The Souls of China

Chapter 1

Beijing: The Tolling Bell

In the southeast corner of Beijing is a neighborhood called Fenzhongsi, or the Temple of the Tolling Bell. According to local legend, the name came from the story of an old widower who was kind and pure of heart but childless. In traditional China, that meant he had no one to support him in old age. His fellow villagers took pity and offered him a small job as the community’s night watchman. His task was to walk around the village every two hours, marking time by beating clappers. He accepted the job but refused pay, saying the villagers should save their money to cast a bell that would replace him when he died.

Over the years, the locals saved their money, while he carried out his duties to unusual effect. During the last watch, just before dawn, he would sound his clappers especially loudly in front of the doors of lazy people, hoping to wake them and get them off to work. In front of the doors of the diligent, he was as quiet as could be, allowing them a few more minutes of sleep in the knowledge that they would get up on their own. As time went by, some villagers said his clappers anticipated the changing seasons or warned of coming storms. When they heard the steady beat, they knew what they had to do—not just when to work or sleep, but how to live their lives, following good and avoiding evil. Eventually, the old man died, the money was counted, and the bell cast. When it was rung, it had the same miraculous effect, a bell tolling for each person.

The bell, the temple that was later built around it, and the village—all were torn down long ago, leaving only a story and the name of a highway overpass, a subway stop, and a neighborhood of tenement homes about to be demolished. Over the past decades, this wave of destruction has rolled over the rest of the capital as well, eliminating a vast medieval city of twenty-five square miles. Beijing had once been made up of hutongs—narrow alleys that passed between walled homes, interspersed with hundreds of temples. Superimposed over these communities was an imaginary landscape of holy mountains and deities who linked the city into a sacred bond of myth and faith. For centuries, this epitomized the political-religious state that had run China for millennia.

That changed in the twentieth century, especially after the Communist takeover in 1949. Many of the temples and hutongs were destroyed to make way for the new ideals of an atheistic, industrial society. Starting in the 1980s came economic reforms and uncontrolled real estate development, which has wiped out almost all the rest of the old city and pushed most of Beijing’s original residents out of the city center. In the few fragments of the historic city that survived, migrants moved in. Some were poor workers from the countryside, others rich gentrifiers from somewhere else. With them came new foods—spicy dishes from the interior or nouvelle cuisine from abroad—and new customs, such as the mass exodus out of Beijing during holidays to rural hometowns or tropical beach resorts. Lost was a way of life, just as the local cultures of other great cities have been swamped by our restless times.

I watched this transformation since first coming to Beijing in the early 1980s. Like many people, I was disheartened and felt the city and its once-great culture were lost. But in recent years I began to realize I had been wrong. Beijing’s culture was not dead; it was being reborn in odd corners of the city like the Temple of the Tolling Bell. It was not the same as in the past, but it was still vibrant and real—ways of life and belief that echoed the sounds of the past.

The Temple of the Tolling Bell was the home of the Ni (pronounced “NEE”) family, ordinary Beijingers who had once lived in the old city near one of its most famous landmarks, the Temple of Heaven. Next door to their old home had been a much smaller temple to Our Lady of the Azure Clouds, or Bixia Yuanjun, an important Daoist goddess. The Ni family children used to play in the temple’s three courtyards, and the family was friends with an old priest who lived there. In 1992, their house and the Daoist temple were slated for demolition to make way for the headquarters of the General Administration of Sport of China, a government agency charged with creating national glory. Faced with such a strong opponent, the Ni family did the wise thing: it yielded. As compensation, they were given money and land to build new homes in the Temple of the Tolling Bell neighborhood. It was from this new encampment outside the old city that they helped orchestrate the revival of Beijing’s spiritual life.

