Beijing is not a city that inspires deep affection. The picturesque is at a premium, regimentation prevails, and sheer size is a subject of tiresome pride. But so it always was. Unlike most European cities, the imperial capitals of China seldom grew up organically. Pre-planned in accordance with beliefs about the centrality of the emperor at the axis of the cosmos – and commensurate with the scale of this presumption – imperial cities conformed to a rigid geometry that precluded whim and often preceded actual settlement. Ideally, and in so far as the site allowed, they were laid out as several vast, walled rectangles, each abutting or nesting within its neighbour. Hence Beijing, before its perimeter walls were bulldozed for boulevards wide enough to take tank formations, consisted of an outer city that adjoined an inner city; the inner city contained the Imperial City; and at the heart of the Imperial City lay the Forbidden City.

Also known as the Purple or Palace City, the Forbidden City substantially survived the upheavals of the twentieth century. It now hosts the Palace Museum and is the capital’s major tourist attraction. Its Outer and Inner Courts, the former containing public spaces of audience and government, and the latter the private facilities reserved for the emperor and his dependants, anticipated and dictated the configuration of the sprawling inner and outer cities beyond. All walls ran north–south or east–west; the emperor faced south; the walkways and portals of the main axis ran south; and once a day, when the sun shone through the Meridian Gate, the shadows cast by the pillared halls and gateways slid into respectful alignment with this rectangular symmetry. No doubt they still would, were the pall of Mongolian grit and industrial pollutants that shroud the capital in an ochreous gloom ever to clear.

The three books under review replicate this boxed symmetry of the city’s groundplan; they, too, nestle neatly beside and within one another. Geremie R. Barmé’s The Forbidden City focuses on the imperial enceinte at the heart of the capital; here festered for four centuries what he calls “the canker of autocracy”. Jonathan Clements’s Beijing: The biography of a city charts the career of the wider metropolis over a much longer time-frame; indeed he begins in the Stone Age with the 500,000-year-old “Peking Man”. Arthur Cotterell’s The Imperial Capitals of China delivers a sound historical perspective that embraces not just Beijing but those several other cities that preceded it as dynastic capitals of imperial China.

Cotterell’s book is the most ambitious. The geomantic concerns that dictated the location and orientation of the capital – “feng shui” in later parlance – are traced to the pre-imperial Shang dynasty (1600–1045 bc). They were first realized in the capital laid out at Xianyang third-century bc by the First Emperor, he of the “Terracotta Army”. Xianyang and its reincarnation as Chang’an lay on a tributary of the Yellow River near the modern city of Xi’an in Shaanxi province. This area remained a favoured site under the Han (202 bc–ad 220) and the Tang (618–907) dynasties, though both also patronized the more easterly Luoyang. Destroyed and rebuilt on countless occasions, Luoyang in Henan province was eventually superseded by the flood-prone Kaifeng, capital of the Northern Song dynasty (960–1127). When driven south of the Yangzi, the Song adopted Hangzhou, today the lakeside capital of Zhejiang province, as their emperors’ “temporary residence” in southern China. There Nanjing on the Yangzi itself would be Hangzhou’s only rival, serving as the fourteenth-century capital of the first Ming emperor and the twentieth-century capital of Chiang Kai-shek’s ill-fated Nationalist government. Meanwhile in the north it was Khubilai Khan of the Mongol, or Yuan, dynasty (1279–1368) who had built the first national capital at what is now Beijing.

Ironically, Khubilai’s city, commissioned by a Mongol and designed by a Central Asian Muslim, seems to have conformed more closely to what Barmé calls China’s “imperial aesthetic of cosmic perfection” than any of its precursors. Its site would be substantially commandeered for the Ming and then Qing city of today, and its palace complex was rebuilt as the Forbidden City. The Mongols, like the Manchu Qing, were ambivalent about urban life, often withdrawing to summer retreats in their native steppe. But anxious to legitimize themselves in the eyes of their Han Chinese subjects, they evidently deemed the construction of an ultra-traditional capital as sound policy. Vast labour gangs were deployed and no expense was spared. For transporting the massive slab of marble known as “the Cinnabar Stairway” from its quarry, thirty miles away, to the Hall of Preserving Harmony (an adjunct of the outer court’s centrepiece Hall of Supreme Harmony) special provisions had to be made. A road was built, ponds dug alongside it, and their ice, come winter, lifted and laid on the roadway. This artificial slide worked well, though 16,000 men and perhaps as many draught animals were needed to complete the operation.

Marco Polo visited both Mongol Beijing and the Southern Song’s Hangzhou. Beijing was the grander and more extensive of the two; each of its four outer walls was six miles long, with Khubilai’s main palace “the largest that was ever seen”. In terms of construction and decorative effect, Polo thought it incapable of improvement. Its great hall was such that “a meal might well be served there for more than 6000 persons”. Hangzhou was less regular but therefore, to a European eye, more appealing. Its waterways, climate and society made it “without doubt the finest and most splendid city in the world”. Owing less to imperial hubris and more to its markets, workshops and salons, Hangzhou struck Polo as a metropolis by right but a capital by chance. Cotterell agrees. The author of a noted survey of China’s cultural history, he handles with grace and skill the challenge of making the country’s dynastic past intelligible to the layman. It’s not easy; non-Chinese readers experience a selective dyslexia when confronted with a flurry of Pinyin proper names and may struggle with the geography. Nor should Cotterell be faulted for occasionally taxing the reader with philosophical asides or relying on the often suspect official dynastic histories. His book is an admirable attempt to generate a wider interest in China’s imperial past through the story of its dynastic capitals.

Jonathan Clements must be equally aware of the problems of interpreting Chinese history, having produced Lives of notable figures from Confucius to Mao. His “biography” of Beijing is a slighter work, breezy, readable and with intriguing personal insights, but marred by syntactical errors that look like the result of hasty production. He favours a journalistic approach and clearly has an eye on the mass attendance expected for the Beijing Olympics.

In a class of its own is Geremie Barmé’s beautifully judged, if more narrowly focused, book on the Forbidden City. A professor of Chinese history at the Australian National University, Barmé grafts on to an authoritative account of the Forbidden City’s Mongol, Ming and Qing genesis some telling Western perceptions of it as a bastion of inscrutable autocracy and his own trenchant examination of its ideological function under Republican and Communist rule. He writes with seductive economy and deploys impressive research. Nothing better conveys the Forbidden City’s reputation as both palace and prison than Barmé’s revelation that the fictional Gormenghast of the Titus Groan trilogy owed its hide-bound rituals, if not its architecture, to Mervyn Peake’s upbringing in nearby Tianjin in the early years of the twentieth century. Peake’s creation was another world within a world, another warren of chambers and courtyards in which the fair and the foul cohabited promiscuously. It too was built in alignment with the four points of the compass and the passage of a reluctant sun. And like the infant Groan, seventy-seventh Earl of Gormenghast, the young Puyi – China’s “Last Emperor” as per the Bertolucci film – must have been “suckled on shadows; weaned, as it were, on webs of ritual: for his ears, echoes, for his eyes a labyrinth of stone”.

Geremie R. Barmé
THE FORBIDDEN CITY
287pp. Profile Books. £15.99 (US $19.95).
978 1 84668 011 3

Jonathan Clements
BEIJING
The biography of a city
176pp. Stroud: Sutton. £12.99.
978 0 7509 4251 5

Arthur Cotterell
THE IMPERIAL CAPITALS OF CHINA
An inside view of the Celestial Empire
335pp. Pimlico. £20.
978 1 84595 009 5

John Keay’s China: A history will be published later this year.

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