A Brief History
Beijing has frequently been at the center of Chinese history, from the rise and fall of dynasties to the recent triumphs and tragedies at Tiananmen Square. Each great phase left visible marks on Beijing, and the capital is a virtual museum devoted to the world’s oldest continuous civilization.
Peking Man
The skull and bones of China’s oldest prehistoric resident, Peking Man, were discovered 50 km (30 miles) southwest of Beijing in 1929. This excavation at Zhoukoudian, estimated to be 500,000–690,000 years old, constituted one of the major chapters in modern paleontology, since it was the first evidence that early man (Homo erectus) might have evolved in Asia as well as Africa. The Peking Man Caves and Museum at Zhoukoudian are still a major Beijing tourist site, although many of the important fossils are in collections outside China.
Within Beijing itself, there was no evidence of prehistoric settlement until the accidental discovery in 1996 of a Stone Age village barely 1 km (half a mile) from the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square. The stone implements and human fossils at this site, beneath the new Oriental Plaza office and shopping complex, are now on public view in a basement gallery. They push the known human settlement of central Beijing back to 20,000 b.c.
Capital of the Khans
There are records of a town existing at Beijing as early as the Western Zhou Dynasty (1100–771 b.c.), but the growth of the city did not begin until the end of the Tang Dynasty (a.d. 618–907). Invaders from the north, the Khitan, swept down and made Beijing their secondary capital, from which they controlled much of northern China. This period was known as the Liao Dynasty (a.d. 916–1125), but there are almost no traces of it in Beijing today. The Liao capital at Beijing, then known as Yanjing, occupied the southeast region of what is the modern capital today, with the Fayuan Temple the only surviving monument.
Another swarm of nomadic invaders eventually routed the Khitan, establishing the capital of the Jin Dynasty (1115–1234) on the outskirts of Beijing (which they renamed Zhongdu, or Central Capital). The Jin capital was in turn completely razed by a fresh batch of northern nomadic usurpers. They were the Mongols — led by Genghis Khan — who would leave a more lasting and extensive mark on Beijing and all of China.
Genghis Khan laid the groundwork, gradually uniting all China under his rule and leaving it to his famous grandson, Kublai Khan, to secure the Yuan Dynasty (1279–1368). Kublai Khan erected his own capital in 1279 on the shores of Beijing’s Beihai Lake, where some of his imperial treasures remain on display today. It was to these same shores that Marco Polo claimed to have journeyed at the end of the 13th century, where he won the support of Kublai Khan. He made Beijing, then known as Khanbaliq (Khan’s Town) or Dadu (Great Capital), the base for his extensive travels in China as emissary of the Khan. Of the 13th-century capital, Marco Polo wrote that “the whole interior of the city is laid out in squares like a chessboard with such masterly precision that no description can do justice to it” — a pattern Beijing retains to this day.
The Ming Period
The Mongol rulers of the Yuan Dynasty were eventually undone by indigenous Chinese rebels who established one of the most renowned of all imperial lines, the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644). The capital was again razed and rebuilt, and Ming Emperor Yongle gave it a new name that would stick: Beijing (Northern Capital). By 1420 he had finished constructing the city’s most famous surviving monument, the Forbidden City. This was accompanied by other monumental projects. The Bell Tower, the Drum Tower, and above all, the graceful Temple of Heaven were built in the early 15th century. Many of Beijing’s major temples also date from the Ming Dynasty.
The Ming rulers cautiously welcomed a few Catholic missionaries from Europe to Beijing. In the 17th century the Jesuits, headed by Matteo Ricci, had a profound influence not so much on Chinese religion (they made few converts among Beijingers) as on science, mathematics, astronomy, art, medicine, and other forms of knowledge that had never before been infused with Western ideas in China. Perhaps the greatest project of the Ming, however, was the restoration and extension of the Great Wall north of Beijing. For the first time, brick was used to finish these magnificent fortifications. It is the Ming Dynasty Great Wall that millions visit today at Beijing.
The Qing Period
The Ming rulers were understandably nervous about yet another invasion from the north and took defensive measures by extending the Great Wall. They were nonetheless undone by precisely what they feared most: northern invaders. This time the conquerors were the Manchus, who established a dynasty that proved as long-lived and as glorious as the Ming.
The Manchu rulers of the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) were wise enough to adopt Chinese ways. They kept the capital at Beijing but, unlike preceding dynasties, did not raze it. Instead the Manchus preserved and restored China’s past. The Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven, and Beihai Lake were maintained as imperial strongholds. Old temples were renovated, and the hutong neighborhoods of courtyard mansions were developed.
Two of the greatest Qing emperors, Kangxi and his grandson Qianlong, maintained the Ming Tombs and saw to the building of the Summer Palace, while the last great imperial ruler of China, the Empress Dowager Cixi, kept the Summer Palace and the Forbidden City in splendid condition into the early 20th century. These and most other historic sites at Beijing were either preserved or created by the Qing rulers, including their own imperial tombs, which rival those of the Ming.
