‘”If the city was dreaming," he told me, "then the city is asleep. And I do not fear cities sleeping, stretched out unconscious around their rivers and estuaries, like cats in the moonlight. Sleeping cities are tame and harmless things." "What I fear," he said, "is that one day the cities will waken. That one day the cities will rise.”’ —Neil Gaiman, World’s End
The wind welcomed us at the start of our journey, blowing from the West, taking with it the pollution that had meekly tried to come creeping back into the sky above Beijing that evening. The wind was the perfect early fall wind, its large sweeping gestures didn’t cut through the single layer of additional shirts we had on, but rather pushed us forward towards our destination, as if to try make us fear being left behind. Its the kind of wind that motivates you, that makes you jog every few minutes because you feel like it, the kind that shows up at the start of a college year and briefly convinces you that this year will be ‘the year’ for something.
We turned onto Haidian Road, and walked down the middle of the street. Why shouldn’t we? It was 2 in the morning, and all quiet residential streets were completely devoid of movement not caused by the fall weather rustling loudly through the trees and our own brisk marching. We climbed the pedestrian bridge that takes Zhongguancun Beidajie over the 4th Ring Road, and even that usual clogged, tired behemoth seemed to be flowing along in an easy sleep caressed by the gusts, with only a handful of cars making their perennial journey around the city.
Zhongguancun passed by us, its massive towers showing no sign of the tech workers and venture capitalists that fill the area during the day. The last subway had reached its terminus several hours ago; only single cars and the occasional night bus meandered their way through the office center; Beijing stirring in its sleep, small against the backdrop of the 10-lane avenue. Right now, this city belonged to us.
We passed the Third Ring Road and cheered. Our journey had hit its first major milestone. We had reached the next concentric square deeper into the historic heart of the city. We left the office towers and grandeur of China’s technological present behind us and turned left, starting the zigzag pattern designed to use any minor flaw in the grid pattern to cut off a small bit of the ten-mile journey to the ultimate center of the city. The wind, which until now had played freely with the open roads of Zhongguancun and the economic centers of Haidian district, couldn’t quite make it into the smaller residential street we were now wandering down. The streets we took slowly became smaller and quieter, with shuttered shops making way for 10-story apartment buildings, their windows covered in cages up to the 3rd or 4th floor to keep burglars out and laundry in. We passed through a residential security gate, ubiqituous across the city and as usual without much indication as to which side is ‘out’ or ‘in’. The streets became paths between slender complexes, winding through backyards of silent houses. At 3am, Beijing was deep asleep.
We hit a closed back gate. No guard was to be found, and the chain-link door was padlocked shut. We backtracked around several corners, and hit another dead end. The security gate we had passed to enter this quarter was deceiving; the seemingly arbitrary dance of ‘staffed’ and ‘unstaffed’, ‘open’ and ‘closed’, ‘outside’ or ‘inside’ played out at every security hut in the city had led us astray and left us trapped. We wandered through some more streets, watching the residential buildings morph into a university campus, just as quiet and asleep, save for some lonely lights in scattered top-floor offices, easily imagined to be filled with veterinary graduate students using the only workspace around their dormss with electricity this late to slave away over a paper. We reached the Southern edge of the wall that enclosed this continuity of buildings that we had unwittingly entered so long ago. Faced with the prospect of backtracking for a half hour, we glanced at the security camera menacingly hovering over the large iron gate spanning what quickly turned into a wide, tree-lined avenue behind the wall, and promptly climbed over anyways. It seemed that once again, we had reached the outside.
But at the end of the avenue was another security gate, of the open, but staffed variety. The two night guards looked at us with the mild interest that comes from staring at the darkness for eight hours each night and seeing something break their monotone. We passed unchallenged. Was it now that we had returned to the outside? In Beijing, it’s never clear what that means. Not every gate forms an enclosure, and not every open road leads to another. The medieval walls that used to form concentric squares around the Forbidden City are gone, but in their place rise freeways and avenues, oftentimes just as impassable. But for now, we had managed to escape the more obvious confines of the campus we were trapped in, and continued our journey unhindered.
Our pace quickened. We had lost time, and besides, we had hit a major avenue, and the wind came roaring back into our consciousness, resuming its push in our backs. Daliushu Road boldly cut through the grid, and signs for landmarks we wanted to pass became more commonplace. Road signs started pointing towards Xizhimen, the rail and bus center that marked the North-West corner of the 2nd Ring Road, and with it, the border to the Inner City. We crossed the Nanchang River, between the Beijing Zoo and the Beijing North Station exit tracks. On our left was another cluster of massive office buildings that had sprung up around the transport hub. On our right, we saw our first hutong of the night. A few blocks had somehow survived the building boom thus far, and still showed the dark, single-story construction that defined the city a few decades previously. With it came the smells and sounds of Beijing’s alleys. A stray dog barked. A public washroom made its presence known from a block away. Chuar wagons, abandoned for the night, were comfortably watiing for their owners to return and fill the area with the smell of grilling meat, maybe even attracting workers from across the street in the modern Xizhimen high rises. A lonely Chinese flag waved above a low-rise building.
Continuing South on Beilishi Road, we went down a tree-lined avenue, with apartments rising on the right and the PKU Hospital filling the space between us and the 2nd Ring Road on our left. The wind had started to die down, and even the occasional car, the first few seen since leaving Haidian, rumbled past. We walked on until Fuchengmen Outer Street, and finally turned East into the Inner City. Our last major landmark before Beijing’s ultimate center had been reached.
