Beijing's axis joins history to the future

Nine-year-old Cheng Dede has lived in central Beijing all her life, and moved from just north of the Forbidden City to near the Drum Tower. Both are key heritage sites along Beijing's Central Axis, the core of Beijing that runs 7.8 kilometers from south to north.

Dede is passionate about traditional Chinese culture, including architecture, music and food.

So, when she saw a notice of the 2023 Competition for the Transmission and Promotion of the Beijing Central Axis, a contest calling for people of all ages to tell their stories about this part of Beijing's heritage, she thought she could give it a go.

While the Central Axis contains profound historical and cultural significance, she decided to simply tell the story of her own family and her perspective as an ordinary primary school student.

At the competition's award ceremony, hosted on Sunday at the Capital Museum in Beijing, Dede, along with her mother, grandmother and brother, gave a presentation that combined speech in both Chinese and English, a performance of hulusi (the cucurbit flute) and singing.

They told of connections with Beijing's Central Axis that span three generations, beginning with Dede's grandmother, who grew up in a small village in Jiangxi province and harbored a longing to see the Tian'anmen Square with her own eyes. Dede's mother fulfilled her wishes and came to study and work in Beijing. Now, Dede and her 6-year-old brother have been able to frequently visit the heritage sites for as long as they can remember.

"At school, I learned that my family has always lived near the Central Axis of Beijing, and the Central Axis is a physical corridor that connects history and the future," Dede says.

"My mother says that the tide of time flows nonstop, much like the three generations of my family, leaving the small mountain village to settle in Beijing. This is our story and also a microcosm of our country's development."

She was awarded as a young ambassador at the competition's award ceremony, and her brother was chosen as one of the first batch of advocates for the Beijing Central Axis Protection Foundation.

To raise awareness about the value of Beijing's Central Axis and encourage more people from all walks of life to engage in its protection, the Beijing Cultural Heritage Bureau and the Beijing Office for Conservation and Management of the Beijing Central Axis have been co-hosting this competition since 2021.

This year's contest set up five major categories: renovation, art, design, ambassadorship and digitization. These are then further divided into 12 sections.

All sections invite people from any age group or nationality with an interest in Beijing's Central Axis to promote relevant cultural heritage in creative formats, such as renovation plans for old buildings, original music pieces and artworks, cultural merchandise design and re-creations of the sites using digital technologies.

According to the competition committee, the contest attracted 80,357 works this year with participants coming from all provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions in China, as well as 13 other countries.

The participants' ages span from 5 to 83, and young people born in the 2000s and 2010s account for over 80 percent of competitors.

Of the group contestants, one team from the Beijing Language and Culture University provided a particularly diverse scene, with international students from 13 countries participating in the contest's music section.

With three songs respectively about the Wanning Bridge, the Temple of Heaven and Jingshan Park along the Central Axis, the students were awarded with a group special honor award.

The students, most of whom are Chinese-language majors who will work as Chinese-language teachers once they graduate, learned about the competition while taking an elective course offered by the university's art department that teaches songs adapted from ancient Chinese poetry.

"I feel that I'm very lucky to participate in this course and the competition, because they have allowed me to learn more about Chinese culture and history," says one of the students, Bach Tong Khanh Minh, from Vietnam.

"I participated in the song about Wanning Bridge. It is a very beautiful song. When I was learning the lyrics, I got to know about the bridge's history and architectural style."

Each year, the university's art department offers a range of elective courses, many of which are popular with international students — especially those related to traditional Chinese music and instruments.

"Beijing's Central Axis is undoubtedly a significant historical witness to our outstanding traditional Chinese culture, serving as the backbone of the old Beijing city. So, when the competition's organizing committee extended an invitation to us, I thought it was a wonderful idea," says Chen Xia, the department's Party secretary.

"International students studying here should get to know Beijing. Apart from exploring Beijing with their eyes and footsteps, they can know more about our city's history and culture by learning these songs. These songs not only introduce the heritage sites but also tell of Beijing's culture, history and contemporary development."

Of all the contestants, Li Shan is the one with the longest connections with the competition since she has participated three years in a row. Over the years, she has submitted four short videos, which won a grand prize, a first prize, a second prize and an excellence award.

This year, her first-prize-winning video shows her combining the classical playground game hopscotch with 12 heritage sites.

"The inspiration for my short video this year came about as serendipity. When I was studying a map of the Central Axis, I suddenly felt that the layout of the major sites looked a lot like the game we'd played in our childhoods," Li says.

She then designed a renewed version of hopscotch that places the heritage sites in accordance with their actual locations. Players can jump from the Yongding Gate at the southern end of the axis to the Drum and Bell Towers in the north.

For two weekends, Li brought a printed version of her game to these sites, and filmed herself playing it and people's reactions. The game became popular among children and the elderly.

Sometimes, the children were seen jumping while reading the names of the sites out loud, as their parents filmed them.

The Beijing native works in a healthcare company that designs jogging routes that often pass through these sites. Part of her job is to document the group runs, which allows her to collect lots of video footage.

Since first joining the contest in 2021, she says that she has been increasingly eager to learn more about the Central Axis by reading and researching, visiting the sites again and again, and discovering new angles to present Beijing's history and culture.

"When I saw my video at the award ceremony, I thought it's kind of cool that I've been doing this for three years. Even though it's nothing grand, it's quite rare that I could persist in doing anything for three years in a row," Li says.