The City of Heavenly Tranquillity: Beijing in the History of China

by Jasper Becker

'The City of Heavenly Tranquility' is a summary history of China, told through the story of its capital and greatest cultural centre.

Genres: China, History, Nonfiction, Asia

Hardcover

First published June 23, 2007

About the author

Jasper Becker is a British journalist who spent 30 years covering Asia including 18 years living in Beijing. His reporting on uprisings, refugees and famine in China, Tibet and North Korea garnered him many awards and he is a popular speaker and commentator on current events in Asia. He now lives in England and has just finished his tenth book, tentatively called The Fatal Flaw. Earlier books such as Travels in an Untamed Land, Hungry Ghosts or Rogue Regime had described the devastating impact of Communism on the peoples of Mongolia, China and North Korea. In City of Heavenly Tranquility, he laments the destruction of old Peking and the building of the new Beijing while The Chinese and Dragon Rising set out to portray the different sides of contemporary China. In Hungry Ghosts, the author had exposed for the first time the true madness and horrors of Mao’s secret famine during the Great Leap Forward. The new work digs into the flawed economic theories which lay behind Communism’s collapse and describes the economic theorists who got it right and the Western economists who believed the bogus statistics put out by Moscow and Beijing. He has also researched family histories of the early Shanghai capitalists who became textile magnates in Hong Kong. Under the pen name Jack MacLean, he has published an engrossing thriller set amid the drone wars in Pakistan and Afghanistan called Global Predator. Four of his earlier books on Asia have just been updated and re-released as kindle books.

Reviews

[Tatyana · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was reading this book before and during my trip to China. I was surprised that a book written by a historian could be so captivating. I found it very informative and enjoyed quoting it to my husband while we were touring Beijing. The information was more logical and systematic than our tourguides.

[Colin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent history of Beijing! I learned so much about the city and how it has changed over the decades, especially since 1949.

[Christopher Pitts · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fantastic history of Beijing as a capital city from Kublai Khan up through the early 2000s, and it's brought to life by the interviews included in each chapter: a former palace eunuch, a Manchu aristocrat, a qi gong con man who is astoundingly venerated by PLA and CCP elites... Although the author is sometimes a bit of a snob, his descriptions and arguments are insightful and generally fair. Really enjoyed reading this.

[Valerie · Rating 3 out of 5]

In a few weeks I'll be moving to Beijing to teach. Because I know very little about Chinese history (or Beijing), I've been trying to read all I can about it. This was the first such book.

I found a lot of the anecdotes interesting, as well as a lot of the earlier history aspects. For me, the information wasn't the problem. The writing was. For a journalist, Becker sure does digress a lot and use a lot of unnecessarily flowery language. I was constantly reminded of Holden Caulfield talking with his former teacher about his current teacher. He said his current teacher would cut students off when they started digressing. Holden argued the digressions were interesting, but his former teacher pointed out that, if the digression was the interesting part, that's what the speaker should have been talking about in the first place. But I digress.

Becker begins each chapter with an interesting aspect (or person) in the city. Then completely digresses into the historical, jumping back and forth through time until he winds up back where he started. A lot of his digressions were interesting, but halfway through the book, I realized I still had almost no concept of a timeline or sense of the city itself. One chapter about meeting the last surviving eunuch had me so confused, I had to read it twice. Another chapter began with him researching the city's brothels, then digressed into the Japanese occupation, and ended with the mention of a Chinese leader embroiled in a sex scandal (I'm still unclear about the ending of that chapter. He reiterates something the prostitue he interviewed had said earlier, but his reference sounded unfamiliar. I reread the entire chapter and couldn't find the comment he was referencing). It's so disconnected in its ideas and lack of thesis that I was beginning to feel as if my reading comprehension was the problem. An anecdotal journey through the city would be great. Historical perspective of the city would be great. However, the mish-mash of both was discombobulating. If the digressions were the main idea and the interesting parts, they should have been the focus.

Which leads me to me next problem with the writing. Becker needs a better editor. After teaching writing and paragraph/essay structure for half my life, I know I can be a little nit-picky. The lack of Oxford commas didn't bother me (I know many who would've tossed out the book at the first one missing). What bothered me was the lack of parallel structure. A lot of my problems with his digressions could have been cleared up with some good editing and reorganizing. For example, in the chapter on eunuchs, Becker introduces the two people he's going to talk about: "one was the last eunuch to serve [Pu Yi], and the other was the claimant to the throne". Common sense and the way our brains process information would indicate that the eunuch would be the first topic at hand. Nope. It was the claimant. When we read, we (unconsciously) use structural clues like that to help us process the information. I had to read the chapter twice before I figured out that my utter confusion came from that lack of parallel structure and that I wasn't reading about two eunuchs (one a claimant to the throne). That's when I realized that issue probably accounted for a lot of the times I was confused about events/people/places. I began to notice that Becker did this All. The. Time. Another reason I'm astounded he's a professional journalist.

All in all, info was good (though I'll admit I gave up halfway through. I got tired of having to reread chapters/paragraphs). The writing and editing made it so much more difficult to read than it needed to be. I don't write a lot of reviews for what I read (and this book doesn't have a lot of reviews for it), but the digressions and poor structure had to be called out. Maybe the editor, publisher, or author will see this and work on editing for clarity.

[Tmq · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found it fascinating for its anecdotes, but unexpectedly superficial when it came to its take on modernist architecture, and this weakened my general impression.

[Danprain · Rating 4 out of 5]

bye bye old beijing it was nice knowing you for the short time that i did. if was only going to read one of jasper beckers books, this is it.