The first thing you'll notice about Beijing is the smog. It's a thick, gray soup that engulfs the city most of the year and is so omnipresent that even someone like me — who endured five years of rush-hour headaches in Los Angeles — has a hard time believing that the dense sky is man-made and not the sign of an oncoming monsoon. My sister, Jill, who has spent the last three years traveling and working in China (on the visual-merchandising team for Prada Asia, lucky girl), has gotten used to it. In a recent poll, she tells me as we drive beneath the smog, 70 percent of Beijing schoolchildren thought that the sky's natural color was gray. The second thing you can't overlook is the traffic. In an urban sprawl that's home to more than seventeen million residents (slightly more than the population of Chile), it's impossible to control, even with a Communist centralized government, a massive elevated highway and not one but six ring roads circling the city.
Yet despite the sky, despite the difficulty of getting around, Beijing is the pick of the Chinese-city litter. It is the down-home Chicago to Shanghai's New York. It is where ancient crafts like kite making and Peking-opera mask painting still thrive in hundreds of parks and where many families live as their ancestors did in courtyard-style houses that, on the occasional sunny day, sit in the shadows of Beijing's towering, modern skyscrapers. It's the art center, the musical heart, the political powerhouse — the real China, many will say. As the source of forward-thinking architecture and the focus of international attention, it is the future, most visitors will agree.
Beijing is currently enjoying the international spotlight, thanks to next month's Olympics, though not all of the attention has been positive. As the torch made its voyage around the globe, activists from London to San Francisco threatened to extinguish its flame and encouraged heads of state to boycott the entire event in protest of China's human-rights violations in Tibet and its business ventures that funnel money into genocide-ravaged Darfur. Still, the show — or more like the coming-out party — must go on. In preparation for the Games, Swiss architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron and the China Architecture Design Institute have erected the 80,000-seat National Stadium, lovingly nicknamed the Bird's Nest for its webbed-steel tentacles. The Netherlands' Rem Koolhaas and his team will unveil their gravity-defying CCTV Headquarters, which some are describing as a twisted doughnut. British starchitect Norman Foster's futuristic new Terminal 3 at the international airport has just opened. Even more impressive, every single Olympics project is on track to be completed ahead of schedule, not to beat timetables but to help clear the dust clinging to carbon emissions in the air. Factories will work in slow motion for weeks before the first starting gun is fired on the auspicious date of 8/8/8, and cars will miraculously be swept off the streets — all in the name of blue skies and beautiful photo ops.
These feats of will are possible because you can't imagine Beijing or, for that matter, China without considering the scale. China is a country claiming one-fifth of the global population, a place where any job can get finished early, where human power is never in short supply and the ideal of doing anything for the common good (whether by force or by personal prerogative) prevails. Want a railroad built on permafrost from the capital to Tibet? Done. The world's largest dam? No problem. The biggest water-diversion project to bring resources from the wet south via the Yangtze — the third-longest river on the planet — to the arid central plains? Finished before the next dust storm strikes, no matter that ancient cities are flooded and a million citizens displaced to make it so. China has one of the fastest-growing economies, is set to become the largest consumer of fossil fuels, is the second-biggest exporter of cars, has some of the highest disparity of wealth anywhere — and the list of hyperboles, both good and bad, goes on.
But as Jill and I duck into one of Beijing's 4,550 hutongs (the narrow alleyways lined with courtyard-style compounds that date to the 13th century), the uninspired Brutalist concrete blocks on the main thoroughfares — the result of the city's legacy of building big and building fast — slip from view and slip from mind. There, in the warrenlike enclave and with the help of our translator, a father shows us his pet cricket and we make dumplings with his wife. We hail a rickshaw to Ritan Park and watch men taking their caged birds out for "walks" and kids of all ages flying oversized kites. The juxtaposition of übermodern and defiantly ancient is what gives Beijing such rich texture, but it's hard not to think that by August this preserved past might be bulldozed into extinction.
Most residents, however, are dazzled by the spectator sport that watching Beijing grow has become. "The Olympics were a turboboost, something to amplify change but not the reason for it," Ole Scheeren, the lead architect of Rem Koolhaas's OMA Beijing, tells me over drinks near his firm's CCTV tower. Young, ambitious and creative, Scheeren is part of a large community of self-starters from America and Europe who have descended upon Beijing to seize the enormous opportunity that this "turboboost" has enabled. Despite being the political center of the country, Beijing is open and free, he feels, a city where "people are real, opinionated, intelligent." "Artists and editors are moving here instead of to Shanghai because it's less commercial and less phony," Scheeren says. Perhaps because of the difficulty that newly transplanted Westerners have decoding the Chinese way of thinking, a tightly knit, easily accessed and rather remarkable expat community has emerged. Within two days I have met a Paris-bred Chinese filmmaker, a Hong Kong–based art dealer, a Philadelphia-born art critic and an Alsatian hotelier. Everyone has commented on the fast pace and the relentless march toward progress, even at the cost of trampling history, but no one is unimpressed.
