Now before talking about the reason I like the place, it’s right to stop and mourn again for bulldozed Beijing. The powers that be basically bulldozed (拆 – one of the most visible characters in China. They paint it on all the buildings that are to be taken down) the northern pie-slice of the city, and rebuilt it to serve the Olympic Games. To be honest, I’m not sure what exactly was up there, but it had to mean uncountable homes and lives, businesses and livelihoods uprooted. The people are almost never compensated to any real degree of what their property was worth. Often they are promised housing in complexes they can’t afford in areas that make commuting prohibitively expensive. Again, I don’t know much about the actual situation in Beijing, but that’s usually how things run.
So, regardless of what was there, what has sprung up is truly remarkable. The main street is a massive pedestrian roadway – it would be maybe six or seven lanes if it were a highway. The street runs perfectly north-south on the same axis that pierces all the most important buildings in Beijing including the throne in the center of the Forbidden City. It was this same axis that boasted perfect feng-shui until Mao’s tomb was placed in the center of Tiananmen Square in willful defiance.
To either side are all the buildings you saw on TV: the bird’s nest, the water cube, the hotel that looks like a torch and all the rest. There’s also a lower level shopping concourse that connects to the brand-new subway line (with the china-plate signage below). Everything is made up in challenging architecture – and I mean that in a good way. It’s a wonderful public space, and it’s going to fail and collapse into decay and indifference.
Apparently, just like the huge, exciting and controversial Beijing Opera House, they can’t get anyone to rent out the Bird’s Nest or any of the other main buildings with any frequency. The shopping concourse is completely empty – not one shop is open. The main promenade is lined with hundreds of umbrella-topped tables, but there’s nowhere to buy food. The few – maybe three or four in the entire area – food stalls serve ramen noodles and little else. For a Chinese place, there was almost no one there, and the people there looked to be all out-of-towners. Has there ever been an Olympic City that has lasted beyond the Olympics to become a useful part of the city?
The major exception to this, I hope, is the Olympic Park. At the end of the promenade and the end of the subway line is a massive park. And I mean massive. It’s one of the things that only a totalitarian state could command: not to protect an already green space, but to raze a huge swath of the city and build hills and mountains and overlooks and dig a broad lake and plant thousands upon thousands of trees. To be slightly critical, it does have a little of the overly-planned feel to it, but that’s only a small quibble.
I think I’m especially drawn to parks in China. Maybe it’s because my lungs are crying out for less particulate, and let it be said that the pollution in Beijing is much less awful than I’ve ever seen it. That’s not to say it isn’t absolutely miserable, not to say that you still don’t cough out pretty colors and wake with an odd scratching in your throat, but it would be wrong to say there hasn’t been an incredible improvement. Standing on a man-made overlook, looking south past the Olympic venue into the haze beyond which Tiananmen Square and all the rest should stand, I was more than a little optimistic about weary weary Beijing.
Perhaps there’s something deeper and more meaningful to be found in another look at the sign that tells us to not lean on the railing:
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