Hutongs again

I live within the second ringroad in Beijing, which is roughly equivalent to having an address in Zone 1 or 2 in London.  Central Beijing is not like other capital cities though.  The traditional hutong style housing – one-storey houses arranged around a central courtyard, parceled into small communities by a network of narrow lanes, and the whole system oriented on an unerring north-south axis – affects how people here live and interact. 

For one thing, the houses, which all have identical slate-grey, windowless, one-storey external walls create the illusion of equality.  Of course, what’s inside the walls is a different matter – one person could be living in Xanadu, while his neighbour might be squeezed into a narrow room with his entire extended family.  Yet the point is that the casual passerby would have little way of knowing.

This effect is at its most obvious when you have a bird’s eye view of the city, for example, if you go to Jingshan Park which is just north of the Forbidden City, in the very heart of Beijing.  As you take in the view, you see that all the hutongs merge into one another – a becalmed lake of blue-grey roof-tiles.  It’s then that you realize the degree of urban planning that went into creating Beijing as a city, and also, how this plan remained essentially unchanged for centuries.

Another thing about hutongs is that they encourage locals to get out on the street.  I imagine neighbors do pay each other home visits sometimes, but the combination of quiet lanes that are too narrow for traffic, and windowless walls that seal you off from outside, mean that if you want to know what’s going on, you have to descend to street-level.  And people do.  Every time you walk through the hutongs, you see people outside passing the time of day: talking, sitting, catching up on the news, walking the dog, watching people go by, playing cards.  The communities live and interact in a way that still strikes me as unbelievably public – was there a time when British lives were played out in the same way?

Of course, not all Beijing is hutongs now, and in fact large sections of hutongs have been cleared to make way for newer housing.  But they still exist in central Beijing, and I’m lucky enough to be able to dip into them.  And as I walk around them, I have started to notice recurring visual motifs, small signs that I have come to associate with the happy intermarriage of people and their living environment: chalk traces of childish games left behind on walls, washing left out to dry in the street, decorated doorways…

These started out as things that just caught my eye, but the more I see them, the more I seek them so that now I am a collector of these images.

Shaolin

Monks

Last weekend I visited Songshan (嵩山) in Henan Province.  Songshan has at least two claims to fame: one is the mountain itself, which is one of the five sacred peaks in Daoism.  Why five?  Because Daoists commonly refer to five compass points – north, south, east, west, and centre.  The second claim to fame is Shaolin Temple, which sits at the base of Songshan, and has passed into literature and legend for its role in training kung-fu monks.

The monks are still there, although I had some trouble distinguishing them from all the other people who I saw fighting in Songshan.  You see, besides the actual monks, there are also teenage military recruits, who belong to a handful of local training schools, and then there Chinese students in local kung fu schools that are capitalizing on the Shaolin brand, and then there are the foreigners who go to Shaolin to study…in fact, the martial spirit is so intense that you can wander through the neighboring town on a Sunday afternoon and pass one batch of youths practicing boxing in the street, another batch of youths completing a long-distance run, and a third batch of youths doing physical stretches within the space of several hundred metres.

Undoubtedly, there are monks in there somewhere.  I saw some of them, performing on stage to a crowd of Chinese out-of-towners.  And I saw a second group of men wearing monks' robes tucking into meat between hearty puffs of cigarettes in a small restaurant behind the main temple.  This isn’t the kind of behavior you expect from Buddhist monks, but then, Shaolin monks are hardly typical.  They perform in theatres across the globe, and have glossy films made about them, although the meat-eating is apparently due to an imperial dispensation that also allows them to be government officials. 

The idea of kung-fu-fighting, Buddhist-monk, Communist-party officials is almost as delicious as the spicy noodles I had while I watched the supposed monks demolish their dinner.

Where do the monks come from?  Three teenagers in the same restaurant informed me that they respectively came from Zhejiang, Yunnan and Shandong – three different corners of the country.  They had been there since the age of about six, and when I asked them how often they went home the most talkative boy paused and his expression darkened, as if he were preparing an answer that would shield the truth without itself being a lie.  In the end, he offered “we can go home if we want to go home”.  Meanwhile, packs of boys no older than seven tumbled and play-fought with sticks in the street outside.  It reminded me of Peter Pan.

Friendship revealed in a bamboo leaf

While browsing a souvenir shop in a small temple nearby, I fell into conversation with the owner.  He showed me an image that, initially, looked like nothing more than a sketch of bamboo.  But then he began to explain…

The bamboo leaves form Chinese characters, somewhat abstracted, but nevertheless recognizable.  And the characters spell out a famous quotation from one of China’s most famous literary classics, “The Romance of the Three Kingdoms”:

不谢东君意

丹青独立名

莫嫌孤叶淡

终久不凋零

The essence of this is a declaration of loyalty from one character in the novel to another, his sworn leader.  It symbolizes friendship.  And as the shopkeeper explained, so does bamboo, because it is evergreen and continues to grow steadily, year after year.  Hence the picture is simultaneously a cleverly disguised reference to a famous legend about friendship, and itself an emblem of friendship – the two symbols reinforcing one another. 

And to think that to me it was, initially, just a picture of bamboo.  I was thrilled by this discovery.

Rocky: Parts I and II

I paid homage to the Spartan spirit of Shaolin while I was there, and perhaps in some small way I also channeled Rocky, although I have never actually seen the film.  I had the idea on the first afternoon while watching the teenagers practice their kung fu on the training ground, and was moved to swear that I too would connect with this hallowed ground.  So, the next morning, shortly after dawn, when the sun had just scraped clear of the mountains, I went for a run…past the temple….past the pagoda forest where the Buddhist masters are buried…back down the other side….past the theatre where they perform everyday…to the centre of the empty training ground, where to the bemusement of several idle young boys, I did twenty press-ups, then continued on my run…back to the small guesthouse and my cold shower.

In fact, when I reflected on it afterwards, this homage was much less Shaolin and much less “Rocky” than it was a cousin with the extravagant poses that you see Chinese people making at tourist sites, and indeed, later that day, I saw Chinese people pretending to throw kung-fu moves for the sake of posterity and their photo albums.  I suppose it’s a common urge not only to want to remember a place, but also to interact with it, and somehow comment on it.

Later that day, I climbed Songshan, which is not so high (just 1500m), but is unusual for the way the path invites you to skirt a near-vertical cliff.  The endpoint, a newly-built temple, flickers temptingly on the horizon, but to get there you have to follow the contour of the cliff.  I will let the pictures do the speaking: