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The Idea of a Town

2007; Duke University Press; Volume: 3; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2752/174321907x194039

1751-7435

Neil Leach,

Chinese history and philosophy

The site for the new town is about an hour north of Beijing, very close to the mountains and the Great Wall. We drive there in a cavalcade of black Audis led by the government minister who commissioned the project. All government cars are in fact black, and many car owners in Beijing also opt for a black car. It is a practice which appears like a form of cultural camouflage, but actually it is a kind of insurance policy – no one would dare to steal anything that looks like a government car. The difference, though, between our black Audi at the back of the cavalcade and the minister’s at the front is that our car doesn’t have a blue flashing light and siren, that scatter pedestrians and cars whenever the road is blocked. We drive up to the site behind the minister’s car clearing a path for us through the mayhem of the Beijing traffic.The minister is in fact a friend of Xu Wei-Guo, the architect and professor with whom I am collaborating on an exhibition for the Beijing Biennial, and who is now commissioned to design the new town. The Minister is a fellow graduate of Tsinghua University, where Xu is a professor, and Xu’s cousin works for him. It is unclear whether or not Xu fixed the job for his cousin, but it does seem clear enough that Xu’s cousin has been instrumental in fixing this commission for Xu. That’s the way they seem to do things here in China.Once we have left Beijing we pass through several miles of idyllic countryside. There are farmers tending the flocks – sheep, goats and cows. The grass is a beautiful, vibrant green, the sky azure blue, and in the distance there is the dramatic outline of the mountains.We are all admiring this bucolic idyll when suddenly the cavalcade comes to a halt. This, we are told, is where the center of the new town is to be. We all get out of our black Audis and peer across the landscape, trying hard to imagine what it would look like as the center of a new town. The immediate response from everyone is that it would look better left as it is. Then we set off in our cavalcade again. First we call in at the nearest town – a strange collection of postmodern office blocks with mirror glass façades, slightly resembling the kind of urban vision that a child might have if given glitzy building blocks to play with instead of traditional painted wooden blocks. We are taken past a lake with a pair of giant kitsch swans at one end, and everyone gets out to discuss the map of the proposed town and its relationship with the existing town. The proposed town appears as a rectangle on the map. It somehow reminds me of the basic layout of Beijing, which is a series of rectangular roads (paradoxically called “ring roads”) emanating out from the Forbidden City itself, a rectangle that sets the tone for the whole city.I ask Xu how he will go about planning the town. He tells me that the economists will prepare a thick volume full of fi nancial recommendations, and then he will simply draw up the plan according to the accepted fashion. Beijing, it would seem, will spawn its own offspring – a mini Beijing – one hour north of the city.Next we go for a meal in a restaurant by a reservoir in the foothills of the mountains. In the grounds of the restaurant there are trellises with gourds of some kind hanging from them and large containers of chrysanthemums.We all sit down on a circular table with the Minister having the prime seat opposite the entrance. (The theory, I am told, is that this is the safest seat, as you are the first to see anyone coming in to attack you.) In the center is a large circular glass plate that can spin round, much like in Chinese restaurants in the UK. But that is where the parallels end. Fish is clearly the specialty here. The menu consists of a single giant fish, with an absolutely enormous head. In fact the main dish is comprised largely of the head itself. We cannot see the whole body to gauge how big the overall fish must have been, as it has been divided up into four sections and cooked in different ways, but we can imagine its overall size from the size of the head itself. (In fact we are told later that this fish is called the “fat head fish,” and that it has a disproportionately large head.) Anyway, the head is clearly the delicacy. The waitress comes round and serves us each a portion. It actually tastes quite good. I assume that I am eating the upper part of the body of the fish, not so far from the head itself, but I am told later that in fact I am eating the brains. I am also persuaded to try one of the eyes.One of the local officials insists on challenging others – including myself – to drink. The tradition is that you stand up, raise your glass in the direction of someone else, say “Campay,” and both of you have to drink it down in one. Normally at a Chinese meal one drinks beer in small glasses, but this time – because the Minister is there – we drink wine: Great Wall red wine. The practice is potentially lethal. I watch as the official grows steadily more inebriated over the course of the meal.Later we head back to Beijing in our cavalcade, again with the Minister’s black Audi at the front, flashing blue lights and sounding its siren to clear a path for us. There are times when I have a very privileged insight into Chinese society. The average tourist would never come to experience these events. I have witnessed the birth of a town – a city, perhaps, in Western terms. Soon it will be on the atlas of the world, a new town – full of glitzy, postmodern office blocks. And not so far into the future a whole generation of inhabitants will look back on it with fondness and attachment, as the place where they were born and brought up.Joseph Rykwert once wrote an illuminating book, The Idea of a Town, where he recounted the various rituals used in Roman times for the foundation of a town (Rykwert 1988). The very choice of location was governed by certain procedures – from the inspection of the livers of local cattle in order to check the healthiness of the region, to the consultation of augurs. Indeed the foundation of Rome itself was decided by augurs – it was inaugurated. Thus, when Romulus and Remus decided the right to found the city of Rome through a contest based on the number of vultures they each saw, it was an augur who interpreted the signs and decreed Romulus the winner. These rituals extended to the demarcation of the walls. A ploughshare would be used to carve a sacred furrow to demarcate the line of the future wall. Where there was to be a gateway, the ploughshare would be lifted up, as dead bodies and other unclean items were to pass through that gateway. And this ritual was clearly very important. It was precisely for disrespecting it that Romulus killed his brother Remus, when he jumped mockingly over the furrow that Romulus had carved.Likewise rituals were established for laying out the main streets of the town – the cardo and decumanus – a pattern that would be replicated in each new town. Even the military camp would be laid out according to the same principles, so that it became a diagrammatic evocation of the city of Rome. So too the main civic buildings were allotted their places according to a highly ritualized set of procedures. In urban planning terms the expansion of the Roman Empire therefore became a question of imposing a standardized template on the rest of the world.Rykwert’s book offered a powerful critique of the seemingly banal development of the contemporary city. In an age of “junk space” – to use a term from Rem Koolhaas – what has happened to the rich ritualistic way in which a city used to be laid out? And in an age of ribbon development and endless suburban growth, what has happened to the sacred notion of the wall that once gave a city its identity?Yet we should not overlook the rituals that exist in our own society. They may seem shallow compared to those of antiquity, but they still guide and govern our social practices. And they may appear almost invisible to us, as they seemingly blend in with everyday life like some background horizon of consciousness, but to someone from another culture they would seem clear enough. Planning permission, building regulations and the templates of standard practice that govern the layout of our new towns, and the media hype and advertising that promote them – these take the role of the ploughshares and the augurs in the establishment of the contemporary town.In the context of contemporary China – a country with an almost over-heated building industry, where new towns and cities are being planned each day – it is worth recording the rituals that mark the birth of a town. Some centuries in the future an anthropologist may well look back on the cavalcade of black Audis, the abstract map with a rectangle on it, and the meal with the fish’s head and the drunk official challenging everyone else to drink, and recognize the richness of ritualistic behavior that once marked the birth of a town in early twenty-first century China.