theories.
He could tear down the city wall and the major gates, but he never created the prosperity necessary to change the neighborhoods where most people actually lived. After the Cultural Revolution, much of central Beijing’s residential layout was still medieval.

Once the reforms gained momentum, however, the market did a much more thorough job of demolition than Mao. Beijing boomed—the population had been about seven hundred thousand in 1949, and it grew to more than twelve million by the end of the 1990s. Roads needed to be widened, and there was a financial incentive to replace
hutong
with apartment blocks. Banks made more sense than courtyards. In the life-span of old Beijing, the last decade of the millennium was the one that brought the greatest physical change to the city.

Despite the transformation, much of the ancient nomenclature survived. Along the Second Ring Road, there were subway stops and intersections known as Chaoyang Gate, Dongzhi Gate, Chongwen Gate, among others. None of these gates existed in the physical sense, but their names still represented important landmarks. If you went to the Gate of Earthly Peace, you saw traffic lights, pavement, and restless red cabs itching to pass through the memory of a building that had once marked Beijing’s northern axis. A cabbie could take you to Hongmiao—“Red Temple”—but there wasn’t a temple there anymore. Fuxing Gate didn’t exist; Anding Gate was just a name. Old Beijing was becoming a city of words: an imaginary place that residents invoked when they went from one point of modernity to another.

The final word was always
chai
: “pull down; dismantle.” In Beijing, that single character was painted onto structures that were condemned to demolition, and you saw the word everywhere in the old parts of the city. Usually, the character was about four feet tall, surrounded by a circle, like the
A
of the anarchist’s graffiti:

As Beijing changed, that word gained a talismanic quality. Residents cracked
jokes, and local artists riffed on the character. One shop sold baseball caps with encircled
embroidered onto the front. When I hung out in Ju’er Hutong, a neighbor named Old Wang liked to make
puns. “We live in
chai nar
,” he used say. It sounded like the English word “China,” but it meant “Demolish where?” Old Wang remarked that ever since he could remember, people had been tearing down ancient buildings in Beijing. In 1966, along with other schoolchildren, he had been enlisted in a volunteer brigade that helped
the old city wall near Anding Gate.

September 21, 2000

Throughout the fall, a steady stream of Chinese reporters visited Old Mr. Zhao. His lawsuit was part of a new trend—during the late 1990s, there had been a number of significant private suits against the government, including some class-action cases. Whenever a suit was successful, it received prominent coverage in the Chinese press, as a sign that the government was fair. But most lawsuits failed, and those were the ones you never heard about. They remained in the purgatory of reform, where cases could be made but never won, and reporters could investigate but never publish. A few articles about Old Mr. Zhao’s lawsuit appeared in minor provincial newspapers, but there was a strict media blackout in the capital. The Beijing reporters visited the courtyard as a kind of ritual: they paid homage to the story, even though they couldn’t tell it.