On the second day of the Lunar New Year, I paid a visit to the Ni family’s eighty-one-year-old patriarch, Ni Zhenshan. Two nights earlier, Beijingers had heralded the Year of the Dragon with loud and endless fireworks against the dark, moonless sky. Yesterday, the first day of the New Year, had been quiet. Traditionally, it is a day for staying home with one’s family, cooking big meals, and recuperating from the previous night’s excitement. The second day is given over to social calls, and so here I was, plodding past spent firework casings and charred paper, doing what any gentleman is supposed to do on this day: pay respects to one’s betters and elders.

Compared with me, the Nis were both. Old Mr. Ni and his fifty-six-year-old son, Ni Jincheng, weren’t just older; they understood infinitely more. They knew all the holidays on the traditional calendar, the right way to kowtow before a statue, how to recite sutras, which cigarettes to smoke, and which grain alcohol to drink. They knew which fruits to eat in April and why you never make a gift of a knife or a plum. They had stylish clothes made by a dead tailor, second homes acquired for a song, calligraphy from a colonel, teapots from a royal kiln, and a flock of European racing pigeons. When I asked why or how or when, they would look at me as if I had missed the point: there was no reason; this was how you lived.

Like any good gentleman, Jincheng was waiting for me at the street corner as I got out of the taxi. He was broad shouldered, with a beefy face and a thick head of hair that was combed back in a rakish wave. In his normal life, he had a desk job at the Ministry of Construction but had spent most of his career out in the field, managing projects or inspecting them for safety defects. His speech was distinctive, in part because of its volume: this was a man whose work called for him to communicate over the roar of a jackhammer. But he also peppered it with a patois of ur-Beijing dialect laden with religious expressions. He talked about karmic retribution (baoying), and when someone died, he spoke of the dark gate (xuanmen) closing. His clothes reflected his double life. Draped over his shoulders was a green army greatcoat that could have been worn by a worker, but underneath was a tailored collarless jacket made of brown silk and patterned with a stylized version of the character shou, or longevity. His cheeks were redder than usual, and he motioned for me to follow him.

“You’ll catch a cold out here,” I said.

He grunted. “Wang Defeng was here visiting the old man. Everyone was drinking.”

Wang Defeng was a government official who ran the most important religious site in Beijing, Miaofengshan, or the Mountain of the Wondrous Peak, located about forty miles west of the city center. I had met the Ni family there a year earlier during the annual pilgrimage to worship Our Lady of the Azure Clouds, the same goddess whose temple had also been next to the Ni family’s old home. During the pilgrimage, the Ni family ran a small shrine next to the main temple. It was dedicated to another popular goddess and had a stand offering free tea to pilgrims. This is known as a pilgrimage association and is meant to help the faithful by providing them with physical and moral sustenance as they climb the mountain. About eighty of these groups exist in Beijing. Some provide food and drink, while others honor the gods with acrobatics, stilt walking, humorous skits, and martial arts. During the two-week pilgrimage, many of these volunteers live on the mountain, bunking out six to a room or, like the Ni family, sleeping on cots in the back of their shrines.

The temple is owned by the government, but neither it nor Manager Wang controls the pilgrimage associations. They are independent, with an authority that comes from tradition and faith rather than power and money. Over the course of many generations, the pilgrimage associations have been handed down through clans and families, and they have developed arcane sets of rules and regulations. They choose who can ascend Miaofengshan and how to behave on the mountain. They even decide how you should greet another association member on the street. And they are crucial to the pilgrimage’s financial success. If the groups participate, then the Miaofengshan fair is a genuine spiritual event and a destination for tens of thousands of pious pilgrims. If the groups stay away, then it’s nothing but a carnival.

