The seemingly incoherent sprawl of modern Beijing is based on meticulous plans to bind citizens together under imperial rule. Conceived as a means of enforcing social order, the impact of planning remains strong in the city today

In the depths of Beijing’s Planning Exhibition Hall, a big grey hangar that squats in the corner of Tiananmen Square, stands a scale model of the city. It is an endless field of tiny wooden and perspex blocks, low-rise courtyards huddled cheek by jowl with a motley jumble of towers, expanding ever outwards in concentric rings.

To attempt to build a model of China’s 22-million strong capital is a Sisyphean endeavour. This carpet of miniature rooftops is hopelessly incapable of keeping up with the city’s relentless pace of change, the exhibition hall too small to ever contain a megalopolis so sprawling that it is currently building its seventh ring road, an orbital loop that will run for almost 1,000km in circumference.

But the model’s bird’s-eye view exposes something that is illegible from the ground: the rigid order that underlies the rambling sprawl. A rhythm of axes, grids and symmetrical walled compounds emerges from the chaos, pointing to the fact that this seemingly incoherent metropolis is in fact the carefully structured product of one of the earliest planning documents in history.

The first thing you notice is the monumental fissure that slices north-south through the city, as if the urban grain had been severed by a great tectonic rupture. It is an axis that runs for more than 20km, shooting out like a laser beam meridian line from the walls of the Forbidden City, the palatial compound that lies at the centre of it all.

The 180-acre imperial palace appears to send ripples through the surrounding urban grain like a rock thrown into a pond, forming the successive layers of ring-roads. Its rhythm of symmetrical walled courtyards seems to structure the layout of the entire city, from the scale of blocks, to streets, to individual homes.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The 180-acre Forbidden City in the heart of Beijing. Photograph: Alamy

The effect is no accident: Beijing was conceived as a diagram of an organised, harmonious society, designed to bind the citizens together in bricks and mortar under the supreme rule of the emperor. It was to be an expression of absolute power like no other city in the world.

Founded more than 3,000 years ago as the city of Ji, Beijing’s present urban form was established in the early Ming dynasty (1368-1644), when the Yongle emperor moved the imperial capital here from Nanjing.



In establishing the fundamental layout of the new capital, the Ming reached for a suitably weighty touchstone, drawing on the teachings of the Kaogong Ji (roughly translated as “regulations of construction”), a text dating from the fifth century BC; part of the Rites of Zhou, an ancient Confucian manual of bureaucracy and organisational theory.

“It was a means of legitimising their rule,” says Toby Lincoln, lecturer in Chinese Urban History at the University of Leicester. “By explicitly drawing on this ancient manual of rites, their new capital city used divine numerology and ritual to express the power of the ruling elite in physical space.”

As one of the oldest examples of urban planning guidance in the world, the Kaogong Ji covers everything from how to determine north-south orientation when planning a new city (stick a pole in the ground and watch its shadow), to dictating the specific dimensions for local, regional and national capitals.

It states that the national capital should be “a square with sides of nine li” (a traditional Chinese unit of measurement equivalent to around 500 metres), with “each side having three gateways”. Inscribed within this square, it stipulates that there must be “nine avenues running north-south and nine running east-west, each of the former being nine chariot tracks wide” – a principle that perhaps set the precedent for the scale of modern-day Beijing’s agoraphobia-inducing highways.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A woman looks at the model of Beijing’s city master plan. Photograph: Guang Niu/Getty Images

But the ancient Han Chinese were less concerned with the practicalities of easing chariot traffic flow than with casting the capital as an expression of divine power, organising the city as a direct representation of the cosmos – with the emperor (aka the Son of Heaven) at the very centre of this model universe. Accordingly, the ideal city would take the form of a perfect square (the shape that the earth was deemed to be), with its principal roads dividing it into nine equal sectors, representing the nine provinces of the empire. The three gates on each of the city walls, meanwhile, stood for the three elements of the universe – heaven, earth and man – the total adding up to the 12 months of the year. Residing at the heart of this city-sized cosmogram, the emperor was the very middle of the Middle Kingdom itself: he who held power over the city and state, by extension, held control over all creation.

So vast, so rich and so beautiful, that no man on earth could design anything superior to it Marco Polo

And what a creation it was. When Marco Polo visited the city in the 13th century, before the Ming had taken control and begun their improvements, he described it as already being “so vast, so rich and so beautiful, that no man on earth could design anything superior to it”. By the time the Yongle emperor had finished building his 10-metre thick walls in the mid-15th century, Beijing was the largest city in the world (a distinction it held until the early 19th century) – a majestic capital of the oldest and richest civilisation on the planet, whose command of science and technology far exceeded that of Europe, which was just emerging from the dark ages.



