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Juggling Bits: Tianqiao as Republican Beijing's Recycling Center Author(s): Madeleine Yue Dong Source: Modern China, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Jul., 1999), pp. 303-342 Published by: Sage Publications, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/189440 Accessed: 04/04/2010 18:46 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=sage. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Sage Publications, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Modern China. http://www.jstor.org Juggling Bits Tianqiao as Republican Beijing's Recycling Center MADELEINE YUE DONG University of Washington "Guang Tianqiao" (wandering around Tianqiao) was one of the most exciting activities for many of Beijing's residents during the 1920s and 1930s. Some travel guides published in those years listed Tianqiao under "tourist attractions" along with ancient pagodas, imperial palaces, and newly opened parks. One guidebook insisted that "it will be one's greatest regret if one comes to Beijing from afar but does not have a glance at Tianqiao" (Tian Yunjin, 1935: 7). But Tianqiao was also distinguished from other places, for it was seen as the best example of "modem society" (Ma Zhixiang, [1935] 1997: 88). In the words of Zhong Ruoxia, a Republican-era writer, "Tianqiao is the epitome of Beiping; it is the front face of life" (Zhong Ruoxia, [1936] 1989: 86). Part of the Qing imperial lands off-limits to most construction, Ti- anqiao (Bridge of Heaven) acquired its name from the nearby Altar of Heaven. During the early Republican years, it became the largest mar- ket serving the city's poor residents with the lowest prices and various forms of entertainment (Ma Zhixiang, [1935] 1997: 88). It was squalid, noisy, and chaotic but also boisterous and infectious-a mix of face-lifted junk and the occasional jewel. It was where the police first hunted criminals on the lam, and to some members of the elite, it symbolized the difficult lives of common folk. In the 1930s, at least AUTHOR'S NOTE: An earlier draft of this article was presented at the Center for Chinese Stud- ies, UC Berkeley, on February 14, 1998, and the History Research Group at the University of Washington. I am grateful for participant comments. I wish to thank the following colleagues for their inspiration and help: David Bachman, Michael Chang, Joseph Esherick, Joshua Goldstein, Dorothy Ko, George Lipsitz, Joel Migdal, Susan Naquin, Paul Pickowicz, David Strand, Cynthia Truant, and Wen-hsin Yeh. The reviews of Ruth Rogaski and William Rowe were most helpful. MODERN CHINA, Vol. 25 No. 3, July 1999 303-342 ? 1999 Sage Publications, Inc. 303 304 MODERN CHINA/JULY 1999 three books and several major articles recounted activities at Tianqiao (Zhang Cixi, 1936; Zhang Cixi and Zhao Xianyu, 1936; Yunyouke, [1938] 1988; Huang Zonghan, 1995). When Xiangzi, the hero in Lao She's ([1936-1937] 1979) novel Rickshaw, fell into the trap of Hu Niu, his wife-to-be, and felt threatened by the city, he ran to Tianqiao: After the New Year holiday all the shop apprentices would have eaten their breakfast by nine o'clock and come here. Every kind of street stall, every sort of acrobat's platform, had been set up and arranged early in the day. These places were already surrounded by groups of people by the time Hsiang Tzu [Xiangzi] got there and the drums and gongs were sounding.... Ordinarily, the sights here, the mimics, the trained bears, the magicians and fortune-tellers, the folksingers, the storytellers, and the martial dancers, could give him a little real pleas- ure and make him open his mouth to laugh. T'ien Ch'iao [Tianqiao] accounts for half the reasons why he couldn't bear to leave Peking. He would recall many comical and delightful incidents every time he saw the booths and awnings of T'ien Ch'iao and the groups of people there.... No, he couldn't leave this delightful, exciting place. He couldn't leave T'ien Ch'iao. He couldn't leave Peking. [Lao She, (1936-1937) 1979: 144] In a poor and desperate Republican Beijing, Tianqiao offered some- thing that kept people like Xiangzi going, that made life in Beijing sur- vivable, even enjoyable. It was one of the very few places in the city that maintained its level of activity in the declining economy of Bei- jing in the 1930s, when the Nationalist government moved the central administration to Nanjing (Qiu Sheng, 1930). What was Tianqiao? Where did Tianqiao acquire this power? To answer these questions, I first examine some of the contemporary per- spectives of Tianqiao and study the formation of this district, then ven- ture into