Manager Wang had not come to ask the Ni family to attend this year’s pilgrimage; no man of culture would come at the start of the Lunar New Year on such a crude mission. Instead, he was paying a courtesy visit. A cynic might view this as the same thing, but this would be too narrow. Personal contact is how life is organized in China, whether running a pilgrimage, business, or political party. All of these have rules, regulations, or bylaws, but what really holds them together is a web of relationships that rarely fits on a flowchart. It includes who is related to whom and who has done whom a favor, when, and under what circumstances. It is about who has the personal charisma and prestige and who has donated the most money, but also it is about who is sincere in carrying out obligations—something even the poorest person can do. Mr. Wang had visited because he was an able administrator wanting to make the next fair a success, but he didn’t think in such unsophisticated terms; he was here because visiting Old Mr. Ni was the right thing to do. The patriarch was a great man in Beijing’s religious scene. Not visiting him on the second day of the New Year would have been unthinkable.

Jincheng led me down a side street, turning in to an alley too narrow for a car. He pushed open the second door on our right, and three small dogs charged out, barking and wagging their tails. He walked through the first room, where his wife and several other women were playing mahjong on a dark rosewood table. They looked up and called out greetings, offering tea and sunflower seeds, which I waved off. Jincheng slid open a glass door, and we entered the back room, where his father sat waiting for me on a heavy, carved wooden chair—a throne for one of the noblemen of Beijing’s religious life.

Old Mr. Ni had a shaved head and thick dark eyebrows that seemed permanently arched upward in a sign of surprise and humility. He loved to talk about catching crickets, collecting gourds, and raising dogs. When I had visited him a few months earlier, we had chatted for a couple of hours about everything from calligraphy to the construction industry, where he had worked since his youth. He had told me that he had cancer but he was certain that he would recover. Now, though, I could see that the illness had overwhelmed his body. His hands clutched the armrests, as if struggling to keep his body upright. His head was bowed slightly and immobile; when I approached, he did not move. It took him a moment to open his eyes and gesture for me to take a seat next to him. Then he summoned his energy and issued a command.

“If you want to write a book, be accurate. You don’t want to be spouting nonsense like people on television, filming this or that, and making all sorts of misleading statements about us. Don’t lead people astray. Do you understand?”

I thought back to my visits to Miaofengshan. State-run television often filmed the colorful festival and aired reports on how everything was well and good with traditional Chinese culture. It rarely showed people worshipping, and avoided mentioning that this was primarily a religious event. It usually seemed like a report on a new theme park. I nodded.

“I am not so strong anymore and am not sure I can explain everything. If I lead you astray, then you will write errors and others will be misled. We’ll get further and further from the truth.

“But I want you to mark this: All temples are not the same. Some are fake. When you’re writing, you have to know the distinction. You have to know which permit pilgrims and which do not. Miaofengshan does allow them. It’s why our tea association goes there.”

Jincheng leaned over and whispered in my ear, reminding me how his family’s tea association had been founded. It had been 1993, and Old Mr. Ni had been ill with kidney cancer. Surgery was imminent. He vowed that if he lived, he would make a trip to Miaofengshan to thank Our Lady of the Azure Clouds. She had looked after the family in their old home, and he was sure she would help him now. Back home, Jincheng lit incense and prayed.

The surgery had gone well, and Old Mr. Ni had recovered. The next spring, he went to Miaofengshan to fulfill his vow. Although the family had lived next to the temple of Our Lady of the Azure Clouds, they had never made the pilgrimage to her mountain. Old Mr. Ni had been just eight years old when the Japanese invaded and twenty when the Communists took power. In such tumultuous times, the flow of pilgrims had slowed to a trickle, with people worried about safety and generally too poor to afford the long trip through the mountain roads. After Mao took power, his zealots destroyed the temple. But by the mid-1990s it had been rebuilt, and the pilgrimage had resumed.

On his way down the mountain, Old Mr. Ni told Jincheng that he had an idea. He wanted to set up his own pilgrimage association to offer pilgrims tea. In a literal sense, pilgrimage associations are superfluous; nowadays, a pilgrimage usually just takes a day, and no one needs free tea or food. But the associations survive because the idea behind them is more important than their function. They symbolize piety—a gathering of people who had enough faith to sacrifice the thousands of dollars and weeks of time that it takes to run a pilgrimage association.