... of contrasts and colourful images

Disembarking at Beijing's Capital international Airport is to be immediately thrust into an exciting other world. Instantly, the earthy flavour of green tea, the nasal glissandi of the Er Hu and the nostalgic rhythms of Chinese classical music combine with the tangy broth of Chinese noodles and the dark mesmerizing eyes of the East, leaving visitors not just a little stunned.

A world that today also combines the sites and sounds of ancient heritage with contemporary global architecture and modernization, Beijing is a place of immense curiosity that satisfies all tastes.

Walking Tour

Tempted by the rare rather than the usual, many global travellers to Beijing overlook what the guidebooks eagerly suggest, and this can be a mistake, the rare can lie just at the borders of the usual.

Yandai Xie Jie (Tobacco Pipe Lane) and Liulichang Market are two places that attract great bands of tourists, both night and day. But by hanging back from the crowd and lingering a little, letting the cooling breeze of a summer day draw you from the beaten track, you can experience some unexpected delights.

One of the hotspots of Beijing's nightlife, Yandai Xie Jie has the air of a briefly vacated party if visited on a weekday morning before the crowds arrive.

Xie Jies are celebrated in Beijing for their human scale and meandering form, and approached from Di'anmen Avenue this one winds like a broken stream between two great tourist spots: Yin Ding Qiao to the east and Drum and Bell Tower at Gu Lou to the West.

Now something of a rarity in Beijing, the Xie Jie recalls a time when the city was almost entirely composed of narrow winding streets. With the demands of expansion, and the needs of motor vehicles.

Beijing's roads were fully redeveloped in 1979 using a grid system and the remaining Xie Jie now act, quite literally, as a path back in time. Tobacco Pipe Lane (Yandai Xie Jie) dates back to the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) and once sold pipes and accoutrements.

Street-side research will tell you that the name comes from its curved, pipe-stem-like shape.

Turning from Di'anmen Avenue, the history of Yandai Xie Jie pulls you down its narrow, flagstone laneway and throws you in the path of speeding pedicabs that ferry tourists more inclined to rest than to walk. There are old buildings that house contemporary 'fusion' shops selling cloths and music and cutting hair, and newly renovated buildings that display the ancient traditions of ethnic craft with wall hangings, woodcarving and batik. But China life has not been hidden.

An old woman sits chewing on the step of her home, appearing uninterested in what flows around her. Further on, bicycle repair shop spills out on to the pavement and a barbershop TV blares over well-scrubbed floor tiles where a young man gets a head massage.

Hutongs

Across town, at He Ping Men, and right near Qian men, there is Liulichang Antique Market, stretching both sides of Nanxinhua Jie, to the east and west. But going east, and crossing the confusion of touts and pedicabs at its entrance, a lane lined with newly developed buildings, selling antiques and calligraphy, leads eventually to the entrance of a protected hutong: an intricate maze-like community of homes and building, and to another way of life.

For the Western imagination, there is little need to further romanticize the hutong, appearing as it does to reveal the sights, smells and sounds of China through the ages. A bitterly cold place to live in winter and stiflingly hot in summer, the cut, thrust and throng of its community is everywhere.

Turning immediately left at the end of Liulichang (on the east side), and following the narrow path for some minutes, a silence falls like a soft blanket on the sounds of the city as if you are suddenly somewhere else.

Free to roam, and with your valuables secured (the pathways will eventually lead you out of the maze), you will stumble across ornate Siheyuan (courtyard house) entrance, pencil-dropping silences down tiny little lanes, and grubby little restaurants that no doubt serve tasty food but are advisable to miss.

There are vegetable stalls, great bamboo steamers and a mosque. And you keep on walking, turning as you chose, saying "Ni Hao" ("Hello") when you can. Back on Liulichang, the sharp voice of the Er Hu reattunes your ears to the sounds of the city.

Memories firmly in place, insistent bicycle bells pull you from the road and you think you might well have just been dreaming.

In today's rapidly changing China, high profile architects and real estate developers are accused of using Beijing as a place of experimentation. Zhang Xin, Co-CEO of SOHO China, the city's most successful real estate developer, asks. "What's wrong with that? Every creative industry needs to experiment."

