Historical Background

The first Peking men

Emperor Qin Shi Huang

Some of man’s earliest forebears wandered the countryside now buried beneath the concrete of Beijing. The bones and stone tools of an early hominid, aged between 500,000 and 300,000 years old, were found at Zhoukoudian, a site 48km south-west of Beijing, in the 1930s. This human ancestor, originally credited as Sinanthropus pekinsis, or Peking Man, is now called Homo erectus.

Fast-forward several millennia and settlements appear near modern-day Beijing from around 1000BC. Foremost among these was Ji, a local capital during the Warring States period (475BC–221BC), and a trading post for Koreans, Mongols and others. This turbulent period ended when Emperor Qin Shi Huang (who ordered the assembling of the Terracotta Warriors at Xian) united six states, and Ji became an administrative centre and military town for over a thousand years.

Yanjing-Zhongdu-Dadu

The town first achieved real prominence in the tenth century. Having been renamed Yanjing, it became the second capital of the Liao dynasty, which was established by the conquering Kitan tribe, who came from modern-day Mongolia. But it lost this name during the next dynasty—the Jin—becoming instead Zhongdu (“central capital”). Rather less successful than the Liao, the Jin dynasty had lasted under 90 years before Ghengis Khan, having united the Mongols, turned his attention south. He arrived in 1215 and captured and destroyed Zhongdu.

Ghengis's grandson, Kublai Khan started rebuilding the city in 1267, and four years later made this city of Dadu (“great capital”) the winter—and principal—capital of his empire.

This is arguably where Beijing’s modern history starts. When in 1279 the Mongols triumphed over the Southern Song, the dynasty that controlled the southern part of China, Dadu became the first centre of a unified China, and the capital of the new Yuan dynasty.


“Such a vast population inside the walls and outside, that it seems quite past all possibility.” Marco Polo

• Marco Polo arrived in China in 1271 and stayed for 17 years. The Venetian was enraptured by Kublai’s city. “The streets are so straight and wide that you can see right along them from end to end,” Polo gushed.

Kublai ensured that the capital’s palace buildings were completed first, and supplemented with artificial lakes and parks. Transport connections to the outside world were improved by the completion of the Tonghui Canal in 1293, which linked Dadu to the Grand Canal and thence to the sea.

The Ming...

Emperor Yongle

A rebellion in 1368 drew on internecine Mongol strife to overthrow the Yuan and establish the Ming dynasty in its place. The Ming moved their capital south to Nanjing, and Dadu was renamed Beiping (“northern peace”).

In 1406, Yongle, the third Ming emperor, inked his name in the city's history books by ordering the building of the Forbidden City—the sanctum of China's imperial family for the next six centuries. The project was a remarkable logistical effort, demanding some 1m workers. Timber for the palaces was felled in Sichuan, but could only be transported once rain water had rolled the trunks into the river, from where they could be steered towards the Grand Canal and thence to the capital. Foreigners and commoners were forbidden entry to the complex unless under special circumstances.

Yongle was preoccupied with fortifying his empire against Mongol invaders and controlling his northern armies, so in 1421 he moved the capital back to Beiping-a move whose expense added 10% to land taxes-and renamed the city Beijing (“northern capital”).

...and the Qing

Manchu invaders from the north overthrew the Ming in the 17th century and this new Qing dynasty ruled China from 1644. They kept Beijing as their capital, and a sequence of three great emperors, Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong, cemented the city’s position at the centre of China’s political and cultural life. The 18th century was Beijing’s golden period. The Summer Palace was redesigned, with Qianlong using 100,000 workers to extend and deepen Kunming lake, and the Forbidden City was restored.

17th-century Beijing

Constant expansion by European and other powers in the 19th century spelt the end of Qing isolationist policies and the system by which the court controlled the movement of foreign residents in China. The First Opium War between Britain and China, fought by the British to preserve their aggressive trading links in China, ended with the humiliating Treaty of Nanjing, signed in 1842, which gave Hong Kong to Britain “in perpetuity” and opened five treaty ports where Britons could live and work. The British attacked Guangzhou 15 years later after Qing officials made a supposedly illegal search of a ship they suspected of opium smuggling. They then sailed north and threatened to seize Tianjin, a port near Beijing. But the Qing capitulated and agreed to the Treaty of Tianjin, which opened more Chinese ports to foreign trade and allowed the establishment of foreign legations in Beijing, which up to that point had been a closed town.

