The shape of public space: Tiananmen Square

I've just read this interesting account of the state of student protest in China on the 20th anniversary of the massacre in Tiananmen Square.  The photographs were strongly affecting for me, and they took me back to the time of my first visit to the Square in August of 2001.  I had landed in Beijing Airport for a conference, and a good friend of mine, a Chinese expatriate, had met me at the terminal.  My friend had left China before 1989, but not much before, and had friends who had been students at Beijing University at the time the protests began.  In an effort to speed the transition to Beijing time, we decided to get into the city and walk until exhaustion overtook us or a reasonable bedtime arrived, whichever came first. I don't remember it being a particularly conscious decision, but we ended up following the route of the student protesters as they made their way from The Triangle at the University to Tiananmen.  This was my first visit to any part of Asia, so it was not difficult to stay awake and alert in the frothing maelstrom of people, cars and bicycles.  What I've come to love so much about Asia on subsequent trips is the first thing that hit me on this visit.  It's such a feast for the senses.  No matter where you look, there's something interesting going on -- a loud discussion, a business transaction, a bicycle laden with several large appliances, a live animal making a desperate bid for freedom, a wide sidewalk filled with food, commerce, mah jong, barbers, or children dodging around the legs of their parents.  Along the way, my friend pointed out salient intersections, tank positions, bulletholes in the walls of the large buildings we passed.  Even though he hadn't been in China at the time of the massacre, I could hear in his tone and see in his eyes that it was if he had been, and at this moment he was taking me there with him.

When the streets opened out into Tiananmen Square, a perfect, flat plain of concrete, studded with a few monuments and ringed by a set of imposing socialist style buildings splashed with red banners, I have to admit that it took my breath away.  A good part of the effect, I'm sure, had much less to do with what I was seeing than with my understanding of the importance of this piece of real estate.  It was the threshold to Tiananmen Gate, the southern entry to the Forbidden City, home to generations of Chinese Emperors.  It was the gathering place of tens of thousands of hopeful citizens in 1949 as Chairman Mao proclaimed the inception of the People's Republic of China.  But as well as being affected by my understanding of the history of the space, I think that I was also overcome by the scale of the thing.  I'd seen many pictures of the square, and had read about its size and shape in books, but none of that research had prepared me for the feeling of walking over the ground, inhaling its dimensions with my eyes.  There's nothing like being there.

In Beijing, especially in the older core, there's nothing accidental about its form.  It's geometrically simple--a series of concentric rings connected with modified grids--but the reasons for this have little to do with realizing planning efficiencies or making graphic on the streets the equation between land and money.  Beijing's overall structure was planned in accord with principles of sacred geometry that dictated how the streets should be aligned with the cardinal directions and with one another.  The position of the palace and other significant locations related to the power structure of old Beijing determined the angles, directions and lengths of all of the main thoroughfares and, to a great extent, also influenced the movement of goods and people through the city.  It's true that the size of the square has changed considerably over time (it expanded to 4 times its original size in 1958, making it the largest urban public square in the world), but the geographic resonance between the square and the rest of the city was fixed by sacred principle many centuries ago.  I can't help but think that my reaction to that first glimpse and walk through the square and the long and storied history of the space were connected.  Our built spaces can exert steady influences on our movements, feelings, and behaviour.  Such small incremental influences can, over the course of longer spans of time, feature as significant players in a nation's history.