the noise and dust at the market to investigate the businesses and entertainment there. Rather than viewing social changes as abrupt breaks, I do not concentrate on identifying what was new in this era but instead seek to outline the dynamic relationship between the old and the new. Tianqiao as a market was created by new forces, yet it was at the same time enlivened and held together by elements from the past. What was abandoned in the creation of a new order bounced back to life, illustrating a process of history that we might call "recycling." A new space released the energy of old forces, creating new apparatuses Dong /TIANQIAO AS BEIJING'S RECYCLING CENTER 305 and communities. By studying the dynamics that formed Tianqiao, we have an opportunity to understand the feeling and meaning of the mar- ket and its cultural dimensions. VISIBLE DETAILS, IMPERCEPTIBLE WHOLE There is no easy and ready answer to the question of what Tianqiao was; at least the contemporaries of Republican Beijing did not provide us one. Most of the time, Tianqiao appeared to observers as a place of puzzling confusion and disorder. One who tried to make sense of Ti- anqiao, the writer Zhong Ruoxia, sighed, Tianqiao is a complex multi-dimensional collective, but is also a cha- otic scene.... One can almost clearly understand it from every place and every corer of it, but it also leaves one totally lost. It is like reading the history of a life, or of society-rich, but not knowing how to digest it. We do not even know where to begin to read it. Given a pen we do not know where to begin to write about it, with a camera we do not know how to bring it into focus. [Zhong Ruoxia, (1936) 1989: 83] Zhong felt that this multidimensional, collective, and chaotic place was palpably comprehensible when one was inside of it but confusing when one tried to look at it as a whole. One was attracted to it but reluc- tant to accept it. It had the richness of real life, but it became incompre- hensible when one was removed from the details. What all this shows is that Tianqiao insisted on existing in details. Distance, panoramic views, and every form for representing it somehow missed it all. But taking a turn through the innumerable corers of Tianqiao would not necessarily help one understand it for one could easily drown in its sea of people and activity, its labyrinth of commodities. It was a one-square-mile space of bustling chaos. According to a survey published in the Beiping ribao (Beiping Daily) in 1930, in the first nineteen years of the Republic, there had been more than 300 regis- tered shops in Tianqiao. If one cared for clothing, there were 82 second-hand cloth shops and 79 silk and fabric stores. If one craved Beijing-style food, one found 37 restaurants, 30 teahouses, 6 wine shops, and 1 tea shop. At least 117 different snacks enticed the visitor (Cheng Shanqing, 1990: 4-5). Industrial goods were available at 7 306 MODERN CHINA/JULY 1999 foreign-goods shops, 4 cigarette shops, 3 clock shops, and 1 western- suit shop. For daily needs, there were 24 grocery stores, 21 wooden- goods stores, 16 brush shops, 9 coal shops, 5 drugstores, 4 birdcage shops, 3 straw-mat shops, and 2 shoe-sole shops. For special occa- sions, one could get a picture taken at one of the 3 photo studios there. For "Mr. Addicted" (yinjunzi), there were 17 "white powder" (drug) houses at Tianqiao. There were also pawnshops, warehouses, luggage shops, army uniform shops, dental-repairing places, and a large number of brothels (Zhang Cixi and Zhao Xianyu, 1936: 8). In addi- tion, there were also more than 290 booths offering goods and ser- vices. More than 2,000 people labored and concocted a living at Tianqiao every day (Cheng Shanqing, 1990:66-67). Squeezed in amid the shops and booths were more than twenty kinds of indoor and out- door entertainment, ranging from regional folk art performances to "moving pictures" and slide shows. One could enjoy folk singing, sto- rytelling, and comedy shows and also see martial art performances, wrestling, magic shows, and even pornography. One could also elect to take in new-style entertainment at the South City Amusement Park or the New World Entertainment Center (Xin shijie), which was mod- eled after the Big World Entertainment Center (Da shijie) in Shanghai and was described by American sociologist Sidney Gamble as "the Coney Island of Beijing" (Gamble and Burgess, 1921: 35). Tianqiao inspired radically different reactions from its visitors. If the imperial landmarks attracted tourists with their deserted, placid solemnity, Tianqiao's allure was its pandemonium-exciting to some, disturbing to others. On the question of