Remnants of the board remain in Beijing's Old City, whose 25 square miles are roughly on par with Manhattan and where the narrow lanes called hutong still stand, lined by gray-walled, single-story courtyard homes whose tiled roofs need weeding. For centuries the hutong characterized the city's culture; the capital's rigid grid still has locals saying turn north, south, east, and west instead of left and right, even though today fewer than one-eighth of the lanes remain.
But Beijing the city is often overlooked and overwhelmed by Beijing the capital; after all, it has been the seat of national power for all but a handful of the past thousand years. Hence the architectural marvels, the engineering feats, the set-piece extravaganzas like the 2008 Olympics.
Yet for all that, Beijing is not quite a city as Westerners understand it. In 1962, a visiting journalist dubbed the place "the biggest village ever," and for locals -- despite having the world's second-busiest airport, nearly 100 Starbucks, and a new subway system that, at last, covers more than the city's core -- it feels that way still. Beijingers still identify themselves by the district or lane where they grew up. Those roots run deep, the way they do in other global villages.
Beijing's most ubiquitous beverage is a beer named Yanjing ("Swallow Capital," from an ancient city name). It's made in town at a brewery owned partly by the municipal government, long reliant on ex-cons to deliver the green 20-ounce bottles on flatbed bicycles as a form of work rehabilitation. The city's most popular daily tabloid -- the Evening News, circulation 1.2 million -- reads like the sort of small-town American paper that runs the drunk-driving arrests and fishing forecast. Sold from newsstands and by roving carriers who bellow its name over the drone of pet pigeons released for their afternoon laps, the Evening News gives the day's date according to the lunar calendar, tells you if tomorrow's weather will be suitable for washing clothes or airing out the house, and runs graphic photos of suicides, knife attacks, heists, and missing people (and, increasingly common, dogs) in between advertising inserts for weight-loss clinics and virility supplements that allow you to "reach fulfillment every time." It even once mistakenly ran an item from the American satirical newspaper the Onion, reporting that members of the U.S. Congress had demanded a new Capitol with a retractable roof, more concession stands, and expanded parking. In its correction, the Evening News wrote, "Some small American newspapers frequently fabricate offbeat news to trick people into noticing them, with the aim of making money."
Unlike London, Paris, and Tokyo, Beijing the capital no longer strives to be everything at once, as it did in Mao's time. Banks may have their headquarters here, but Shanghai and Shenzhen have the stock markets, and Hong Kong remains the window to international finance. The most famous universities call Beijing home, but their equals exist in Shanghai, Guangzhou, and, increasingly, second-tier cities like Wuhan. Gone are the smokestacks; manufacturing and mines were shuttered or moved to surrounding Hebei province in the run-up to the Olympics -- an anti-pollution measure whose effectiveness is eroded by the ever rising tide of automobiles on the capital's gridlocked streets.
Even as a cultural capital, Beijing falls short. Travelers in China will note that in terms of popularity, Beijing's cuisine takes a back seat to Chengdu's spicy Sichuan fare and Harbin's dumplings. Chinese identify Dalian and Suzhou as the home of fashion and beauty, and coastal Qingdao and Xiamen as the best environments in which to live. The best modern novels and films aren't set here -- the city's most famous work of fiction details the life of a 1930s rickshaw puller that ends so devastatingly that the American translator changed its ending to a happy one without telling the author. And Beijing's best contemporary film, Zhang Yimou's Keep Cool, was pulled from its screening at the Cannes film festival by Chinese censors; Zhang was given no explanation, he says. He would go on to direct the Olympics' opening ceremony at the Bird's Nest stadium, designed in part by Beijing artist Ai Weiwei, who has never been inside, dismissing it as "propaganda."
SUBJECTS:
