GOLDEN WEEKS - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 216

and yang,” according to earlier visitors like Arnold Toynbee. The Imperial Palace, known
as the Forbidden City, sat at the geographic and celestial center of the city, surrounded by
other palaces, temples, vast Asian gardens, archways over the wide streets and a labyrinth
of hutongs leading to traditional houses built with central courtyards mimicking the larger
harmony of the city. As charming as Paris and as mysterious as the Sphinx, Beijing was
considered one of the world's great marvels.
Within ten years most of that ancient Beijing that had been built over five hundred
years had been torn down on orders of the government. The reason was political. The city's
plan followed the feudal order of imperial China and the new leaders wanted a socialist
city.
“The very map of Peking was a reflection of the feudal society, it was meant to demon-
strate the absolute power of the emperor. We had to transform it, we had to make Peking
into the capital of socialist China,” said Professor Ho Renzhi of Peking University to the
journalist Tiziano Terzani.
It was the equivalent of tearing down central Rome because it represented the Italian
past of empire and medieval feudalism. First, the Chinese Communists tore down the
“pailos” or arches, in marble and painted wood that were built across the major streets in
honor of revered citizens of China. Next, the walls came down. In 1950 the Communists
ordered the famed walls removed at night, to avoid citizens' anger. Liang Sicheng, one of
China's best architects at the time, wrote that “it was as if my own flesh was being torn off,
as if my skin was being peeled away.” He was denounced for his right-wing tendencies and
died in disgrace.
This cultural suicide continued. In 1958 the government officials surveyed the city and
declared that 8,000 monuments and buildings were of cultural value and worth saving.
Yet political powers overrode that survey and only 78 of those structures were allowed to
remain standing. Some were removed to make way for small-scale factories and industries;
others for dormitories, apartments or barracks. Centuries-old temples were razed as unne-
cessary as the country geared up for the Great Leap Forward and, in their place, were built
1,400 factories in the center of Beijing. The Abundant Tranquility Temple and the Sleep-
ing Buddha Temple were destroyed to build new roads. Palaces were turned over to work
units and the military.
The authorities tore down thousands of Beijing's courtyard houses, which had defined
northern Chinese architecture since the twelfth century. Every storybook about old China
is illustrated with paintings of modest homes with curved roofs, windows of paper inside
lattice frames, with a small garden enclosed by walls. In place of those temples and
palaces, walls and gateways, the new Chinese authorities built massive modern public
buildings with exposition halls and enormous conference rooms in a style that was bland
at best, and at its worst was grotesque. This modernization purposefully eliminated centur-
ies of culture in order to remake Beijing into a symbol of socialist China. Acting more like