Right after crossing the Ring Road, we turned right onto Minkang Hutong, a name reminiscent of an alley in old Beijing and in denial of the Beijing Financial Street which had replaced the neighborhood in favor of banks, investment bureaus, and the occasional InterContinental. Where old men likely used to sit outside their doors and play cards or smoke, watching a lively pace of life roll by was now filled with impeccably clean sidewalks, large bilingual directional signs pointing to such local landmarks as the Yinglan International Financial Center or the Beijing Equity Exchange, and cold, dark skyscrapers rising above even the tech hubs of Zhongguancun, seven miles behind us.
It was getting late. Though the Beijing Financial Center was still a ghost town, the distant rumble of the Second Ring Road was getting louder and more sustained. Beijing stirred again. We left the ultimate expression of the modern Chinese economy behind, and turned East, on a collision course with the Zhongnanhai governmental complex, likely easily visible from above through the windows of the corner offices of the capitalist behemoths behind us. The average building height steadily decreased, signifying as it only could in Beijing that the center of the city was drawing near.
Along Linjing Hutong, our path became more red. As we went on, Chinese flags became more and more plentiful, until they were hanging above every doorway and on every gate. To what degree these were put up as a grassroots sign of patriotism was put in doubt by their incredible uniformity - the closer the Forbidden Palace, the denser the occurrence of equally sized flags looking down from every possible location. From Linjing Hutong, we turned onto Fuyou Street. The midrise apartment buildings and occasional clusters of skyscrapers that had accompanied us for most of the night were now replaced with 2-story, likely unaffordable, condominuims and mansions on the right, and a dark red wall topped with black and green shingles on the left. This was Zhongnanhai, the communist party complex, where the real political authority of the country resided. The change in importance of the neighborhood was subtle; similar security gates lined the red wall as they did so many others in the city. But a closer glance at the streetlights and trees revealed cameras, pointed down the street and at every nook and cranny, blending in withe the foliage. Though cameras were ubiquitous in Beijing, as in every other major Chinese city, a sense of cool, dark judgement emanated from this setup, quietly reminding the casual walker that there are some lines that could not be crossed here.
The sky was beginning to lighten. Our walking had almost turned into a jog, quiet and determined in face of the knowledge that the sun wasn’t far from the horizon. The sky had turned from black to a dark, rich bluish purple; Orion, which had been so easily visible throughout the impeccably clear night to the Southeast had faded away. Lights and movement in the distance signaled that the long sleep of Beijing we had witnessed was soon to be over.
Finally, we reached Chang’an Avenue, the central axis of Beijing, a street with a name power few others can match. The avenue lay before us, stretching out towards the horizon in both directions, perfectly straight, early morning traffic already thundering down its many lanes. Intricately designed yet massive lightposts still illuminated the way, reminiscent of oversized Parisian fixtures. But a closer look banished that thought. What from far away looked like extra ornate design quirks next to the lamps were in fact a dozen cameras on each lamppost, fixiated on each and every square inch of roadway and sidewalk. The top of each pole wasn’t a shiny visual effect, but a bank of loudspeakers capable of yelling orders at crowds bigger than could be imagined. So these lamps lined the street, a double row of power projections reminding the souls that passed under them of their place, but yet a symbol of weakness, of a desire for control, of a fear that never truly left its designers since those many fateful moments in its past. Beijing’s nighttime dreams that we had wandered through for the past four hours were coming to an end; the powerful West wind playing uncontrolled as it pleased with the wide avenues had died down, the lonely stray vehicles that could be followed along intricate stories of their own were replaced with the anonymous, fluid workings of one of the biggest cities on Earth.
We turned East onto Chang’an Avenue. Under the stern gaze of a guard, we passed a pedestrian barrier, a few metal fences designed to control the flow of pedestrians along Beijing’s most famous road. We passed another. And another. We passed a last one, this time with an X-Ray machine, and reached Tiananmen, the gate of heavenly peace, presided over by the Mona Lisa smile of Chairman Mao.
I had held off on writing about our experience at Tiananmen for weeks. On the one hand, at 6 in the morning after ten miles of walking, my brain was slowly shutting off to new epxeriences. But, additionally, compared to the strong impression the journey itself had left, the ritual we witnessed at Tiananmen seemed more distant. This wasn’t my national day. I saw the red flag go up behind the thousands of selfie sticks and children on their parents’ shoulders. People probably cheered, but I honestly don’t remember. We had room to move, but across Chang’an Avenue on the side of the square hosting Mao’s Mausoleum, I only saw one gigantic mass of people stretching out as far as I could make out in my limited view within my own crowd. A few minutes after the flag reached its position and the sun finally showed itself above the buildings of Chang’an avenue, I escaped the faction wanting to stay on the square and tiredly slogged back to the subway with some like-minded friends. We didn’t talk much on the hour ride back; we had all been up for close to 24 hours by now. We got back to BeiDa around 9, and I instantly stumbled to my bed to spend the rest of the morning there.
But what I do remember is an undercurrent of energy in this city. Twenty-two million people combine in unlimited interactions, dealings, friendships, disputes, crimes, heroisms, and actions, banal, world-changing, and everything in between. They are penned in to some extent, but no amount of control can stop the disorder that will still exist and work its mischievous interventions along every step of the way. Beijing knew this. It was written on the crowd barriers and the lampposts lining Chang’an Avenue. It was written along every little security station across the city, on every little deviation from what looked like a perfect grid, a perfect city plan from afar. The little hutongs and alleyways had life that can’t be controlled, the actions of individual scooter drivers jumping sidewalks and weaving through lanes to save several seconds off their trips cannot be constrained by the forced guides of ring roads and avenues. And I get to see all of this happen. I think that’s pretty cool.
