Drum Tower: The sounds of old Beijing

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The economist. This intimidating sound is dear to my heart. The drums of Beijing's Gulo, its drum tower, for which this podcast is named. Those drums were recorded by Colin Suyuan Chinnery, a Chinese British sound artist.

We're in the drum hall of the Drum Tower. It's quite high up above the city and there used to be 25 drums here that used to be beaten every two hours to announce time for the city.

In imperial Beijing, sand was remarkably important and the drum tower was used to keep order.

And the way that the drums used to be was. The saying is in Chinese, jin shi ba man shi ba bujin, which means you hit the drums 18 times fast, 80 times slow, and 18 times neither fast nor slow, which makes 54 times. And that's one cycle and you have to hit it two cycles. That makes 108 times. And all these numbers, 18 and 72 and 54, every single one of those things has a meaning.

The drum tower has lost its official role. It's a museum now, and in many ways, today's Beijing sounds like any big modern city. I'm going to take you to places where Beijing's ancient soundscape is being kept alive. I'm David Rennie, the Economist's Beijing bureau chief. This week, Alice is taking a break from all her reporting, and I'm going to take you on a journey with your ears into Beijing's sonic past. I'll be asking, why has sound been such a vital part of Beijing's spirit? And is that still True today. This is Drum Ta from the Economist.

Beijing's very, very sensitive to sound Beijing traditional culture, that is.

Colin's an artist and he's made it his mission to preserve the unique soundscape of China's capital.

So this is Sound Art Museum, which is an institution that focuses entirely on sound. And this is our permanent show called Sound Terminus.

Colin's a bit of a powerhouse. Last year he co founded one of the world's few museums entirely dedicated to sound. It's a brand new modern complex in the suburb of Tangzhou. Connor moved to Beijing as a young boy in the late 1970s. His father was a British Sinologist and his mother is from a famous family of Beijing writers. As a kid he trained at a tough martial arts and sports academy and he acted in a kung fu film. In the 1990s, he was a vocalist in a rock band called Xue Wei or Pressure Point. That was kind of a homage to Talking Heads.

So this is the first room of the museum and the sounds of old Beijing. And we're in a room which is a combination of a theater set and a museum exhibition show.

So in that first hall of Collins Sound Museum, you're transported back to a much older Beijing. If you grew up in a courtyard house on one of Beijing's ancient alleyways, then this is the sound of summer. I've talked to older Beijingists whose first memory of a cold, sweet summer treat isn't ice cream because that was a luxury a half century ago. They remember slices of watermelon cut up and sold on the corner of the street, even in the days when food was rationed. And this is the cry of the watermelon seller.

I think it's also for lazy people. I mean, you just had to sit in your courtyard and wait for these people to come over. And it's a little bit like using your phone to order some food or whatever, but instead of it, you just wait for the right person to come and then you go to the front gate and call them in. So everybody came over. Like it could be the knife sharpener, it could be the barber, it could be even selling kind of makeup and all kinds of foods so you really didn't have to leave your home.

The cries of Beijing's street sellers predate the Communist Party taking power. In fact, many of the sands in Collins Museum are a relic of imperial times when Beijing was a low lying city of courtyard houses. Back then, traders would walk or push barrows along its narrow alleys. They would call out their wares and those traders were chased from the city when the party collectivized the economy. Other cities had cries. But Colin, as a proud Beijinger, says that they were kind of noise. Beijing had distinctive, sophisticated calls.

Street hawking in Beijing went to another level compared to the rest of the country because the people who lived there had higher standards, and they had to compete with those higher standards to attract business.

Street traders came back to Beijing after the Mao era as China opened to a market economy. But actually, very few of those distinctive ancient sounds can still be heard today. One that does live on is the knife sharpener's cry and the clanking steel plates that the sharpeners use to announce their arrival. Where I live in an apartment building, a sharpener comes to the street downstairs. He clanks his plates, and we all go down and get our knives sharpened. But he says he has no apprentice and he doesn't think his trade will last that much longer. And actually, Colin does a pretty good imitation of a knife sharpener's cry.

I'll do that again, but with a more accurate accent, I think. I didn't. I had a Beijing accent. It's not in Beijing accent because these people are not from Beijing. Their kind of poor itinerants from outside of Beijing.

Imperial Beijing was exceedingly hierarchical, and sound followed similar rules. At the bottom of the sound pyramid were those tradesmen and their distinctive cries. Some of them had cymbals and bells. And above the street cries and the traders came a second tier of sand, this time generated by the people who lived in those courtyard houses of old Beijing. Some of them are courtiers or military commanders who served the emperor himself. And that's why they got to live in alleys or hutongs right around the Forbidden City. And some of their favorite hobbies could be heard before they were seen. In Beijing. Crickets are still sold in spherical bamboo cages in the summer. When I first lived in the city in the 1990s, some delivery riders with their flatbed tricycles would hang a cricket cage from the handlebars. Go back to the really old days, and keeping crickets was a pastime for the rich and the poor alike. In fact, if you watch the film the Last Emperor, right at the start, you'll see a cricket in its cage being given to the emperor as a little boy. In imperial times, a cricket's cage could be worth a fortune.

