Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Though increasingly strict laws are intended to address these concerns, they are inconsistently enforced, and many Chinese express skepticism, believing, for example, that much of what is touted as organic is not so. A preponderance of wealthy Chinese consume imported fresh foods they believe are less likely to be compromised—the market for imported fruit alone is nearly $10 billion. Some organic farms inside China have been set up exclusively for the politically connected and will not sell to common people.

At the same time, the incursion of Western fast-food restaurants means that many people are overeating unhealthily. While the consumption of salt has always been extremely high, Chinese people are eating more and more fats, and while rice sales have gone down, intake of corn products has skyrocketed. Purchasing of packed, processed foods is higher than in the United States and brings in nearly $250 billion a year. Obesity is rising sharply, and about 12 percent of Chinese have diabetes, giving China the world’s largest diabetic population.

CHINA

Outward Opulence for Inner Peace: The Qianlong Garden of Retirement

World Monuments: 50 Irreplaceable Sites to Discover, Explore, and Champion, 2015

I spent time in the Qianlong Garden and the Juanqinzhai, in Beijing, during my 2005 food trip to China. I had made frequent visits to the Forbidden City, but never to this refined and intimate area of it. I had studied Chinese art history in college and was interested in the period during which this garden was conceived and built; I had studied architectural conservation, too. I had become a trustee of the World Monuments Fund and had sought to learn more about the challenges of preserving the garden structures. As WMF’s fiftieth anniversary approached, I was asked to write an essay about one of its historic preservation projects, and I selected the Qianlong Garden.

Preservation issues are of concern worldwide, but in China, the erasure of the past to make way for a supposedly better present and future has been pursued with a particularly troubling gusto. I am all for a better present and future, but I don’t believe that destroying the past is a good means of getting there.

The central axis of the Forbidden City was designed to impress and intimidate; the Juanqinzhai (Jwen-t(ch)in-JAI), or Studio of Exhaustion from Diligent Service, built by the Qianlong Emperor in the 1770s for his retirement, is intended to coddle and caress. Clandestine though it may have been to the masses, the Forbidden City was public to its privileged visitors, an architectural rendition of the emperor’s immutable being; the Juanqinzhai promises an almost lonely privacy. Most great monuments are for civic consumption, but the Qianlong Emperor built the Juanqinzhai and surrounding garden for himself, envisioning a lodge that would allow him to live according to his habits but free from his responsibilities. However, nothing about the Juanqinzhai is modest; a refined discretion nuances its opulence. If the Forbidden City is a grand sculpture, this is a jeweled object. As a linchpin uniting heaven, man, and earth, the emperor enacted a formal, immutable self, but the Juanqinzhai acknowledges the passage of time; for all its sumptuousness, it humanizes those who enter it.

When I first went to China in 1982, the streets of Beijing still consisted mainly of hutongs, long alleys of traditional courtyard houses. Down those narrow byways, anxious people in Mao suits bicycled at lackadaisical speed, keeping a deliberate distance from foreigners. The city was dusty and decaying. Luxury, that corrupting anticommunist idea, was essentially nonexistent. In the Qing dynasty, the area that now constitutes Tiananmen Square consisted of a walled, north-south corridor surrounded by government buildings. In the 1950s, inspired by Moscow’s Red Square, authorities bulldozed those buildings to create the empty expanse of Tiananmen as we now know it. The square turned barren, brutally austere, and insufferably grandiose, a place where the pomp of the Communist state could be paraded before a meekly awestruck populace. In the middle of this dilapidation incongruously rose the Forbidden City, long revered as the ultimate stronghold of power, where the most prosperous rulers in the world had once held their hidden court. Of course, Buckingham Palace is rather grander than the houses across the street from it, and the Louvre puts the rue de Rivoli to shame. But I have never, before or since, encountered so immediate and stark a contrast as that between the Forbidden City and Deng Xiaoping’s Beijing.