SOHO China is the work of young media-savvy Beijing-based entrepreneurs Pan Shiyi and partner Zhang, currently high on the list of China's movers and shakers. Zhang Xin, a Cambridge educated merchant banker who moved to Hong Kong from the mainland at an early age, and who returned to invest in her homeland, received a second prestigious award for her role as a patron in the field of architecture.

The 2004 Montblanc Arts Patronage Award was conferred on the young urban visionary and entrepreneur in July 2004.

Two years ago, Zhang won the especial prize at the 2002 Venice Biennale for her role in promoting the work of 12 Asian architects, six of whom were Chinese, in Commune by the Great Wall, a large-scale SOHO China development in the Shuiguan Valley, just outside Beijing.

"When I first came back to my hometown Beijing in 1995, I was ignorant about architecture and nobody in the real estate industry paid any attention to architecture, Developers here thought architects were just workers from the streets. In this sense I feel I have made if anything - a small contribution to architecture in China." she says.

In an initial $24 million (199 million Yuan) investment, 11 individual houses and club house were built, five of which will be reproduced in subsequent developments in the Commune complex.

Commune is a showcase for the very best in Asian architecture and is an architectural installation as much as a living museum.

Feng Shui

It seems strangely fitting in a country that has historically undervalued the work of the architect that in March 2004 the tombs of ten generations of the Lei family, imperial 'architect' designers to the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), were mistakenly flattened.

Strangely fitting, because it is only now that architects in China are accorded status equal to the celebratory status they receive in Europe and the US; and the result of the news of the levelling of this family history has brought much needed attention to the subject.

It was during the Qing Dynasty that the 'architect' first emerged in China in a multifaceted role that incorporated design, planning and building and that used a system of practical and spiritual consideration including feng shui.

Feng shui or 'wind water' is a system of guiding principles that bring man together with his environment. It was a central feature of the master planning of Qing Dynasty projects.

A complex combination of astrology, numerology, geography and geomancy, feng shui involves the 'auspicious' positioning of buildings within a landscape. Spirit walls or 'mirrors' fend off evil spirits and inharmonious energies around buildings, and gardens and water are provided in or around lived-in or occupied spaces.

Today, in many cases, practical considerations of climate mitigate against the overall theoretical effect and intentions of feng shui.

However, Qing architects, such as the Yangshilei, were 'holistic' designers who used the techniques of feng shui to great effect.

Beihai Park

In 2001, an 800-year-old Lacebark pine that showed signs of poor health inadvertently led park authorities to discover the existence of an unusual irrigation system built into the foundations of the Round City, an ancient site of devotion and contemplation in Beijing's Beihal Park.

To casual observers of Beijing's history, the existence of something wise and ancient in one of its parks should not have seemed surprising. The park, as with much of the city's ancient imperial infrastructure, has had a colourful past.

Dating from the middle of the eleventh century, Beihai Park is the largest of Beijing's municipal parks situated a stone's throw from the back door of the Imperial Palace in the Forbidden City.

The history of the Round City, a walled, elevated landform situated at the southern end of Beihal Park, to the east of Great Marble Bridge, dates from the Lieu Dynasty (916-1125). It came to prominence during the Jin Dynasty (1115-1234) when rulers planted trees from many parts of China there and built a devotional pavilion they called the Hall of Received Light.

Today the Round City is a shaded, stone-terraced edifice with courtyards, buildings and its many ancient trees that have survived scourges of war, invasions and earthquakes.

Emperor Qianlong is said to have granted titles to these majestic old trees that are now as much as 800 years old. A white Lacebark pine that dates to the Jin Dynasty was entitled the 'General in White Robe' by the emperor, and a twisting, knotted, arthritic-looking pine, which stands to the side of the Hall of Received Light and which is just as old, was named 'Marquis of Shade' by the humorous emperor.

Although the existence of the tunnel was known to park authorities, its purpose had never been ascertained and the workers were genuinely surprised with their find. Experts gathered and agreed a sophisticated ancient irrigation system had fed water to the imperial trees unaided for hundreds of years and was still functioning, something regarded as a modern day miracle.

Beijing, China's favourite city, is filled with many such enchanting discoveries.

Courtesy Serendib