Cairo and Beijing

September 7, 2009

I recently came across a new book on Beijing, City of Heavenly Tranquility Jasper Becker. I read the introduction and was surprised at the degree to which Beijing has been destroyed over the past two decades.

I doubt there is another example in history of an ancient capital being destroyed and rebuilt so thoroughly and in such a short space of time. Even Baron Haussmann left 40 per cent of nineteenth-century Paris untouched, but Beijing will be left with less than 5 per cent of its buildings. Out of the 25 square miles of largely Ming buildings that had survived into the 1950s, just three have been kept. If one subtracts the sizeable grounds of the Forbidden City, just twenty-five historical areas have been kept as isolated pockets in a new city that sprawls over 50 square miles. [8]

I find that depressing, if familiar. With classical manuscripts it is common to breathe a sigh of relief for that one manuscript that made it to the modern world and was printed and saved. We are thankful for the fragile artwork that lasted until it could be preserved in a museum. Getting to the modern world equals safety for cultural artifacts. But when it comes to cities and landscapes the modern world has and continues to be utterly and remorselessly destructive.

The story is not quite as simple as it sounds. History gives us a few examples of states that were actively hostile to the past. In Anthony Tung's Preserving the World's Great Cities there is a chapter on Moscow and Beijing entitled "Ideological Conflict with the Past." In these extreme cases there is not only the modernist conflict with traditional society, but an actual goal of uprooting the past. But while that attitude was part of the legacy of Mao and the Cultural Revolution, the greatest destruction of Beijing came under a more nationalist oriented government. This current Chinese government would deny destruction of the past:

Even as they were destroying Beijing's past, the authorities boasted of how they were spending US$ 800 million on preserving its traditional culture. [12]

So the current government is receiving and preserving much from historical China, but it is doing so in bits and pieces. Note how in that first long quotation there are 25 historical areas kept as "isolated pockets" inside Beijing. The real problem is that culture and landscape are not being treated as wholes, but as bits and pieces.. beautiful relics that can be exhibited individually to visitors.

This approach to preservation is quite common, and perhaps China is unique only in its ability to overnight, as it were, tear down and reconstruct. Over the past few decades Cairo has been going through the same thing, only without much evidence of planning. The traditional city is being lost right in front of us. The Egyptian government belatedly realized the tourist value of its Islamic history, and turns to preservation. It does a beautiful job in some ways, and the buildings are restored and spiffed up. But even while this preservation is taking place, the texture of the traditional city is being lost. What one ends up with are small pockets of preservation within an unhistorical city.

At the top of this post I embedded a slide show of the mosques that line Bayn al-Qasrayn in Islamic Cairo. The mosques look great, and the lighting brings out the marble patterning in a way that the hard sunlight of the day can't. These mosques are now being worked into the tourist economy of the city.. and stripped out of any living memory.

On this last point Becker makes an interesting point about the preservation of Beijing:

This was conservation only in the sense that the British Museum preserves such dead cultures as the Assyrians or ancient Egyptians. [12]

As a museum preserves beautiful objects cut off from context, so this approach to preserving the city creates remarkable little set pieces within a modern city. The loss is that there will no more be experiences like that of Amina, the wife and mother who is central to The Cairo Trilogy. Mahfouz has her look out her balcony upon these same mosques in Bayn al-Qasrayn:

There was nothing to attract the eye except the minarets of the ancient seminaries of Qala'un and Barquq, which loomed up like ghostly giants enjoying a night out by the light of the gleaming stars. It was a view that had grown on her over a quarter of a century. She never tired of it. [6]

As you can see from the slide show at the top of this post, these mosques are hardly "ghostly giants" anymore. They are lit up with lots of drama. They are the spectacular companions of the ever-changing crowd of visitors, not the silent overseers of a traditional and locally rooted life.

Jasper Becker. City of Heavenly Tranquility. Oxford UP, 2009
Anthony Tung. Preserving the World's Great Cities. Three Rivers Press,      2001.
Naguib Mahfouz. The Cairo Trilogy. Everyman's Library, 2001.