And yet: It's Beijing. First a capital in ancient times, it's home to the still-serene Temple of Heaven, to gated villa communities named Upper East Side and Merlin Champagne Town, to the world's largest duck restaurant, to a chain of lakes at the city's heart lined with cacophonous bars and quiet cafes, to the hub of high-speed trains linking the country, and to migrants who make up an estimated 40 percent of its workforce, building high-rises behind billboards that say, "One pinch of soil is one pinch of gold."
Unlike Shanghai, Beijing was not a port connecting China to the outside world. It was designed to be a seat of power, strategically located to keep the northern barbarians at bay and dampen the south's influence over the empire. (The city still feels like a garrison: In addition to the 165 embassies, plus the municipal, district, and neighborhood government offices, all the country's national ministries and Communist Party branches are headquartered here, along with the largest of China's seven military regions -- an estimated 300,000 soldiers charged with defending the capital, as well as the country's borders with Mongolia and Russia.) Shanghai has more people and a larger economy; for all its growth, Beijing's GDP lags behind Moscow's and Sao Paulo's. Shanghai even has claim to "redder" roots, as the site of the meeting, in 1921, of the First National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party.
But Shanghai was not the land of dragons, as legend holds Beijing was, nor was it designed to resemble the shape of the prince who subdued the Dragon King after fighting him nine times a day for nine days. Shanghai was not once named the Swallow Capital, as Beijing was, nor was it the seat of Kublai Khan. Shanghai never had a magnificent palace, never mind one built when Versailles was a mere shooting lodge, and it was not the place where Manchu rulers built pleasure gardens and temples and mosques and cathedrals to showcase their empire. Nor did Shanghai see a battalion of Soviet engineers and architects arrive to erase the city's feudal features and redraw them as a worker's paradise, or reverse course again and tear down the smokestacks, rebuild portions of the city's wall, and restore imperial-era parks.
For the last decade, Beijing the village has globalized, as capitals of rising countries do. Across Tiananmen Square, 72 miles from the Great Wall that marks the city's far border, that change looks like this: an optimistic banner I saw a few years ago, draped over a building's rubble, that read:
(The ancient capital reappears.)
At least it did, until one night, when an anonymous hand neatly excised part of the second character, so that the slogan became:
(Farewell, ancient capital.)
Passers-by note that both slogans hold true; Beijing is once again looping through an 800-year cycle of rebuilding and renewal. The altered sign was pulled down within hours, but no matter: Beijingers don't need to read it. They see it every day.
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