This conception of the city as an expression of both regal power and social order, guided by cosmological principles and the pursuit of yin-yang equilibrium, was unlike anything in the western tradition. As architect and Chinese scholar Alfred Schinz, author of The Magic Square: Cities in Ancient China, puts it: it is “probably the most elaborate and complex system of thought developed by ‘archaic’ man about the world order and its reflection in a planned settlement structure”.

It was a form of symbolic planning that had a strong impact on the everyday life of the city, too, influencing the profane world beyond the realm of the emperor’s divine rituals. Each of the city gates was assigned a particular function, according to the kind of traffic that was permitted to enter through it. Chaoyangmen, to the east, was used for grain, prompting warehouses to grow up around it. Andingmen, to the north, saw the daily flow of night-soil, with three great pans outside where it was dried and sold to farmers, stimulating agricultural trade immediately outside the city walls. Qianmen, to the south, was positioned on a central trading route, which fostered a lively market culture that continues to this day – although the informal street markets were sadly swept away and replaced with a Disneyfied traditional shopping street for the 2008 Olympics.

The city plan also proved to be a powerful way of structuring and maintaining a sense of order down to the scale of the individual family, the walled compound form extending beyond the gates of the imperial palace and into the home. According to David Bray, author of Social Space and Governance in Urban China, not only did the walled city “embody a complex array of cosmologically determined symbolic spaces, designed to reinforce the might of the emperor and his government, but also, in its simple grid design it provided the template for the ordering of everyday social life.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Night view of Changan Avenue, the 10-lane thoroughfare which slices east-west through the city. Photograph: Imaginechina/Corbis

Just as the 180-acre imperial palace was structured as a rigid diagram of court hierarchy – its courtyards, halls and suites of 9,000 rooms organised according to the royal food chain – so too were Beijing’s surrounding houses planned as an expression of the Confucian family structure. The traditional courtyard homes, or siheyuan, that line the city’s hutong alleyways were arranged according to the “duties of obligation” between family members.



The northern-most wing was the place of the patriarch and his wife (or wives), the eastern wing was for to the second-ranking male and his family, the western wing was for the third-ranking male, while the southern wing closest to the street was for servants and the menial functions of cooking and storage. As anthropologist Francesca Bray puts it, the traditional courtyard house was “a kind of loom, weaving individual lives into a typically Chinese social pattern” – the city itself a regularised tapestry of obedient subjects laid out before the emperor.

The repetition of the walled compound as a means of enforcing social order was a tool that didn’t go unnoticed centuries later by Chairman Mao. In his drive to erode the nuclear family structure, he began to reconfigure Beijing into a network of semi-autonomous enclaves, each under the control of the danwei – the work unit to which each citizen was assigned and the basic unit by which society was organised and controlled in the Communist era, both ideologically and physically.



The traditional courtyard house was “a kind of loom, weaving individual lives into a typically Chinese social pattern”

Each compound was to be self-sufficient, offering its residents housing, employment, education and healthcare, along with communal canteens and bath houses, creating miniature walled cities within the city. Intended to foster a sense of belonging and being part of a collective endeavour, it instead turned Beijing into a place of introverted islands, separated by competition and mutual distrust. It had the effect of atomising the previously vibrant urban society into a world of isolated cells, each citizen’s loyalties tied to their danwei, which managed every aspect of their lives, from cradle to grave, issuing permits for marriage, divorce and even childbirth.

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While the controlling power of the danwei has been progressively diluted, and the land holdings of state-owned enterprises increasingly sold off to private developers, the model of walled compounds continues in Beijing to this day. “Walls, walls, and yet again walls,” was the reaction of Swedish art historian Osvald Sirén, when he visited China’s capital in the 1920s. “They surround [the city], they divide it into lots and compounds, they mark more than any other structures the basic features of the Chinese communities.”

He was recounting his experience of walking the hutongs of old Beijing, within the limits of the city walls – which were demolished in the 1960s to build a subway line, above which the second ring road now rumbles – but he could have been describing driving past one of the many gated communities that have since sprung up across the city. These exclusive islands of themed villas and apartment blocks, surrounded by private schools and swimming pools, have a mirror image at the opposite end of the social spectrum, too.

“Enhance the idea of safety and reduce illegal crimes,” read a banner hanging over the main road to Shoubaozhuang, a village of 7,000 migrants to the south of Beijing – one of 16 such villages around the city that was subject to a programme of “sealed management” in 2010, their residents’ routines controlled by a strict curfew. The ancient cosmological symbolism may long have fallen away from the streets of Beijing, but the role of city planning as a means of enforcing social order is as strong as ever.

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