An Armchair Traveller's History of Beijing

By Jonathan Clements

As China’s global influence continues to rise, its capital, Beijing, has become increasingly important—and a popular tourist destination, greeting close to five million international visitors each year. An Armchair Traveller’s History of Beijing presents the capital from its earliest beginnings as a prehistoric campsite for Peking Man through its fluctuating fortunes under a dozen dynasties.

Home to capitals of several states over time, the site of modern Beijing has been ruled by Mongolian chiefs and the glorious Ming emperors, whose tombs can still be found on its outskirts. Through Beijing, we can experience Chinese history itself, including its more famous residents—including Khubilai Khan, Mulan, and Marco Polo. Special emphasis is placed on Beijing’s precarious heritage in the twenty-first century, as modern construction wipes out much of the old city to make way for homes for twenty million people.

This book also offers detailed information on sites of tourist interest, including the pros and cons of different sections of the Great Wall and the best ways to see the Forbidden City and the fast-disappearing relics of the city’s Manchu and Maoist eras. A chapter on food and drink examines not only local delicacies, but the many other Chinese dishes that form part of Beijing’s rich dining traditions. With its blend of rich history and expert tips, An Armchair Traveller’s History of Beijing is an essential introduction to one of the world’s most remarkable cities.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Haus Publishing
• Release date: Nov 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781909961302

Jonathan Clements

Jonathan Clements presented several seasons of Route Awakening (National Geographic), an award-winning TV series about Chinese history and culture. He is the author of many acclaimed books, including Coxinga and the Fall of the Ming Dynasty, Confucius: A Biography, and The Emperor’s Feast: A History of China in Twelve Meals. He has written histories of both China and Japan, two countries that have, at some point, claimed Taiwan as their own. He was a visiting professor at Xi’an Jiaotong University from 2013 to 2019. He was born in the East of England and lives in Finland.

Book preview

day.

1

The Land of Swallows: Prehistory to 221 BC

HE IS BARELY HUMAN. The nose is a little broader than one might be used to. The lips seem oddly thin, pressed in the beginnings of a smirk. Bushy eyebrows sit atop large brow ridges. He stares down the steps, towards what is now the car park, and seems lost in thought.

This is no ordinary sculpture. The bronze head that sits outside the Zhoukoudian museum is based on painstaking archaeological reconstruction. The artist Lucile Swan, a graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago, had moved to China in 1929, and found herself charged with the job of rebuilding the image of a man from mere fragments of bone. It was not the only sculpture that Swan worked on in Beijing. She also modelled a bust of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit priest with whom she fell in love. They never consummated their relationship, although their passionate, heartfelt correspondence survives, as does Swan’s statue of the famous ‘Peking Man’. Today he stares, inscrutably, down the steps that lead up to the museum built in his honour.

The Discovery of Peking Man

Only a hundred years ago, Zhoukoudian (see Gazetteer: Fengtai) was still an obscure mining community on the outskirts of Beijing, where residents quarried the nearby limestone hills. One cliff, known as Chicken Bone Hill, was notorious for its endless supply of old animal remains. Nor were its artefacts always readily recognised – it also contained many fossils of unidentified creatures, written off by local authorities as ‘dragon bones’.

Still beyond the reach of the modern subway network, Zhoukoudian doesn’t attract the same dutifully trudging crowds as the Forbidden City. There are no truant students here trying to pressgang me into looking at their art show. No old ladies push postcards or souvenir fans. Zhoukoudian is a way out from the urban centre and chiefly of interest to archaeologists. On the day that I arrive, the car park is deserted. I have the gift shop to myself, the road to the summit is deserted, and at its terminus, I am the only man in the cave where the first men once dwelt.

A few foreign archaeologists picked over the area in the early 20th century and carted off some debris to analyse. It was not until 1926, in Sweden, that scientists picking over some Zhoukoudian junk made the discovery of a lifetime – two human teeth. The first documented case of Homo erectus pekinensis, or ‘Peking Man’ had already travelled thousands of miles from the place where he, his ancestors and his distant descendants had made their home for tens of thousands of years.

A wide, clean road leads up the hill to the museum, flanked by memorial tablets to the scholars who excavated Peking Man and his artefacts – men such as Johan Gunnar Andersson, the Swedish geologist who surveyed the hill in 1918, Pei Wenzhong, the Chinese archaeologist who found the first skull in 1929, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the French palaeontologist who was denounced by the Catholic church as a heretic.

A path winds away from the low, unobtrusive museum around the hilltop itself, where cavemen spent thousands of years looking down on the valley below. A single glance is not enough to appreciate its full impact. It is not the cave that is impressive, but the fact that primitive man lived here for thousands of years. This bare cavern could be the very place where fire was first kindled; where the first words were spoken; where the first art was created in China. Like the Great Wall, it is not so much the sight itself that is humbling; it is the knowledge of how far it extends beyond view, out past the horizon, across the mountains and deep back into