Almost twenty years later, I can still remember with perfect vividness the morning I saw Tiananmen Square for the first time. I had arrived in China late one April night in 1975 while Mao Zedong still lived and the country was still infused with the political militancy of the Cultural Revolution. After trying to reach Beijing for many years, now that I had at last been allowed in, I could not help feeling somewhat furtive, as if I had mistakenly been given entrance into a forbidden realm.
I awoke the next morning at dawn with Tiananmen Square already tugging at me. Knowing it was just moments away from the Beijing Hotel, where I was staying, made going back to sleep impossible. In 1975 the authorities still frowned upon “foreign guests” setting off on unchaperoned expeditions around the city, but the thought of watching the sun rise over this long-heralded place was so irresistible that I dressed, took the elevator downstairs, and then hoping that no watchful comrade would notice my exit, crossed the hotel’s cavernous empty lobby. Stepping out onto the Avenue of Eternal Peace was like walking into a dream.
As I headed west under the canopy of budding sycamore trees that fringe the vermilion wall of the ancient Forbidden City, the eastern sky was just beginning to be suffused with a hint of matinal gray. The half-light created the feeling of a great chimerical openness rather than a clearly defined place in front of me. When at last I approached the very end of the sidewalk with the oceanic vastness of the Square stretching away in front of me, my heart was pounding. Stepping out onto the checkerboard of cement paving stones, I felt the same kind of breathless excitement that I remembered as a child the winter I had first dared venture out from shore alone to ice-skate out across the enormity of the frozen reservoir that lay behind our New England house. I was so intoxicated by the thought of finally being in Tiananmen Square that it was not until I was nearing its center that I allowed myself to stop and actually look around and see Tiananmen Gate itself, rising up like a mountain above a flat plain at the Square’s northern end.
There are no words that adequately convey the grandeur of China’s great men, or gateways, which were the only means of entry through the thick, towering walls that once surrounded the Forbidden City and Beijing, as well as many other Chinese towns and cities. Capped by two tiers of sloping yellow-tiled roofs, Tiananmen is a massive ten-story-high stone rampart painted imperial maroon, a color that traditional Chinese associated with the North Star. As Confucius said, “He who exercises government by means of virtue may be compared to the north pole star, to which all other stars are attracted.”
Running through Tiananmen Gate’s base were five tunnel-like portals that before the fall of the last dynasty in 1911 were kept closed except when the son of heaven himself emerged out of the central and largest one accompanied by a retinue of thousands of attendants. And just above, flanked by two latter-day inscriptions–“Long Live the Unity of the Peoples of the World” and “Long Live the People’s Republic of China”–like a prize jewel set at the center of a royal diadem, was Mao’s famous portrait.
I’m not sure how long I stared at Tiananmen Gate that morning, but when I finally turned away, the sky was beginning to glow red in the east, and the colossal Museum of the Chinese Revolution and the Museum of History on the east and the Great Hill of the People on the west were being transformed before my eyes from shadowy blurs into sharply limned images like a photograph developing before my eyes. I stood alone in the middle of this vast, man-made expanse and watched the sun slowly climb into the sky. The early-morning cold was bone-chilling, but having arrived at long last here at the figurative center of what was, for Americans at least, one of the most elusive and impenetrable countries in the world, I did not care.
As the day broke over the museums and the sun began shining fiery orange down on the Square, it would not have surprised me if one of those electronic carillons that the Party often rigged at train stations and the in the cupolas of government buildings had suddenly begun to peal forth with the old Party anthem, “The East Is Red”:
The red in the East raises the sun, China gives forth a Mao Zedong He works for the happiness of the people, He shall be China’s saving star. The East is Red!