The Qing Dynasty is also celebrated for its elaboration of the artistic traditions it inherited from the Ming Dynasty. What we know as Peking-style opera and still see performed today in the capital became formalized under the Qing, although its roots (and costumes) go back to Ming and earlier eras. The Ming were also noted for their superb ink paintings, cloisonné enamel work, furniture design, and lacquerware — but above all for their porcelains of the “five-colors” and “blue-and-white” schools. At the end of the Ming, these porcelains with landscape and garden designs became all the rage in Europe, where imitation “Chinese” pottery began to be produced. The Qing continued these artistic traditions, adding increasingly rich and dense ornamentation and applying new colors, many of them clashing or gaudy.
This absorption in overly elaborate artwork, combined with heavy demands for imperial luxuries, finally coincided with a decline in the dynasty itself. In the 19th century the Qing rulers faced a new legion of invaders, not from the north (as in the past) but from the West, and they were unable to resist the tide.
Since the time of the First Opium War (1839–1842), Western nations had been pushing China to open its doors to foreign trade. In 1860, during the Second Opium War, British and French troops forcibly occupied Beijing and exacted treaty rights. Foreign delegations, businesses, and missionaries poured into the capital, taking up residence in the Legation Quarter, located just southeast of the Forbidden City.
In 1900 the Legation Quarter was attacked by the Boxers, a radical nationalist group that had the tacit support of the Qing court. In retaliation for this unsuccessful attempt to expel Westerners from Beijing, military forces representing the eight foreign nations resident in the capital went on a rampage, destroying the national library and even setting fire to the Summer Palace. Thereafter, the Legation Quarter exercised complete control over its own affairs, becoming its own foreign city within the city of Beijing. Many of the European-style embassy buildings, offices, banks, hotels, and mansions of the period have survived, although all have been converted to other uses since the revolution of 1949.
Republicans and Warlords
China’s history of imperial rule is far older than Beijing’s reign as capital, but it was at Beijing that the last of China’s dynasties was destined to fall. The Qing rulers were overthrown in 1911, and the Republic of China, led by Sun Yat-sen, was declared. A period of regional civil wars and power struggles among rival warlords ensued. Students used Tiananmen Square in 1919 as the stage for their protests against post-World War I “unequal treaties” that favored Japan, a patriotic demonstration known as the May the Fourth Movement. In 1928 Beijing was re-established as the national capital under the Guomindang (Nationalist Party), led by Chiang Kai-Shek. For the first time in Beijing history, the imperial strongholds, from the Forbidden City to the Temple of Heaven, were no longer forbidden to China’s masses.
Progress and freedom were short-lived in Beijing. Japan invaded northern China on the eve of World War II, seizing the capital in 1937 after a valiant battle at the Marco Polo Bridge (one of many new monuments added to Beijing in the 20th century). The Japanese occupied Beijing until the war’s end in 1945. Nanjing became China’s new capital under the ruling Nationalist Party, but revolutionary change was in the air.
Communists and Capitalists
On 1 October 1949, a new nation — the People’s Republic of China — was declared from the podium facing Tiananmen Square, and Beijing was again to serve as China’s capital. This new China was indeed radically new. Led by Chairman Mao Zedong, it was the largest communist state in the world, and it would soon begin its own program to reverse and destroy the “feudal” legacy of thousands of years of imperial rule.
The Chinese Communist party first initiated a popular program of reconstruction to transform and modernize the nation. In Beijing, the ancient city walls were pulled down and the city moat was filled in. Only a few of the venerable city gates and towers remain standing today. China’s first subway system now makes a loop that retraces the foundations of the city walls, with the subway stops named for the ancient city gates. Tiananmen Square was substantially enlarged, Chang’an Avenue widened, the Great Hall of the People built, the Museum of History and the Museum of the Revolution opened — all in the 1950s. Old neighborhoods began to be replaced by modern brick-and-concrete highrises. Beijing became its own powerful municipality (not part of any province), the seat of the new revolutionary government for the nation.
The Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) closed Beijing’s doors to the outside world. Mao and his most radical followers shut down the nation’s institutions and went on a witch hunt for those alleged to harbor politically incorrect thoughts, behaviors, or backgrounds (which at times seemed to include anyone not waving Mao’s Little Red Book). Many of Beijing’s temples and historic sites were not only closed but severely damaged, all in the name of making a complete break with the feudal, superstitious past. Renovations as a result of this era of cultural destruction are not yet complete, and some ancient sites have never reopened.
Nevertheless, after the death of Chairman Mao (whose mausoleum on Tiananmen Square has become a much-visited modern monument to China’s modern “emperor”), Beijing entered a period of liberal economic reform that has again transformed the capital. Under “supreme leader” Deng Xiaoping, China opened its doors to Western investment and culture in the 1980s.
By the time of Deng’s death in 1997, Beijing was firmly reshaping itself as an international capital in the Western mode, complete with expressways, skyscrapers, shopping plazas, luxury hotel chains, rock concerts, and state-of-the-art computer technologies — not to mention rising crime rates, soaring pollution levels, increasing unemployment, and income disparities sharp enough to make Mao turn over in his crypt.
The skyline of the capital rises higher and higher each year, glass and steel replace brick and mud in the old courtyards, cars replace carts in the streets, and computers replace abacuses in the schools. Today’s Beijing would seem to have little in common with the Beihai lakeshore of Kublai Khan and Marco Polo, the Forbidden City of the Ming, the Summer Palace of the Qing, the Temple of Confucius, or even the patriotic tomb of Chairman Mao. But China’s capital has not escaped the history that shaped it, be it ancient or modern. Visitors can still see both today.