The Alsatian, Yves Wencker, had treated me to a cup of coffee a few days before I checked into his hotel, but even his breathless description of Commune by the Great Wall Kempinski couldn't prepare me for this most unusual of retreats. Designed by twelve Asian architects and abutting the Great Wall, Commune's forty-two 3,000-square-foot-plus villas illustrate just how far off the beaten path that free spirit can tread only an hour and a half outside Beijing. My weekend home is the six-bedroom Shared House villa (which has been carbon copied five times at Commune), all sharp edges and floating staircases, done completely in white. My stone bedroom has a little courtyard that faces one of the dramatic Bamboo Houses, elegantly crafted from bamboo poles and black steel and reflected in a glassy moat. Tours are offered to curious architecture junkies like me, so I spend most of my stay, with mouth agape, wandering through the floating Suitcase House, Japanese architect Shigeru Ban's woven-bamboo Furniture House and the rusted Cor-Ten steel main clubhouse. Before a dinner of traditional Peking duck in a room lined with peacock feathers, I treat myself to a hot-stone massage at the Anantara Spa, then stroll the public spaces in search of the contemporary Chinese art that decorates the halls and walls. Commune's developers won the 2002 Prize for Architecture at the Venice Biennale — the first time the award was granted to a patron of the arts rather than to the artist himself — and staying there is like living in a three-dimensional coffee-table book that begs you to turn the page. It's not uncommon for a guest (like Natalie Portman or Tommy Hilfiger, who both preceded me by a week or so) to change rooms a few times during a long-weekend stay.
I can't not hike the Great Wall — even though visiting it is more like waiting in line than hiking — but then I race back to town to avoid traffic and pop into 798, the factory compound turned gallery district where Commune's art is sourced. It's Monday, a day when most artists and gallery owners don't work, but the few who are around confirm my growing belief that Beijing is not at all the China I've read about in the papers, where the individual is a disposable commodity and dangerous corners are cut for the sake of saving a few yuan. A sign in English near Long March Space (so subversive!) reads: "Beijing is a city in motion, and its emerging art scene shares that characteristic." Hipster teenagers in slouchy jeans and Converse low-tops roam the narrow paths. At Red Star Gallery I recognize a piece by Ma Han — a sculpture of tiny Chinese action figures glued together and dipped in red paint to look like coral branches. Art-scene doyenne Pearl Lam later tells me that because China was closed in 1949 after the Maoist revolution and didn't go through various creative phases (Abstract Expressionism, etc.), its artists have been uninfluenced by mass movements. As a result, "there is no fear to explore," she says. "Video, sculpture, painting — art here is lateral." True enough; one gallery showcases birdcages transformed into chandeliers, and another displays photos of a fake Chinese opera and the wild hairstyles of the Basha Village people. It's hard to know where craft ends and art begins, or how much these artists are influenced by their dollar-wielding Western buyers, who shell out as little as $5,000 for a foot-tall sculpture of a man in business attire holding a single daisy. Whatever their driving force, the result is astonishing, cutting-edge (and buyable) beauty.
Back in town, beside my second resting stop, the Peninsula Beijing, the cranes are busy forging a modern identity 24/7, even as tourists elbow one another to see the more traditional sights: the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, the imperial Summer Palace. Rain finally falls one day and clears the skies for a few hours at dusk, and my sister and I have our last meal together, at a much-revered restaurant in a hutong. The food is fusion and pretty terrible, the native tongue of diners mostly French. The conventional wisdom is that as Beijing prepares for the onslaught that will come with the Olympic flame, art and architecture, tourism and, one would assume, food will have to cater to international tastes. As the torch continues its world tour on television screens, with the Free Tibet and Save Darfur activists supporting their causes with passion, it's possible to believe that Beijing and the powers that be will eventually cave in to international pressures. But I think that the opposite is just as likely — that foreign tastes will have to bend to Beijing's anarchic extremes. All the people I've met who've been here have the same story: they arrived thinking the city was just an Asian Los Angeles, an ugly sprawl of uninspired architecture and progress at any cost, and left (or even stayed) wondering what it was that converted them. The impromptu concert in Tiananmen Square? The day-trip to the Eastern Qing Tombs, in a rural setting two hours outside Beijing? The chic crowd lounging on opium beds at Face Bar? Perhaps, ultimately, it is that sky, its gray sheath pierced by steel towers whose defining purpose is to bring the city and its residents up, up, up.
