Blitzed Beijing

Due north of the Forbidden City, at the foot of Coal Hill, I met a French couple with a motorbike and sidecar. They had bumped the bike up on to the pavement. She was sitting in the sidecar. He was trying the starter pedal with regular patient stamps, as though working a lathe’s treadle. He had a handlebar moustache (Great War General) and a soft blue felt beret (onion seller). She had dark glasses ( Jackie Onassis) and a mulberry silk scarf (perfume advert). He answered my questions, as the bike coughed and hawked and refused to start. The bike itself: 1960s, I guessed, and painted a gleaming black. A single wide headlight mounted above its thin front wheel, and the sidecar plump as a thorax.

‘She is a beautiful machine,’ I said.

‘He is a beast.’

‘A French design?’

‘No. Chinese manufacture from a German pre-war design. A CJ 750.’

‘Have you travelled far on it?’

‘Not today.’

‘More generally, then?’

‘We have been on the road for two years now. The present leg of the journey has taken us from Kashgar to Beijing. From here we go due north, to the ice. Harbin.’

The woman looked off into the middle distance, waiting for the conversation to end. Another stamp and the bike gunned. He tweaked the choke until the engine roared, pulled his goggles down into place, smiled a farewell. Then the bike trundled forwards, the back wheels thumped off the kerb and on to the road, and they sailed off northwards with a blast, her hair and scarf flying out behind them.

A CJ 750: a Chang Jiang 750. A strange link back to theThird Reich; an unforeseen ghost of Speer’s line. For much of the 1930s, Germany was forbidden under the terms of theTreaty of Versailles from any form of military vehicle production, including motorcycles and sidecars. But with the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939, three years before Speer became Minister of Armaments, Hitler circumvented this proscription. Manufacturing became a joint venture: Germany supplied the designs and Russia the labour. Among the technological rake-offs for the Russians was the original BMW design for a high-capacity motorbike and sidecar, with superb off-road abilities.After the war, the Russians sold on the basic design of the motorbike to their new allies the Chinese, who quickly began large-scale production. The CJ 750 became the People’s Liberation Army standard issue from 1957 and over the course of forty years, more than 1.5 million of the bikes were produced in China.

I left the road to the motorbikes and the cars and climbed Coal Hill.The hill — flat Beijing’s only high point — is artificial: made from the heaped-up rubble excavated during the building of the Forbidden City. Five pavilions are erected on its crest: the highest and biggest stands on the meridian line; two lesser temples align to the east and two to the west.

Up in the highest temple, in the full strength of the northerly wind, the city’s symmetry became visible. To the south, I could see the axis bisecting the seven great central roofs of the Forbidden City. Northwards, it led to the squat shape of the Drum Tower and proceeded, vanishingly, into the pink-and-yellow granite hills that shield Beijing.

But in every other direction, disrupting the symmetry, were buildings: plazas, trade towers, hotels, banks. Beijing is not a brutalist city, because it is so various in its styles. There is no architectural vernacular, only competitive idiosyncrasy. Single superstar buildings stand aloof, like models in a fashion parade. Scanning the skyline, I could see pseudo-air-con towers (chalk-white in memory of modernism), a 300-foot-high steel coil (the city’s technology museum), a gigantic ‘buckyball’, office towers like vertical chocolate bars and dozens of the undistinguished slabs of glass and steel that embody the Stalinist architectural logic of grandiose intimidation: Engulf the Pedestrian, Turn Visitor to Supplicant.

Spread between these buildings was the city’s architectural understorey: five-floor Maoist-era work units and a few relict areas of hutong, with their four-sided courtyards, or siheyuan. The courtyard was the cell of the old imperial city, a domestic space designed to encourage harmonious family living. But rampant land speculation, uneven development and corruption have now brought the hutong to the cusp of extinction.

I came down the steep northern side of Coal Hill and walked out through the wood of conifers at its base.The air was fresh and resin-scented.vBlack-capped corvids with jouncy tails bickered in thevbranches. I passed four elderly Chinese women in smart brocaded jackets singing Peking opera to the backing of a crackly tape-player, their high voices carrying far between the trees. Further on I found a glade of sorts, in which thirty or forty women in tracksuits were dancing in time to what sounded like a Chinese version of do-si-do. They beckoned me to join their hoedown, but for their good as well as mine I shook my head, and walked on. I’d cleared too many dance floors in my time.

It was north of Coal Hill that the destruction really began. It was as if I had walked into a bombsite. On either side of the road were cratered acres of rubble, twenty or thirty metres across. Fields of Demolished hutong, smashed by the wrecking ball and the hand hammer, presumably to permit the widening of road into avenue. The debris had spilled on to the pavement, which was strewn with shattered slabs, broken bricks and slip-heaps of scree.

Some of the buildings had been left part standing, so you could see into rooms designed to see out of: half a bathroom, with its flush tank still standing on iron struts.A ripped-back bedroom, flowered and stained wallpaper leaning out fromone of its walls. Sheaves of tin roofing and collapsed sheets of corrugated asbestos. I thought of the blitzed Vienna of The Third Man, with Harry Lime fleeing over the rubble, or Rose Macaulay’s adventures — described in The World My Wilderness — exploring the bombed-out buildings of London: ‘the vaults and the cellars and caves, the wrecked guildhalls, the broken office stairways that spiralled steeply past empty doorways and rubbled closets into the sky…’

Scavengers were picking over the remnants, looking for fragments of scrap metal and other trophies, lashing their finds on to pedal carts. I stepped up on to one of the rubble fields and wandered across it, the bricks sharp underfoot. The scavengers shot me curious stares: What are you doing? Hints of lives previously lived were depressingly visible: a shred of curtain here, a doll’s arm there. I recalled Eugène Atget, the photographer who had chronicled Paris following the years of Haussmann’s overhaul. His walks had turned into acts of elegy: photography as a loving salvage. To some of his images — of alleyways, bars, street corners — he gave the caption ‘Cela aura été’: This will have been.

Further north,welders were at work, squatting on the pavement, orange sparks flurrying off the white-hot centre of the weld. An old man on a bench held aT-shaped perch on which two magpies sat, one on either arm of the T, each tethered by a wire halter about its head and neck. Just south of the Drum Tower, two men came past me in the opposite direction, carrying amirror four feet by four feet. They had tilted it upwards, so that from where I stood it seemed as though they were carrying a slice of the cold winter sky.

A mile on, I stopped at a small park. At its gate, an old man dipped a long-handled brush into a paintpot filled with water.Then he began to write on the paving slabs, with the water serving as ink. He used the brush confidently, producing large, full-form Chinese characters with dynamic strokes and tapering tails. A character per paving slab, more or less, descending vertically, tomake a line of text. A classical poem, I guessed, like the start of one pictured below, but didn’t have the Chinese to ask him. By the time he had reached the bottom of his long line, the topmost characters had begun to evaporate into Beijing’s super-dry air.