You get your stipend from the central government, from the imperial government, and what you did with that money was like you. What's the word for it? You nurtured sophistication and the way that this happened in Beijing was that again, you couldn't be very flamboyant. Everything had to be low key. So if you look at things like how they spent their money, they spent the money on what you're listening to insects or singing birds, right?

So crickets in a tiny cage. But it was the cage you kept it in and the, the kind of, the beauty of the cricket and also.

The time you spent in, in training a songbird. It could be years or even decades. You could you spend training one single songbird to do one particular sound. And the cage had to be made by certain masters. And each element of the cage were made by different artisans who are famous.

That eerie thrumming like noise of flying saucers from an old science fiction film, that's birds too. Those are pigeon whistles. Pigeon whistles are tiny flutes. They're made from bamboo or gourds. And they are sewn into the tail feathers of homing pigeons that old Beijingas loves to keep in rooftop coops. They would release the birds twice a day to circle in a flock in the sky. And even 20 years ago, you could hear quite often this melancholy noise like a theremin. I remember hearing them when I very first came to Beijing in the mid-90s and being confused because you'd hear this bizarre noise. And after a while I realized it only happened when there were pigeons overhead. But back in imperial times, pigeon whistles were another way for courtiers to signal wealth and cultivation. So in old Beijing, sound was all around from the humble noises of commerce and then the telltale proofs of wealth and sophistication and hobbies. And then above all of that, there was a third highest layer, the sounds of Imperial. And that's where the drum tire comes in.

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That's the Beijing Metro announcing the stop for the Drum Tower, which is where I'm going to take you next. Once there were drum towers all over China, but Beijing's is special. It's a three story tower. It's nearly 50 meters tall with massive red walls and this lovely roof of green and grey tiles with upturned eaves. And it lies on the sacred central axis that runs north, south, right through the heart of old Beijing. The Drum Tower is due north of the imperial Forbidden City. The drums of the Gulao, or Drum Tower, could be heard throughout the whole city for almost seven centuries. That stopped in 1924, when the last emperor was expelled from the Forbidden City. The Drum Tower and its twin, the Bell Tower, were a public service. They told Beijingers the time. Some have compared the beats of Beijing's Drum Tower to the bongs of Big Ben in London. But the Drum Tower was much more than a clock. It called officials to work, it called ordinary residents to order. And the drums told Beijingers when the city gates were closing and opening for the nightly curfew. And if you got stuck outside, you were not getting in that night. All night, the drums of the Drum Tower would be beaten every two hours. And down below, smaller drums, gongs and clappers would guide police patrols who couldn't see very far in that maze of alleyways. So they had to be guided by their ears. In fact, if you look at the diaries of early foreign visitors from the 18th century, they complain that they couldn't sleep on account of all the din at night. And all that time telling was a symbol of imperial and state power. The most accurate, expensive clocks were kept in the Forbidden City. They were tended by China's most skilled astronomers. I met Colin at the Drum Tower a while ago before his Sound Museum opened. And he explained how those palace astronomers and clock keepers made sure that ceremonies and rituals happened on the right day at the correct moment.

This is at the heart of the contemporary Chinese terminology of harmony. They use hexia, this contemporary political piece of jargon, which is harmony. And that is basically the old Chinese term is tianyi, which means mandate of heaven. It's about that sense of order which is kept through a central authority, but then permeates all throughout society through Confucius codes of conduct. And of course, you know, the drum and bell towers, that sense of time on everyday level, of course it's just practicality, but then in sense of order and ceremony, then it's the Sound that congeals everything to go, that keeps everything in order and harmony and a sign.

That the world is being run the right way, that everything is in its place and is happening at the allotted time. And you're living in a well ordered city at the heart of a well ordered empire. That was the kind of the promise of the regular beats of this drum.

That's exactly it. An interesting thing. It was all conveyed through sound.

And so the drum tire with its drum beats was helping to reassure Beijingers that that all was in order and so their ruler, their emperor, enjoyed the mandate of heaven. Garbage classification policy is applied in this area.

Please put garbage into deeper defense.

