Diary – 25 November 2006

Beijing

Last time I was in China it was for the handover in Hong Kong. I stood in Tiananmen Square with tens of thousands of others as the clock went to midnight. This time another clock is ticking — counting down to the eighth of the eighth of 2008, an especially chosen auspicious date, for the opening of the Olympic Games.

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Beijing in nine years is transformed. Not just the Starbucks you see as you come though customs. Not just the buildings, the ring roads; for Tiananmen Square itself is changing, and at one corner an egg is growing. It is the National Grand Theatre, a great shining blob of a building, positioned in stark contrast to the classic Communist party architecture of Mao’s mausoleum and other party buildings replete with red flags. It will be open for the Games, and you will enter through a glass-roofed passage under the lake that surrounds it. Inside this huge shell there is a theatre, a concert hall and an enormous opera house. We hope — if we can get the funding together — to have the Royal Ballet there just before the Olympics start. The scale of it takes the breath away. ‘Ha,’ said one prominent Chinese artist I was talking to, ‘the egg is the French people’s revenge. They haven’t forgiven us for our architect putting a pyramid in the middle of the Louvre.’ That apart, the building is an awesome sight.

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At the opposite end of the square, Chairman Mao is still on display over the gates of the Forbidden City, but Mao is now a mere brand a kilometre away. Number 798 is an old factory still producing something rather smelly in places, but otherwise the home for artists and galleries and even a small studio theatre.