Chapter 122 Expulsion from the party for opposing city demolition

Lin Huiyin is Liang Sicheng's most powerful supporter on all issues of protecting ancient buildings and maintaining the style and appearance of the ancient capital. When the representatives of the Beijing Municipal People's Congress held a meeting to vote on the demolition of the three city gates, she forced the sick to attend the meeting.She patiently persuaded the delegates: Traffic issues are important, but you can't give up everything else for traffic.She even took the sidewalk of Huairen Hall in Zhongnanhai as an example, saying that whenever Huairen Hall held a meeting, there would be a lot of people entering and leaving, and the traffic would be congested. There are only two rows of passages in the hall.The traffic problem can be solved in other ways, but once the city gate is removed, it can no longer be repaired.

Although Lin Huiyin was a representative of the people, her voice was not answered, and the meeting passed a resolution to demolish the three city gates. They were very sad. Lin Huiyin asked desperately: Why, after hundreds of years of wars and vicissitudes, the ancient city that could be rescued from the muzzle on the eve of liberation was destroyed in the peaceful construction of New China?Why do we carefully preserve a few broken bricks and broken tiles in the glass cabinet of the museum, while tearing down the well-preserved unique ancient buildings in the world? Liang Sicheng said painfully: "To tear down a city tower is like cutting off a piece of my flesh; tearing down a section of city wall is like peeling off a layer of my skin!"

Many years later, Liang Sicheng is still regretting the three gates that were demolished. He blamed himself deeply: "I am very sad when the three doors are demolished. It is really sad to destroy a treasure. But I am not without mistakes. My mistake is that I didn't think of a way to solve the traffic problem." .If I could have thought of a better way at the time, it would have been possible to preserve the three city gates. I just had no choice, because there was indeed a problem of traffic deaths, and I could not ignore the lives of the people. Now it seems that since the city can Re-planning, why can’t the East and West Chang’an Avenue be rolled out to the south and bypass the three gates. Isn’t the water of the Jinshui Bridge also made a small bend? Can’t our roads make a bend like the Jinshui Bridge? In this way, the three gates become roadside embellishments without affecting traffic."

Of course, this is just Liang Sicheng's naive wishful thinking. Under the circumstances at that time, no matter whether he and Lin Huiyin could figure it out or not, no matter whether he could come up with a better way to solve the traffic problem, their running and hard work would be in vain. At a meeting, a person in charge of Beijing said: "Anyone who opposes the demolition of the city wall will be expelled from the party if he is a party member!" taste.He told Huiyin this, and both of them felt an invisible pressure, and their hearts were very heavy. At that time, some young students and young teachers in the Department of Architecture of Tsinghua University—some of them were party members and teachers—had jointly written a letter to the Beijing Municipal Party Committee and Municipal Government, expressing their support for Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin's opinions on protecting ancient buildings.

The leaders of Beijing were furious when they read the letter. One night, all the party members in the department were called to the municipal party committee. The city leaders asked them: Should they follow the Communist Party or follow the bourgeois scholar Liang Sicheng?Do you want to be Liang Sicheng's "guardian"?The question mentions such a political height, so what else can we say?Even if it is said, what is the effect? Against this background, all the efforts made by Liang Sicheng and Lin Hui to protect ancient Beijing and Beijing's ancient buildings appear even more fateful and tragic.