Blitzed Beijing

Two months before coming out to Beijing, I had spent a day with the writer Iain Sinclair, walking the perimeter of London’s ‘Olympic Park’: the 500-acre site in the Lower Lea Valley that has been requisitioned, fenced off and depopulated in preparation for its 2012 Olympic future. The idea for the walk had been Sinclair’s. For years now, he has been working on a book about Hackney: a deep history or mapping of that borough, whose final chapters will detail the damage done to it by the coming of the Games. Our circumambulation of the park was a part of this survey — a ritual pacing-off of London’s new Empty Quarter.

From London, I had come out to Beijing, another Olympic city. Soon after I arrived, I began looking for a way to walk Beijing: a route logic that would takeme under the city’s skin, or at least through some of its contrasts. A few weeks after arrival, I found the answer.

Take a street map of Beijing, a ruler and a pencil. Draw a line running north–south down the city, and bisecting Tiananmen Square, so that you have given Beijing a central axis. You will see that many of the city’s most significant structures align along this meridian. The Bell Tower and the Drum Tower in the north. Coal Hill, on which the last Ming Emperor hanged himself in 1644. The Forbidden City. The Monument to the People’s Heroes, China’s answer to the Iwo Jima memorial. And south of that, the ‘Maosoleum’, as it is locally known: the vast pseudo-classical building, inside which is a bullet-proof sarcophagus of angled glass, inside which is the embalmed corpse of Chairman Mao, lying precisely along the axis, his head to the south. Mao, smart in his long coat, aloof even in death, orange from the formaldehyde used to preserve him: a great proto-Hirstian shark,mandarin in three senses.

The meridian alignment of these sites is not accidental. For Beijing is a creased city, originally designed about a centrefold. During the first main pulse of Beijing’s construction, in the Yuan Dynasty (1260–1368), the city planners embedded a lateral symmetry into their blueprint. A four-mile axis or ridgeway was to run down the city’s centre from north to south. Fishbone streets were to run orthogonally out from this spine, within which courtyard houses were to make a chequerboard pattern, and important buildings were to be constructed equidistantly to the east and west of the spine. The symmetry was intended to connote and to embody harmony: metropolis as Rorschach print for the balanced mind.

This axial conceit thrived throughout the imperial centuries, and even beyond them. For after the Communists came to power in 1949, they extended the idea of the axis.Tiananmen Square — a Communist construction — was oriented along it, and Mao’s portrait was hung perfectly astride it, in the centre of the Gate of Heavenly Peace, the Forbidden City’s great southern portal. The portrait remains there, sentinel and vast:Mao’s head twenty feet high and the wart on his chin big as a bowling ball.

Then, in 2002, Beijing held an open competition for a redesign of the city in advance of the Olympics. Starchitects from around the world submitted proposals. And the winner was none other than Albert Speer, the son of Hitler’s own architect, Albert Speer.

Speer Senior became the Nazi Party architect in 1934. He designed and built the Nuremberg parade grounds, the new Reich Chancellery and the German Pavilion for the 1937 International Exposition in Paris. He helped to plan the stadiums for the Aryan Games, a proposed replacement for the Olympic Games. He oversaw the construction of the Olympic Stadium for the 1936 Berlin Games, which were filmed by Leni Riefenstahl. He devised the theory of ‘ruin value’, the idea that buildings should be constructed with a view to their future dilapidation. And he drew up plans for a widespread redesign of Berlin, to celebrate its status as the capital of Germania — the Greater Germany. Speer’s new Berlin was to be organized along a three-mile central avenue, running north–south through the city: an axis for the Axis. At the north end would be the huge domed Volkshalle; at the south a triumphal arch and a railway station. An estimated 80,000 houses would be demolished to accommodate the avenue.

Speer’s plans for Berlin were abandoned on the outbreak of war in 1939. But they found a curious reprise in Speer Junior’s winning vision for the redesign of Beijing. For his plans involved a radical widening and lengthening of Beijing’s central axis. A vast avenue would run south from the new Olympic stadiums in the north (the Bird’s Nest and the Water Cube), down to the Bell Tower. Then south of Tiananmen, the avenue would resume: another fourmiles to a new rail terminal and an eco-park. Affinities were, of course, quickly pointed out between Speer Junior’s Beijing and Speer Senior’s Berlin. Speer Junior rejected the comparisons as invidious and ignorant. His design was, he said, indigenous to Beijing: ‘My philosophy is to find something related to the situation, to the climate, to the history, to the people who are there.’ He explained that he took his inspiration partly fromthe city’s own pre-existing axis and partly from the Chinese ideogram for ‘middle’, zhong, which is also the first character of China — Zhongguo, meaning the Middle Kingdom. The character zhong resembles a cube of meat pushed on to a skewer. It is my second favourite Chinese character, after that for kebab, chuan, which resembles two cubes of meat pushed on to a skewer (see below).