Tiananmen Square, Pre – PRC

Day to day, it’s an essentially humdrum place, little going on other than tourists dutifully posing for shots before they go into the Forbidden City. But symbolically, Tiananmen Square is China’s political nerve center, and the flash point for east-west finger pointing. And there’s no way you’ll understand the place just from walking around in its vast expanse and gazing at the stately monuments to socialist realism that surround it. For Tiananmen Square is six hundred years old, and up until recently was a bustling metaphor of earthly harmony under the aegis of heaven, a metaphor that has lost its way over time, but not its significance.

Chang’an East and West Gates

Today, it’s a half-kilometer stretch of eight-lane blacktop, one of the few where drivers pay special heed to the police and traffic lights. But it was a long age before China picked up the fascination with straight lines and how to hurtle along them. In those times, the Chang’an gates, guarded, roofed and divided into three arched passageways, ensured no thoughtless progress across sacred ground.

The east one was known as the Dragon’s Gate. Nowadays, enterprising commoners with smarts and willpower open a KFC to secure their futures. For more than a thousand years before, however, they struggled through the imperial examinations, comprising three levels: provincial, metropolitan, and finally the imperial exam itself. Candidates sat for the last test in the Forbidden City’s Hall of Supreme Harmony, under the emperor’s direct supervision. Afterwards, the results were posted outside the east gate. Those who passed were likened to the mythical carp who had leapt through a divine gate, becoming dragons.

The west gate didn’t jump-start careers and lives; it ended them. There each May, the Ministry of Punishment would submit a list of the names of criminals to be executed, detailing their crimes and confessions. Their fates already decided, the offenders were marched out again in August, for a mass trial before the Ministry of Punishment and officials from the Court of Judicial Review. Only an Ang Lee-scripted turn of events could reverse a criminal’s sentence. Such unfortunates were virtually thrown into the tiger’s maw, and their place of sentencing became known as the Tiger’s Gate. Not until 1953 were the gates deemed an impediment and torn down.

The Thousand-Step Corridors

The length from the east to west Chang’an Gates, intersected by imperial road which spanned the Forbidden City’s Heavenly Gate down to its southern Zhengyanmen Gate, made the whole area more of a Tiananmen “T” than a Square. Flanking the “T” were two Thousand-Step Corridors. Confining as the corridors must have been inside, they led out to 144 administrative buildings, all yellow-tiled and red-columned, gilded and detailed for imperial effect.

The analogy set by the Chang’an Gates extended to the Thousand-Step Corridors, culminating in a local saying , “The East holds the power of life, the West holds the power of death.” For while the former led out to the Ministry of Revenue, the Imperial Academy of Medicine and other life-sustaining offices, the latter was flanked by the Ministry of Punishment, the Censorate, and the Court of Judicial Review. Whatever the surrounding temporal affairs, the corridors themselves were constructed as a symbolic interpretation of the Confucian dictate that only people who could control their emotions could attain harmony with the heavens. The tight-packed tumult of the corridors, relieved at last by the exit before the openness of the Daqingmen Gate, mirrored earthly darkness and confusion, relieved at last by other-worldly grandeur.

Chessboard Square

The other side of that gate of grandeur, however, opened up on China at its most earthy. A plaza roughly one hundred steps in length and width, encircled by railings and split by the imperial road, drew inevitable comparison to the chessboard used in weiqi, a game beloved by commoners. Fittingly, Chessboard Square was as close as commoners could get to old Tiananmen and the Forbidden City beyond. But lying at the gates of power lent importance to the square, making it a site on which to conduct high-stakes business. No doubt the proximity to officials who, for the right price, could guarantee a venture had something to do with Chessboard Square’s fame as a business center. However, buskers of the highest caliber dreamed of putting on their acts on Chessboard Square, and the place was usually thronged with gawkers, squawkers, and all manner of common Chinese street life.

Only when the emperor deigned to sally forth from his Forbidden City did Chessboard Square quiet down. First the palace guards would shoo everyone out, making the square an encampment. Next they would shut down all ingress and egress from either side, damming a day’s flow of downtown business so that uncouth eyes could not gaze on heaven personified. And Beijingers get upset today when the cops hold up traffic for a convoy out of Zhongnanhai.

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