End of an empire

The Boxers came to prominence in the late 19th century. A nationalistic group who were vehemently anti-foreign and anti-Manchu, they were co-opted by the Qing rulers, and particularly the Empress Dowager Cixi (the de facto ruler of late-Qing China), who viewed them as a tool for ridding China of meddling foreign powers. In June 1900 the Boxers laid siege to westerners and Chinese Christians in Beijing’s Legation Quarter. The German embassy on the other side of town could not be defended by the small body of western fighters, and the ambassador was killed.

In response, a 20,000-strong expeditionary force involving soldiers from eight different countries—but mainly Japanese, Russian, British and American—invaded China on August 4th to quell the siege, fighting their way to the capital from the port at Tianjin. Within ten days they had beaten a combined force of imperial troops and Boxer rebels, and burned down the Summer Palace. The following September the Chinese were forced to sign a peace agreement, the Boxer Protocol.

The new republic

The imperial troops' inability to defend China from foreign invasion was one of the factors that hastened the demise of the Qing dynasty. The first decade of the 20th century saw a growing anti-Manchu, Chinese-nationalist movement that inspired a series of small rebellions, leading to the collapse of Qing rule in 1911.

• The last emperor was Puyi, born in 1906 and “ruler” from 1908. The regent, Empress Dowager Longyu, abdicated on his behalf in 1912, but he was allowed to live on in the Forbidden City. He was restored to the throne in 1917 by a warlord, but lasted in power just 12 days. Seven years later he was expelled from the Forbidden City by another warlord, Feng Yuxiang.
Library of Congress
Library of Congress

Chiang Kai-shek

The Republic of China was formed in 1912 with Sun Yat-Sen, leader of the nationalist Kuomintang party, as its president. Yet the central government was weak, and power was concentrated mainly in the hands of regional warlords. When Sun Yat-sen died in 1925, leadership of the Kuomintang was assumed by Chiang Kai-shek. Chiang's mission to evict foreigners and unify China created an uneasy alliance between his army and the Communists. The nationalists made Nanjing their capital in 1927, so when Chiang reached Beijing in 1928 he reverted its name to Beiping (“northern peace”), to reflect its provincial status.

After Chiang turned on his Communist allies, they fled south to Wuhan and the civil war began. The Japanese took advantage of China’s weakened state to invade Manchuria in 1937 and captured Beiping in July. They retained control of the city for six years, while the Kuomintang established a temporary capital at Chongqing in the Sichuan province.

Communist rule
AFP
AFP

Following the second world war, Mao Zedong led his Communist forces to victory over the forces of the Kuomintang. The Communist army, the People’s Liberation Army, formally entered Beiping on January 31st 1949 and, as the new capital, the city became “Beijing” once more. In October of that year, Mao stood in Tiananmen Square to announce the formation of the People’s Republic of China.

He put forward a vision of Beijing as an anti-bourgeois city where worker units clustered around factories. “We’ll see a forest of chimneys from here,” he gestured. He ordered the demolishing of the city walls not only to ease transport burdens but also because he saw the barriers as a throwback to China’s feudal history.


“We’ll see a forest of chimneys from here.” Mao Zedong in Beijing, 1949

At the beginning of Communist rule, Beijing was an old-fashioned, small-scale city of congested, narrow streets, where all houses were lower than official buildings, as per Qing rules. The Communists wanted to change this, and were inspired by the principles of Soviet architecture in their plans to redevelop the city. Officials expanded Tiananmen Square in 1958 to four times its original size and destroyed many of the old-style courtyard houses in the hutongs, the centuries-old neighbourhoods of narrow alleyways (see: That was Beijing, September 7th 2000.

The Cultural Revolution began in 1966, and saw students becoming Red Guards and participating vigorously in the fight against the four “olds”: old culture, old ideas, old customs, old habits. Many of Beijing’s traditional buildings were destroyed and many were redesignated as factories (eg, the Lama Temple and the Confucius Temple).

