WALLS WITHIN WALLS

My Beijing, and the Beijing of most of its residents, has disappeared. What was once the greatest walled city the world had ever known has been destroyed; a city that was the highest expression of a culture and a way of life has vanished under concrete.

Nostalgia is not an emotion to be trusted, but this visit gave me a chance to test out my own regrets for the vanished city against the feelings of those with greater rights over the place than I have: its residents, its artists, intellectuals, architects, writers and painters. I found them in mourning for the city they loved. What pigheaded ideology had begun, globalization had finished.

I never knew the walls of Beijing - they were destroyed more than a decade before I first arrived. They were more than 60 feet high and 30 feet wide, punctuated by great gates and watchtowers, and they encircled a city that had been laid out not just as a majestic capital in which all that was finest in the empire was on display, but as an expression of the cosmology of that empire.

Beijing was a walled city within a walled city: at the heart of it, the imperial palace - the Forbidden City - with its walls and golden roofs, is main gate facing south. Around the Forbidden City were the palaces and residences of the princes and the emperor's officials, their main doors facing north. On the points of compass were the temples of Earth, Heaven, Sun and Moon, to which the emperor, as Son of Heaven, would repair at prescribed times of the year to carry out the rituals that ordered the calendar and ensured peace and good harvests. If the rituals were neglected, chaos and disorder, war and hunger would result.

Beijing in its days, was the world's richest and most advanced civilization, a city of splendors: of beautiful gardens, gorgeous temples, of an architecture that understood the relationship between mass and void, that led the eye through courtyards and gates, past spirit screens and along cunningly designed vistas.