what was attractive about Ti- anqiao, contemporaries provided different answers. Tian Yunjin's tourist guidebook dwelt mostly on the singsong girls. Although he warned innocent young men not to indulge in entertainment there, he nonetheless took pains to create an alluring picture of the singsong girls' flirtations, arousing interest and curiosity in Tianqiao's "inde- cent" diversions (Tian Yunjin, 1935: 7-9). For European and Ameri- can women living in Beijing, the fun of Tianqiao was material. It was a market to buy cheap second-hand "furs, silk, occasionally embroider- ies and clothes" (Mother's Club of Peking, 1921: 179). Yi Shunding, a Qing and Republican official from Hanyang, enjoyed the entertain- ment at Tianqiao so much that he wrote a lengthy poem, "Song of Ti- anqiao," praising drumsong singer Feng Fengxi after his visit in Dong / TIANQIAO AS BEIJING'S RECYCLNG CENTER 307 1913-1914 (Cheng Shanqing, 1990: 39-42). The self-styled sociolo- gist Zhang Cixi acted as an observer, recording "ordinary people's" reactions to Tianqiao: One rarely sees gentlemenly people here. Most people who come here for fun are those who have to exchange their physical strength and sweat to acquire food ... People come here excited, and mix into the flying dust. The filthy smell of sweat and air from the ditches of dirty water are blown into people's noses by the wind. The smell is so bad that it makes one feel suffocated. Yet, it seems that many people are not aware of this at all. They are all enjoying themselves. [Zhang Cixi and Zhao Xianyu, 1936: 12] Although Zhang Cixi attempted to understand Tianqiao by distancing himself from the people and their activities there, he was just as con- fused as the writer Zhong Ruoxia. Common people's excitement was obvious to his eyes, but he could not fathom how one could delight in such a filthy place. Zhong Ruoxia and Zhang Cixi's inability to gain an objectifying distance from Tianqiao's details had its European counterparts, as Timothy Mitchell discusses in his study of Cairo. When Gustave Flau- bert first arrived in Cairo, he experienced the city "as a visual turmoil." It was "indescribable, except as disorder." In his first letter from Cairo he wrote, So here we are in Egypt .... What can I say about it all? What can I write you? As yet I am scarcely over the initial bedazzlement... each detail reaches out to grip you; it pinches you; and the more you concentrate on it the less you grasp the whole. Then gradually all this becomes har- monious and the pieces fall into place of themselves, in accordance with the laws of perspective. [Mitchell, 1993: 21] It was not a coincidence of vocabulary that made these accounts of Cairo and Tianqiao so similar, but it does not mean that Tianqiao and Cairo were the same. The key to these descriptions lay in "the laws of perspective," or the expectation of order predetermined in one's per- spective. Mitchell (1993) argues that modem consciousness, as well as the urban planning that attempts to produce and conforms to it, is based on 308 MODERN CHINA/JULY 1999 viewing everything as an exhibition, a perspective best expressed by the world expositions. This world appears "to consist not of a complex of social practices but of a binary order: on the one hand individuals and their activities, on the other an inert structure that somehow stands apart from individuals, preexists them, and contains and gives a frame- work to their lives" (Mitchell, 1993: xii). This principle of "world as exhibition," Mitchell argues, was reflected in the rebuilding of Cairo in the nineteenth century: [The] layout of the new streets was designed to give the appearance of a plan. Such a plan was not merely a device to aid the work of urban reconstruction but a principle of order to be represented in the layout of the city's streets and inscribed in the life of its inhabitants. The new city remained, like the old city, simply a certain distribution of surfaces and spaces. But the regularity of the distribution was to create the experi- ence of something existing apart from the physical streets as their non- physical structure. The order of the city was now to be grasped in terms of this relation between the material realisation of things themselves (as one could now say) and their invisible, meta-physical structure. [Mitchell, 1993: xii] This world functions in "a two-dimensional form of individual versus apparatus, practice versus institution, social life and its structure-or material reality and its meaning" (Mitchell, 1993: xii). The case of Beijing was somewhat different from that of Cairo in that the expression of "plan" and "order" was not a uniquely