Urban Space of the Living and Dead: The Conception of Environment and Death in Beijing from the Eighteenth Century to the Middle Twentieth Century

Abstract

In modern Beijing, urban space for the living and the dead is completely separate. However, before the 1940s, the separation was not that obvious. After the middle of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), funerals of residents in Beijing were carried out according to “Master Zhu’s Family Rituals” (Zhuzi jiali 朱子家禮, 12th). Typically there were three phases: the period in a mortuary, the farewell to the soul, and the burial. All three phases were ceremonies which clearly show that before the burial, and for a long period of time, the dead person was not separate from the living. During the first phase, the coffins were temporarily placed in a temple. The temples could also rent their rooms to the public and therefore served as hotels hosting the living and the dead at the same time. The second phase, which was the farewell ceremony to the soul of the dead, was typically held near water, especially large expanses of water in the heart of Beijing. Shi Cha Hai 什刹海, a lake in the center of Beijing, was thought to be the entrance to the other world, and thus, the space, in the city, reserved for the souls and ghosts. Moreover, the cemeteries were not only for the dead, they were the places for the living for recreation, to meet, and to present newborn infants to the ancestors and therefore embodied, in a sense, the true “home of the family”. The way people treated death deeply influenced their knowledge of and feeling about the environment, which also impacted on their planning and usage of urban spaces. From the analysis of death rituals in late imperial Beijing, and of the spaces shared by the living and the dead, one can observe that death was not a polluting element for the living nor seen as a danger for the health. However, the transformation brought by the Japanese invasion, along with its ‘hygienic modernity’ completely overturned people’s attitudes towards death and the dead body. Urban spaces for the dead and the living became strictly separate, which finally formed the modern urban landscape.