According to today's Beijing sounds like this, like any modern mega city. And most of Beijing's hutongs, its alleyways, most of the courtyard houses have been demolished. We talked about that in an earlier episode of Drum Tire. A lot of the sounds of old Beijing vanished with that way of life. Some of that is a natural process that happens in all cities. London, Paris. They don't sound anything like they used to. Districts of old Beijing are being restored. They're being tidied up for tourists. I like the way that locals have quietly reclaimed some the of those spaces, including the paved square between the drum tower and the neighboring bell tower. You can hear games they play there, some of them very old. Jenza is an ancient game. There are depictions on tombstones from the first century. It's keeping a shuttlecock in the air with your feet, which is passed between players standing in a circle. They're a bit like badminton shuttlecocks, but they're much heavier with metal discs in them. And dienza is seriously hard. I have tried playing it and I usually fail after one kick and then I'm laughed at by pensioners who can play for hours. I went down and talked to some of those players in that square between the Gulu and the bell tower, and I asked them whether they thought the ancient sound that they're making is actually going to survive. One of them told me that, you know, he's. He and his friends get together, they play after work. It's a good way of getting exercise. It's an energetic game. And I asked him, do children play it? Do you think maybe in 20 years time will people still come here to this place and play? And he's like, yes, of course. Ladle Square is actually one of my favorite places in central Beijing because it's a mixture of a lot of tourists taking selfies and going into the two towers. But you also do get locals, they come out and take advantage of that open air. And there's kids learning to ride bikes, there's people playing jenza, people playing badminton. And that community, that center of old Beijing, is actually Colin's ancestral home. His great grandfather on his mother's side was the last mayor of imperial Beijing. And part of their family mansion is now a hutong museum. And it's not just museums. Colin points out that Beijingers are actually preserving other traditions on their own.

I think it's really interesting that Beijing is still a contemporary city with a traditional past that is still alive. So there is still remnants of that old way of life alive today. There's no more street hawking in the old days, but people still like to keep songbirds. They take their songbirds for a walk in the park in a cage. In a cage. They don't actually walk them, they walk. The birds are in a cage and they put them on a tree and they have a chat amongst themselves while the birds do their thing. There's life that still happens in parks.

Still, the modern version of Beijing order doesn't leave that much room for ancient sounds.

It's actually illegal to keep songbirds. I mean, the police won't actually arrest you for having a songbird, but they basically shut down all the bird markets.

In the hutongs. Pigeon lofts are becoming rarer. Neighbors complain about the noise or the dirt. Although Colin is going to build a pigeon loft of his own on the roof of the sound museum, his hope is that the museum in Tongzhou can teach future generations about the sound of their city. His colleagues have seen visitors, old Beijingers, move to tears as they bring grandchildren to hear the noises of their youth. The museum is more than an exercise in nostalgia though, because Colin's a contemporary artist and one wing is given over to conceptual sand art.

This is a project called Feedback, which is a retrospective of sound art from Chinese contemporary art the past 30 years or so. The project is long term.

Back in the Sound Museum, in the last wing dedicated to contemporary sound art, Colin showed me a work by Shanghai artist Yinyi and I really loved this piece. It's a whole bunch of floor mounted electric fans whirring away in tight formation.

You can't really feel any wind Even though there's 25 fans because they're all cancelling each other out. So you're just hearing the sound.

I really love the physicality of this artwork. You need to be in the room there with those electric fans all roaring away at full speed. And what you suddenly realize is that there's no residual air current blowing at you because the fans have all been placed in such a way that they cancel each other out. And there's an idea to that that is a homage to young Chinese people in particular who are wrestling with the idea that all of their efforts are essentially pointless. They're kind of running to stand in the same place. There was that term neizuan that we've talked about on Drum Tower before that became such a common term online. That sense of futility that young people wrestle with, That kind of hint of rebelliousness is really fitting because Beijing, the Beijing that I love, was a grand hierarchical capital in history. But down at ground level in its hutongs, it was a village full of artists and poets and, and, yes, rebels. And you might not see your neighbors, but over the high gray courtyard walls, you could hear that humanity was all around you. In fact, when the emperor left his palace and headed off on some grand ceremony, commoners were forbidden to look at him. They had to stay indoors and close their windows. But every day and night, they could hear the Drum Tower beating out his time, his order. Beijing's very different now. Now no ordinary member of the public can hear the hobbies of Chinese Communist Party leaders. They live closed away in these massively guarded leadership compounds. And the rich, they're at the top of a 50 story skyscraper in a penthouse. And the street hawkers, they've been chased away. And the food markets tidied into shopping centers. I consider myself very lucky to have first encountered Beijing in the mid-1990s when still quite a lot of everyday life was lived at ground level. And I'm definitely fortunate to know Colin Chinnery, a link back to just a much older China. And I think only Beijing could host a sound museum like his. And he built it in the nick of time.

Landing on white town, ra.

Thank you for listening to Drum Tar. And special thanks to Eric from Lausanne in Switzerland and Cynthia, who listens while driving kids to School in St. Paul, Minnesota. A seriously cold place at this time of year. We love reading your emails. Please keep sending us more@drumconomist.com Our editor is Poppy Sebag. Montefiore, Alize, Jean Baptiste and Jiehao Chen produced this episode with additional help from Chen Yi Tsai. Sound design is by Weidonglin. Drum Tao's music was composed by Jocelyn Tan and the executive producer is Marguerite Hao.