Satori - Don Winslow [29]
18
ALTHOUGH NICHOLAI HAD PORED over maps and aerial photographs, they could not substitute for on-the-ground knowledge, and he wanted to orient himself to the city. His survival might depend on an immediate decision as to what alley to turn into, what street to avoid, and there would be no time for indecision or hesitation.
Beijing in the early days of 1952 was a city of contradictions, divided between spacious governmental sections and the narrow alleys—hutongs — on which most of the people lived. The heart of Beijing was the Forbidden City — as its name indicated, closed off to the general public for most of its thousand-year existence. Now that the Communist government had moved in and turned many of its buildings into offices and residences, most of it was still “forbidden” most of the time.
The “other” Beijing that surrounded the Forbidden City was — or used to be — a vibrant, active, cosmopolitan city of some two million people, with open-air markets, streets of fashionable shops, small parks and squares where jugglers, magicians, and other buskers performed.
The Beijingren, the natives, had the same tough, jaded, superior attitude of the residents of all major cities. To them, Beijing was its own universe, and they were not entirely wrong. Everyone had come to the imperial city — not only all manners of Chinese, but, for good or ill, the rest of the world as well. So the sophisticated Beijing citizens knew all the varied cultures of China, Japan, and Europe. A well-heeled Beijingren might well have eaten in French restaurants, bought suits from Italian tailors, watches from German craftsmen. Most of the modern Beijingren had worn British suits or French dresses and danced to American music.
Still, any good Beijingren, from the impoverished night-soil collectors to the richest merchant, would proudly proclaim the superiority of Beijing culture itself— its fabled imperial buildings, its bridges and parks and gardens, centuries-old restaurants and teahouses, its theaters and opera houses, its circuses and acrobats, its poets and writers.
Beijing was a sophisticated imperial capital when London and Paris were little more than insect-infested swamps. Of all the European capitals, only Rome could rival Beijing in terms of antiquity, sophistication, and power.
The Beijingren had seen it all. Within the living memory of many of its citizens, Beijing had survived invasions from the French, the Germans, the Nationalists, the Japanese, and now the Communists. It had adjusted, evolved, and survived.
Many observers were surprised that Mao chose the city, with all its imperial associations, for his capital. Nicholai thought he chose Beijing for exactly those associations. No ruler could claim power in China without those trappings — without possession of the Temple of Heaven, no emperor could claim the Mandate of Heaven, and Nicholai knew that Mao, for all his Communist propaganda, saw himself as the new emperor. Indeed, he had quickly shut himself up in the Forbidden City, and was rarely seen outside it.
The Beijingren knew this. They had known many emperors, had seen dynasties rise and fall, watched them build monuments to themselves and then watched them crumble, and they knew that the Communist Dynasty was but one in a long line. Its time would come and its time would pass, but the city would endure.
But in what form, Nicholai wondered as he walked out the front entrance, up the street, and then turned right onto Chang’an. Mao had plans for the city and announced that he was going to transform it from “a city of consumption to a city of production.” Already blocks of old houses had been torn down to make room for new factories, narrow streets were being broadened to allow tanks to roll up and down, and Soviet architects — a perfectly oxymoronic phrase, in Nicholai’s opinion — were now busily designing sterile concrete housing units to replace the old courtyard houses that were the center of Beijing domestic life.
The courtyard walls lined the residential