new or modem phenomenon. Imperial Beijing was a well-planned city, delib- erately offering a powerful image of order. But the dissimilarity stops there at the experiential level. The differences between Qing and Republican Beijing (and Mitchell's modem city in general) rest in the relationship between the concept and the material reality of order. In Imperial Beijing, order was created by the very action of building the palace and ceremonial sites as well as the material existence of these structures. When the emperor performed a ritual, he was, to all minds, literally ordering the cosmos. The city was in a sense an enormous altar where the thought of distinguishing form from function, or "indi- viduals and their activities" from "an inert structure that somehow stands apart from individuals, preexists them, and contains and gives a Dong /TIANQIAO AS BEIJING'S RECYCLING CENTER 309 framework to their lives," never arose. The situation was different in Republican Beijing. Before new streets were opened up, there was already an abstract concept called "the principle of order." Plans were drawn to express the principle of order, and construction projects were carried out to transform the plans into material forms. No matter whether the plans and projects were successful, and even if the mate- rial structures were torn down, the principle still existed. And the minds were set to expect that order everywhere, visible or invisible, in both the space and in people's behavior. When Zhong Ruoxia attempted to present Tianqiao in pictorial terms, he wanted to see "the world as a limited totality, something that forms a bounded structure or system" (Mitchell, 1993: 22). But this attempt met with resistance. Tianqiao refused to cooperate-it was "a place whose life was not yet lived as if the world were an exhibition" (Mitchell, 1993: 22). Space at Tianqiao, except for the few major ave- nues, was not designed according to any plan, and activities in Tianqiao were neither practiced at such a large scale as in Imperial Beijing, nor did they fit expectations for the new citizens of the new Republic. Tianqiao's position in the imperial order was long gone, yet the Republican order, when used as a framework to understand Tianqiao, had little explanatory power. Rather than looking at Tianqiao and finding the logic in the activities, many observers had a vision of order and plan in their minds that might have come from other parts of the city, Shanghai, or even Japan and the West. While the framework of expectation for a Republican order was imbedded in the viewing eyes and minds, it is not surprising that Tianqiao only appeared as a negative, as a place of disorder. But to many in Beijing and certainly for those who made a living in Tianqiao, the district had an order and rhythm of its own. That Tianqiao's disorder expressed an order of its own can be first illus- trated through a study of the formation of the district. When Beijing was undergoing a transformation in its spatial order, the rejected ele- ments were thrown together at Tianqiao: people who could not survive in the new city, things that did not appear to represent an imagined moder future, and activities and behaviors that were deemed too degenerate to measure up to the new moral requirements for citizens of the Republic. 310 MODERN CHINA/JULY 1999 THE BIRTH OF TIANQIAO Even the very name of Tianqiao sometimes seemed confusing: many were unclear whether it was an old or a new place. In the 1930s, "Tianqiao" cigarettes were sold in Shanghai. Printed on the box was a beautiful landscape painting of a long bridge with many arches. Many people heard that there was a place called "Tianqiao" in Beijing and naturally thought that this was the bridge. Only when they traveled to Beijing did they realize that both this bridge and a place named Tianqiao existed, but they were falsely combined on the cigarette box. The bridge was the "Seventeen-Arch Bridge" (Shiqi kong qiao) of the Summer Palace to the northwest of Beijing, while the place called Tianqiao lay in the southeast corer of the city (Wei Gan, 1935: 95-96). The two places were distant from each other and were in no sense similar. The Summer Palace was the tranquil former imperial garden and Republican public park, and Tianqiao was in every way its opposite-except for the fact that both were imperial lands opened after the 1911 Revolution. Although Tianqiao was grouped with "ancient" historical sites in some guidebooks, it had little in common with the preserved imperial landmarks. Tianqiao was a form of urban space that emerged after 1911, made possible by the fundamentally new nature of the forces th