China in five elements
木 — Wood
Jingshan Park spreads its ancient trees over 23 hectares in the imperial heart of Beijing. Sitting directly north of the Forbidden Palace, it is a venerable redoubt of huddled pines and raw-boned cypress. In winter, its flower beds are comatose, its fruit trees stand naked.
I climb to the top of one of its peaks and I feel the dry, muted chill of the Beijing winter. From somewhere near the foot of the hill, I hear the ghostly rise of old men singing. I have no idea what they are singing about. I have never known what old men speak about in Chinese.
I’ve only ever been back to China in the thicket of winter, when the green of the branches are merely a murmur, an echo of woodlands on brighter days.
火 — Fire
It is nearly Chinese New Year. We return to the old family village. My uncle demonstrates to me his favourite pastime as a child growing up in Jiangsu countryside: burning dry grass in the fallow fields. It snarls like firecrackers. It is a hungry and industrious blaze. I look down near my feet and see wretched little fish darting in the irrigation canals.
Now it is the eve of the Lunar New Year and the apartment complex I’m staying at in Changzhou has become a war zone. Fireworks explode overhead like artillery shells. Flashes of raging colours. Sizzling plumes of smoke. The noise is deafening. There are no safety codes around here — the bomblets violently burst between buildings, flare up balconies and windows, ricochet off clothes lines and AC units.
I watch a middle aged couple mischievously fill an empty oil barrel with fireworks and set it alight. Just another pillar of festive hellfire, sending the city into a seizure of lights. What is this obsession with infernos? Where has it suddenly come from? Nowhere is safe.
土 — Earth
It staggers belief that this stone scar is still standing. For hundreds of years, the Great Wall has slithered through hills, deserts, valleys, rivers. Its empty watchtowers have demarcated the spine of the world herself. A ten-thousand-mile long serpent. Poets called it ‘the Earth Dragon’ (土龙 or Tǔ Lóng).
The ramparts of the old dynasties: stone, brick, rammed earth stretching as far as the eye can see. Built by the indomitable will of the emperor and the innumerable bones of his labourers. It’s hard to imagine what the land must have been like back when the nomadic raiders of the Eurasian Steppes bashed against its great bulwark and crumbled into dust. It’s even harder to imagine what it must have been like when, time and time again, the horsemen breached the wall.
I race up the battlements to a vacant watchtower, then hike over to another, and then another. Tourists are dotted all along the wall, scattered like pebbles across its winding back. There are many visitors, but they are diffuse. There’s no natural congregation point along the Great Wall — you can walk as much or as little of it as you want. The wall doesn’t care. It knows it cannot be conquered on foot. It simply never ends.
金 — Metal
For over three decades, China has been drilled, arc welded, riveted, injection moulded and press forged. The thunder of drop-hammers. The shriek of belt grinders. The clatter of a stack of rebar. Across the whole country, there has been a manic clamour for metal.
It’s hard not to notice the nation’s prodigious demand for iron and steel. On the high-speed rail across Yixing, I speed past a slew of rural construction sites. Half-built towers, their steel beam skeletons rising off the sullen countryside. All along the highway to Shanghai, I see a forest of scaffolding, a canopy of cranes.
The experts say that China’s extraordinary construction boom has finally begun to wind down. Even so, I feel the momentum of its nation-building efforts everywhere I go. Entire urban environments are being constructed from scratch, even if it’s unclear that anyone will go and live in them. It is as though China is a colossal freight train struggling to apply the brakes. However, the long-term ramifications of this movement for the country — and the entire global economy — are perhaps best discussed elsewhere.
The museums I visit in Beijing show that China has always dealt in all things smelted and forged, except that it has often been to satisfy the destructive, rather than creative, impulse. On display are the cast-iron cannons that terrorised the Warlord Era, the dented bayonets that slashed at Japanese aggressors, the mortar rounds that bombarded Nationalist soldiers. But like the blueprints to its future, the legacy of China’s rusted past is perhaps a tale for another time…
水 — Water
Summer Palace. 頤和園. Yí hé yuán.
A royal retinue of halls, pavilions, lakes and gardens in the capital of the People’s Republic. We are standing on the glassy face of Kunming Lake. Icy vapours rise over Longevity Hill. The Marble Boat is shackled to the frozen waters. The 17-Arch Bridge is pale, frosted moonstone.
Like the palaces around it and the fallen social order that built it, the lake is but a memory of animate water. Its flows, its forms, its living forces have become locked in the cage of winter, imprisoned for many months to come.
My little cousin patters on the ice next to me, cocooned in a pink puffer jacket. The lake ice groans, like a persistent toothache. Blue lightning streaks reveal its tension points. Another groan. A crunching sound beneath our feet.
We get spooked and the two of us scamper for the safety of solid earth.
In the back of my mind, I am already floating off to warmer climes.