A Walk Through a City of Walls

Like all siheyuan, the hotel has four walls with apartments enclosing a central garden. But unlike most, it has a particularly grisly history. Mao's secret police chief, Kang Sheng, seized the compound in 1949, and is said to have tortured some of his victims in a chamber beneath a man-made hill in the center of the garden. All I hear in the garden is the whisper of wind through a grove of bamboo.

Not far from the hotel, beside Back Lake, is the former imperial mansion of China's last emperor, Henry Pu Yi. After the communists took power, the ``Son of Heaven'' joined the working class as a gardener at his former residence, and Soong Chingling, the widow of Dr. Sun Yat-sen, moved into the mansion.

A room for listening to rain

Today, behind the somber walls of the mansion-turned-museum, is the beauty and serenity cherished by the mandarins that built the siheyuan centuries ago. The Granting of Grace Pavilion looks out on a brook, pond, and garden. After a short climb up worn stone steps, I imagine the last emperor listening to showers play delicate melodies on the roof of the gazebo called the Room for Listening to Rain.

On the other side of Back Lake is perhaps the best-tended museum in Beijing, an immaculate siheyuan that is the residence of the late Mei Lanfang, the best-known actor in Peking Opera. Inside the compound, within apartments with red lacquered columns and eaves painted in green and blue, are photos of Mei posing in the jeweled headdresses and silken gowns of the opera's tan, or female roles.

Within Mei's apartment, fragile wooden carvings separate the rooms. From the ceiling hang hexagonal lanterns of glass and carved wood with long red silk tassels at each corner. Like the photos of Peking Opera's greatest female impersonator, the siheyuan is a tribute to the refinement and frailty of China's old culture.

The daughter of Mei, actress Wang Yulan, fondly recalls growing up in her father's rambling siheyuan before the revolution. During parties after opera performances, in the golden light of their garden courtyard, she often sat wide-eyed before European artists and royalty.

``The splendor of those days is gone but many siheyuan remain in Beijing,'' says Mrs. Wang, standing in the center of her own courtyard, a patch of bare dirt no larger than a horse-drawn wagon.

The best way to learn of the warm civility of the people living in Beijing's maze of cold stone is to win an invitation to a home within courtyard walls or the apartment blocks.

Around a New Year's holiday table stacked in two tiers with steaming platters of food, a Chinese friend briefly forgets his grinding effort to get by and inadvertently teaches a battened Westerner like myself the true meaning of ``feast.''

Occasionally, I'm asked why I want to work in China at a time when the leadership is systematically dismantling the gains from 10 years of enlivening economic reform and eased regimentation.

The answer is easy: Poverty and repression cast a stark light on the lives of Beijing residents. They must struggle to defend their dignity; their lives have profound clarity and pathos.

Sometimes it seems a visit by someone from a wealthy democracy like me lifts the hope of my Chinese host that freedom and prosperity are within reach.

Today, for residents of this ancient capital, liberty and affluence are like the refreshing air and soothing verdure in a forbidden garden beyond an insurmountable wall.

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