Four Fires that Changed Beijing
In a city that like old Beijing was built out of wood, one of the biggest scares was fire. When a fire raged, it would have immediate catastrophic consequences, but the flames would also ignite significant developments in the capital. Because out of the ashes of devastation long lasting societal changes would grow.
1421 - The Fire that destroyed the grand idea of Beijing…
…and almost caused the capital to be moved back to Nanjing
In 1403 the third Ming Dynasty Emperor Yongle took the decision to move the Capital of China from Nanjing to Beijing. It was a monumental decision taken not least because Yongle had a problem - he had just killed the second Ming Dynasty Emperor, his own nephew Jianwen, and as the political climate in Nanjing was toxic, Yongle wanted to create a new political platform from where he could rule the empire.
The third Ming Dynasty Emperor Yongle build Beijing in 1420. However, only one year after his grand vision of the capital lay in ruins.
For seventeen years massive pieces of marble and hundreds of thousands of tree trunks were dragged in towards Beijing to create Yongle’s new grand capital, and in 1420 it was finally completed, but then only a year after completion disaster happened, lightning struck the largest halls of the Forbidden city and they burned down to the ground.
This was a problem for more than one reason, it would be very costly to rebuild the halls, but even more importantly it challenged the legitimacy of the emperor. In China the emperor was seen as the medium between heaven and earth. If heaven did not agree with an emperor’s conduct, the harvest would fail and natural disasters happen, so it was not the best of omens that less than a year after its completion the main structures of a palace it had taken seventeen years to build burned down.
Inside the Forbidden City there were during the dynasties 308 water barrels set up to have water ready available in case of fire
The officials around the emperor now argued that the capital should be moved back to south China, and in 1424 the decision was taken to move the court back to Nanjing, but then an earthquake was reported to the imperial court in Nanjing creating a strange political limbo, not till 1440 was the decision finally taken to stay in the new capital Beijing and rebuild the Palace.
In 1421 Yongle’s idea of a grand new capital went up in flames
1889 – The fire that destroyed the temple of heaven...
..and introduced American timber in imperial architecture
One of the most famous buildings of Beijing is the Hall of Great Harvest inside the Temple of Heaven, but not a lot of people know that it is constructed of wood from the US. When Yongle built Beijing in 1420 the famous Chinese hard wood Nanmu was used to construct the imperial halls, but after several fires in Beijing, there simply was not enough Nanmu left in the empire, so when the Hall of the Great Harvest was rebuilt in 1896 it had be done with tree trunks imported from Oregon in the US.
Fire drill at the Temple of Heaven. Few people know that of the last fire in 1898 the structure was rebuild by American timber from Oregon
1900 - The Fire that destroyed the Dashilar area…
…and threw Beijing into the hands of capitalism
When the Boxer Movement entered Beijing in the year 1900 to rid the city of all foreign influence, they burned down a pharmacy that sold Western medicine in the Dashilar district. The fire spread and the whole area outside the Qianmen Gate was turned to ashes. The market forces in Beijing was originally regulated by trade guilts, nobody could set up a business in the city without their approval, but when the Eight-allied-nations occupied the city of Beijing and quelled the Boxer uprising, everything changed and when the shop fronts outside the Qianmen were rebuilt, Beijing started to become an unforgiving capitalist society, where the only thing that really mattered was money in hand.
Many buildings in Dashilar were destroyed by fire in the year 1900. Out of the ashes grew a new liberalized reality in the old capital.
1923 – The fire that put an end to the eunuchs of China
In 1923 last Emperor Puyi ordered an inventory count of the treasures inside the Imperial Palace. He suspected that widespread fraud was taking place inside the Palace. This made Palace eunuchs start a fire to cover up how much treasure they had sold out of the back door.
The Emperor reacted by expelling the eunuchs from the Palace thus ending a more than 2000-year long tradition of keeping eunuchs in the Palace. Where the treasure house had originally stood in the Forbidden City, a tennis court was built. In fact, this is where Puyi is standing in Bertolucci’s famous movie The Last Emperor playing tennis, when the soldiers of Feng Yuxiang enter the palace in 1924 and force the Emperor to leave the Forbidden City for eternity.
In 1923 the Imperial treasure house burned down to the ground. The last emperor subsequently ousted all palace eunuchs as he suspected the fire had been started by them