Recent news about the excavation of one of the Ming Tombs, which are the subject of a chapter in my book Great Burial Places, reminded me of my days living in Beijing in 1973-74.
There were only about 3,000 foreigners in the whole of China in those days and our lives were very circumscribed. There were no foreign tourists. Today there are over half a million foreign residents and they are pretty well free to do what they want and go where they want.
“Round eyes” (foreigners) were a rare sight in China in 1973.
We could only shop at one department store, the Friendship Store. Only foreigners could use it. Apart from food, local liquor and cigarettes and some small, shoddy, locally made household appliances, it had nothing to offer. The locals shopped with ration cards at small state-run outlets or street markets. (I still have my rice ration card). The last time I went back to China, about five years ago, the main shopping district and the huge shopping malls in every city I visited were stocked with all the luxury goods that you could find in the West.
Everyone wore only Mao outfits. 870 million people all dressed in the same drab, grey unisex outfit. Nobody owned a car. Bicycles were cheap and housing, in drab, Soviet designed apartment blocks, was allocated by the state, as was your job. Today, the streets are jammed with expensive cars and land that was agricultural when I lived there has sprouted forests of high rise luxury apartments.
We couldn’t talk to the locals in the street. If we did, a security man would appear out of the crowd and whisk them away. Now, you can even do homestays.
We weren’t allowed to leave Beijing without the permission of the Foreign Ministry, even to drive the short distance to the Ming Tombs, where we liked to picnic in summer, or the Summer Palace, where we liked to go ice skating in the winter.
Foreigners could only visit a handful of other cities in the whole of China, including Shanghai, Canton and Hangzhou.
Permission was difficult to obtain and, if you were successful, you were accompanied for your every waking moment by a minder. How I appreciated the difference when, a few years ago, I crossed China quite freely from east to west by bus and train. From Xian I followed the ancient Silk Road to Kashgar and over the Torugart Pass through the Tian Shan mountains into Kyrgyzstan and thence Uzbekistan.
Despite all the restrictions of living in Beijing in the 1970s I, and everyone I served with in the Embassy, fell in love with China- the history, the culture, the landscape, the food and so many other aspects of one of the world’s great root civilisations.
