Under the Capital

Ice, Ice Baby

This is a hot time to be travelling. The Chinese summer is a sweltering heat, and running around outside looking at temples and historical sites is a big ask on any class of traveller. Most people can only make one sightseeing stop a day before the unforgiving sun drives them back to their hotels or into air-conditioned restaurants.

One good way to escape the sunshine is to go indoors - but a better way by far has to be to get underground, where the sun's merciless heat cannot penetrate. Chinese people have for centuries sought refuge from the sun beneath the surface of the country - there are man-made caverns and underground chambers to be found in many places throughout China, and a good deal of China's population still lives in caves - many by choice - where it is cool in summer, and thankfully warm in winter.

If you're in the capital, the modern world takes us far away from caves, and basement levels in shopping malls are often less than ideally conditioned. the subway presents itself as an option; but if you've been caught clutching at the rails on a crowded circle-line metro carriage in Beijing, you'll know it's not a place to escape the oppressive weather. Fortunately for the traveller on the hunt for refrigerator-cool sightseeing, there's one admittedly cool and just as intriguing place to get below the surface - and it's not far away from the centre of the ancient city, the Forbidden City.

Not many people are aware of this, but in less politically friendly times, the Chinese Government had to seriously consider the possibility of foreign invasion of the capital - after all, it had happened before at the turn of the last century - and the strategy that emerged saw the construction of a vast network of tunnels built beneath the capital. The tunnels are rumoured to be extensive and complex; the vestige of a more paranoid age. Known as the Underground City, and occasionally dubbed the Underground Great Wall, it is said that these subterranean equivalents of Beijing's famous hutongs (thriving back avenues) spread out beneath a vast area of the city.

Most people living in Beijing are only aware of the fact of the tunnels by their reputation, and over the years they have taken on something of the nature of myth. Many people will admit that they've heard of them, but aren't sure if they really exist or not. There are stories that they are still in use; that the Government has converted long stretches of tunnel into intelligence operations and top secret military training facilities; other more fanciful fables tell that the tunnels burrow deep within the Earth, where countless ancient Chinese treasures are stored away from public view.

Regardless of the truth or fiction of these popular imaginings, the tunnels do exist, and can be visited for a reasonable ticket price of twenty Chinese yuan. Hidden away in the backstreets of Qianmen, this is not Beijing's most popular attraction by far, but it is one that is undeniably unique, and worth setting aside a few hours for to see, if for no other reason that they're an icy cold place to visit on an otherwise scorching day.

The Qianmen Backstreets

I'd been planning on visiting the tunnels ever since I'd heard that the rumours about their existence were true, and was just waiting for an excuse to take the subway across to Qianmen to hunt the entrance out. I found that excuse when a long-time Chinese friend, reluctantly stationed in Singapore, let me know she was on holiday and coming to the capital to visit. Jade, an exceptional character with a taste for the unusual, was the ideal companion to accompany me on an excursion into the literal depths of Red Chinese history, and it was not without some degree of enthusiasm that we crossed over Great Qianmen Road and began to seek out the partially-hidden hutong entrance leading to the tunnel gates.

Qianmen's network of old-style avenues are interesting enough to spend days getting lost in. In ancient times, Qianmen was the most raucous and colourful part of town, a place where the usually stiff-necked palace officials and guards (and, it is thought, occasionally the emperors themselves) would come out to drink, whore and gamble. It was the commercial hub of old Beijing, and hundred-year old trades in such diverse products as silk, medicine and scissors still thrive in the curling streets.

As Jade and I wandered through them, it was like walking back in time - or to be less fantastical, like stepping out of the glamour of modern Beijing (if indeed modern Beijing can be described as glamourous, which is a moot point) and into the alcoves of China's poorer provinces. Where less than a kilometre away the wealthy sip at expensive coffees and check their diamond-studded watches, here the elderly sit outside their mudbrick homes in white vests, waving the warm heat over their face with limp bamboo fans, watching the passers-by as they busy between their homes. Qianmen's residential narrow alleys are a classic Chinese contradiction, and their charm is that they preserve something of Beijing's original character for those who wish to drop by and see the city as it once was.

