Contrasts Evoke Beijing's Beauty

Among the great cities of the world, Beijing is striking for its ugliness.

I wasn’t surprised at the grunginess that is characteristic—even expected—of China’s capital when I traveled there this summer to do thesis research. I’d been there the year before to study Mandarin, and I acclimated quickly to the city’s vast size and urban sprawl.

I wasn’t surprised that I could hardly breathe after a day in Beijing’s legendary smog, or that the smells and sounds of construction were ubiquitous. The grime that seemed to cover every public space was a familiar presence, and so were the utilitarian, communist lines of much of the city’s architecture.

Yet with its enormous size, Beijing contains correspondingly intense artistic extremes. I was familiar with the city’s exceptionally beautiful sights as well as its tough exterior.

At a few select, walled-off sites—like the Temple of Heaven or the Imperial Palace—monolithic concrete buildings are replaced by carefully cut stone and manicured gardens, protected by guards and signs pleading with passersby to “please protect the cultural relics.” These sites of officially recognized art stand opposite the everyday lives of Beijingers, making the name “Forbidden City” quite literal.

I understood that contrast between the two Beijings on my first visit to China. But this summer, the most beautiful places I found were neither the most attractive parts nor the grittiest ones.

Instead, the sites that were most appealing to me captured both of the city’s aesthetic extremes—modern ugliness and ethereal classicism—in microcosm. In doing so, they served as solitary points of departure from which I could begin to understand Beijing as a whole.

I found that kind of beauty, for instance, at Jianguomen, an ancient astronomical observatory. The rooftop collection of huge, rusted telescopes and instruments is itself surrounded by skyscrapers, and the building also serves as the entrance to one of Beijing’s largest subway stations.

The result is a neatly framed artistic interaction between the old and new: The elegant instruments of Chinese classical antiquity stand dwarfed by urbanity, but at the same time, these ancient telescopes still stand watch over Beijing, no matter how much the city has changed.

A similar artistic quality was present in the small medical college where I worked, Xiehe Medical College. The university and attached hospital were primarily composed of flat concrete structures, as dismal and dingy on the inside as their exteriors.

But the oldest parts of the hospital were designed to replicate a royal palace that had once stood on the same grounds. Traditional architecture disguised dusty hallways that were crowded with patients and modern medical equipment, in an even closer juxtaposition of Beijing’s “high” and “low” aesthetics.

I found beauty from one of Beijing’s many sky bridges—concrete footpaths over the city’s highways.

I’ve stood there often, watching one of the greatest acts of mass transit performed daily, overwhelmed by movement: cars speeding by just a few feet below, bicycles making their way erratically across intersections, the groan of a cart piled high with trash, even the occasional horse-drawn vehicle making its slow way down the highway.

And always, there was the city sprawl, stretching out into the interminable haze, while the unsteady bridge shook below my feet.

It’s a sight to make any Modernist’s skin tingle, because the scene gives great artistic meaning to the states of motion and transportation so common to Beijing.

Beijing’s vastness makes it a difficult city to digest aesthetically, because its design and architecture cover such an unusually broad spectrum—from the totally utilitarian and modern to the fanciful and archaic. In exploring the points of contrast between these extremes, there is a way to make sense of Beijing’s sprawl. In understanding more fully its artistic elements, the city does not seem quite as forbidden.

­—Staff writer Mary A. Brazelton can be reached by email at mbrazelt@fas.harvard.edu.