Tiananmen tragedy, twice
AFP
AFP

Tiananmen Square, 1976

Zhou Enlai, the Premier of the PRC, died in January 1976. Many of the wreaths and poems laid in Tiananmen Square during a public holiday that April were subtly critical of the Gang of Four, the Communist Party leaders considered the architects of the Cultural Revolution. Alarmed, the Politburo ordered that everything be removed from the square overnight. When thousands of mourners returned the following day, the square was forcibly cleared and party officials arrested 4,000 people and beheaded 60 that evening in the Great Hall of the People.

Mao died in September 1976 and by 1979 Deng Xiaoping had emerged as the new leader. He introduced progressive, free-market reforms that enabled some Chinese to get rich, and used material incentives to increase agricultural output. Some of the cultural ravages visited on Beijing in the previous decades were mended in the 1980s, as money was spent on temples and monuments.
AFP
AFP

Before the massacre, 1989

Yet Deng's limited reforms could not satisfy a growing mood for change. In 1989, public mourning at the death of Hu Yaobang, a popular former General Secretary of the Communist Party, gave way to student-led demonstrations, called to coincide with a visit to Beijing by Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader. On April 27th around 50,000 students took to the streets to express their outrage at the government-sponsored media and their disappointment with the limits of Deng’s reforms. Bizarrely, they were joined by workers who believed that the reforms had gone too far, but the two groups coalesced on an anti-corruption stance. By May 4th there were 100,000 on the streets, and Martial law was declared on May 20th. Two weeks later the army fired on unarmed demonstrators, killing hundreds and possibly thousands. Some estimate that as many as 7,000 protesters were killed.

Post-1990
AP
AP

Public discussion of the Tiananmen Square massacre remains taboo, and many of the freedoms for which the demonstrators agitated have not yet materialised (see: Where are they now?, June 3rd 2004). Many argue that the city's growing wealth lets people ignore their lack of political freedoms: politicians have quelled dissent by loosening social controls and allowing unprecedented economic freedom.

Yet as some in Beijing enjoy a standard of living that approximates that of Shanghai and Hong Kong, the last ten years have also seen many more beggars on Beijing's streets (see: Rich man, poor man, September 25th 2003 and Golden boys and girls, February 12 2004).

The city's building boom gathered pace in the 1990s (see: Cultural Revolution, February 12th 2004), and has accelerated since Beijing won the right to host the 2008 Olympics (see: Beijing gets the gold, July 16th 2001).
AP
AP

Swathes of development have followed, thanks to private and public investment. New business and residential districts, green areas and roadways have radically transformed the face of the city. Factories have moved to the suburbs and construction has begun on an 80,000-seat stadium in the north of the capital. Beijing’s bureau of statistics says that $16 billion will be directly invested in communications, infrastructure and housing improvements (see: Olympian efforts, February 16th 2006).

The pain of modernising

This advance has come at a price, though. Beijing’s population has tripled since 1949, and the streets are thronged. Beijingers have been trading in their traditional bicycles for cars, and the traffic jams are awe-inspiring. Combine these cars, buses and lorries with the factories in the suburbs, and the result is a near-ubiquitous haze of murky grey. Some locals optimistically refer to this as “fog”.

In the summer, Beijing suffers another hardship—dust storms, the result of fierce winds sweeping in from the overgrazed, deforested Gobi Desert. A 5,700km line of trees is being planted north of the city to help prevent this. But the benefits are not felt quite yet. Together with the heat, these storms can make midsummer here a grim experience.
Reuters
Reuters

Death of the old city

As the local government pulls down more hutongs (the old narrow streets around the Forbidden City), the residents of the courtyard-style homes are being relocated into purpose-built apartment blocks. Hundreds of thousands have been moved from buildings dismissed as old and dangerous. At a time when new museums are springing up—there are plans for 20 more before 2008—and tourists are increasing, it is strange for town planners to destroy a rare trace of the city's architectural past. But the drive to modernise here is stronger than the drive to preserve.

Lacking the commercialism of Shanghai, Beijing has long been overshadowed by the richer city to the south. But the Olympics and a new mood of optimism are leading locals to believe that Beijing is on the verge of regaining its pre-eminence, which is good news for visitors.