They have a limited lifespan, however - Qianmen is being dissected quarter by quarter by clumsy hydraulic earthmovers and wreckers, and everywhere there are torn walls and exposed sections of earth, the gaping wounds in old, tiled homes spilling a century of mortar into the dug clay littered with wastepaper and plastic bags. The directions I was following were already out of date - the Bei Xiaoshun Hutong we were making our way down has already been torn asunder by a new roadway under development, and some degree of twisting around was necessary before we were at the right place. There, at number 62 Xida Mochang Hutong, was an unlikely looking doorway opening into a room decked out in khaki with a visible staircase leading deep down into the bosom of Beijing.

Beneath the Surface

We paid our tickets and stepped down into the tunnels, and were immediately relieved. Wandering through dusty backstreet Qianmen had been a sweaty ordeal, and the Underground City is thankfully just as cold as is reported. There was an immediate musty smell: the old military patterned cloth lining the walls at the entrance were damp with condensation and most likely mildewed, and the stuffy air hung about the tunnel walls murkily. I'd heard that the tunnels were poorly lit and had brought a torch: in fact, the areas of the Underground City open to tourists are now well lit, and we stared down the length of the first whitewashed old passageway as our guide appeared from the distance, walking towards us with a gait that was positively eerie.

She was dressed in Khakis herself and had the somber look of someone who has to work on morbid premises. The tunnels, she explained, had been constructed to house 300,000 people in the event of war and bombing by aeroplane, although she personally couldn't imagine how people could have survived the damp and stale air - I surmised that she would have preferred the bombs to spending the night in these wet catacombs. I didn't share her opinion - as we walked through, I found myself enthralled at the twists and turns, the condensation trickling down the walls as the summer air wafted in from the numerous ventilation shafts and cooled below ground. I saw sealed-off sideways labelled with distant destinations halfway across the city, and I pointed at one passage labelled 'Wangfujing' - "does it really go as far?", I asked. "The tunnels go all the way under the city", she informed me. "Through the tunnels, you can reach Wangfujing, the Forbidden City, the Railway Station, Tiantan, the Summer Palace, even the airport."

Most of them, of course, have been sealed off, perhaps to keep tourists away from the top-secret intelligence bases I'd heard about. I asked the guide if the rumours were true, and she laughed. "I've been told that there's a road that goes all the way underground from the Great Hall of the People all the way to the Government homes in Tongzhou, and that there are great fields of mushrooms grown down here. Tell me, do you see any mushrooms?"

I preferred to hold on to the stories of intrigue - the tunnels lent themselves to exciting stories, many of which may have happened if war had broken out. It took ten years to build them: threatening signals from Russia in 1969 saw the work begun, and it was only until softening relations after the Cultural Revolution that it began to be apparent that the tunnels were unlikely to ever be used. They remain a military asset; maps are not provided and photographs are not allowed to be taken - and the sections of the tunnels open to the public are few. It's not possible to break away from a tour group and venture out into the shadowy belly of the capital city, but it is possible to get an idea of what living here would have been like. There were facilities intended for long term use: libraries, cinemas, hospitals and vast storerooms for ammunition and weapons in case the tunnels needed to be defended. Now the Qianmen entrance is the only one of the former twelve that remains open, and apart from tourism, the only purpose the tunnels serve is to house a small silk factory, where six workers smooth silk in the cool air. "We keep a close eye on their health", the guide told me - "spending all day in this air isn't good for your health." Her miserable look convinced me she was right, but I was still disappointed when our tour ended far sooner than I'd imagined and we were rushed away - I'd have preferred to stay below, where it was cold, and run around beneath Beijing looking for secret spy bases.