Chapter 30 27．frustration

A comprehensive account of the life of the Liangs under the communist regime is impossible, and only fragmentary, fragmentary and unidentified information has reached the West.The following are some of the situations collected in this way. Before Beijing changed hands, the People's Liberation Army had infiltrated the Tsinghua campus area.An army officer gave Sicheng a map and asked Professor Liang to mark the precious buildings and cultural relics that should be protected when artillery must be used.Sicheng was very moved and remembered that he had handed Zhou Enlai several similar lists in Chongqing that he believed should be protected during wartime.

After the city changed hands, the new government cleaned it up.The piles of waste that polluted the streets of Beijing between 1949 and 1950, along with tons of garbage and putrid residue, were carted away.Miles of sewers were cleared, and lakes choked with sludge, waste, and overgrown weeds were dredged and purified. Two other actions by the government made this a honeymoon period for it and ordinary people.Inflation, which had suffocated the people throughout the war years, was brought under control.The era of foreign privileges in China is over, and national pride has replaced the humiliation of citizens.

Sicheng was appointed deputy director of the Beijing Urban Planning Commission.He once proposed to transform Beijing into the new capital of China. 1.Beijing should be a political and cultural center, not an industrial center. 2.Industrial development must be stopped.Because it will lead to traffic jams, environmental pollution, population explosion and housing shortage. 3.The Forbidden City is strictly protected. 4.Buildings inside the old city walls were limited to two to three floors. 5.Build a government administrative center along the north-south axis in the west of the city.

The Party Central Committee only accepted his third suggestion, which is to keep the Forbidden City (Note 1.).Regarding industry, Mayor Peng Zhen said when they stood on the tower of Tiananmen and looked south, "Chairman Mao hopes to have a modern big city. He said that he hopes to see from Tiananmen that there are chimneys below." We must assume that Sicheng was very discouraged by this news.He has every reason to love the old city of Beijing.Not only was it his home, but he and Huiyin studied its beauty throughout his career.Preserving the Forbidden City is not enough.The great walled city must not be destroyed.

He turned to his fifth proposal, to build the administrative center of the government along a north-south axis to the west of the city.In this way, important new construction can be carried out without destroying the original central axis of the city.With the help of Chen Zhanxiang, an urban planning expert studying in the UK, Sicheng wrote his plan into a proposal.He printed it and distributed it at his own expense.He also published an article titled "Beijing - An Incomparable Masterpiece of Urban Planning", hoping to gain public support. However, the influx of Soviet specialists who flocked to China between 1950 and 1960 insisted that the government must center on Tiananmen.Also, the square in front of Tiananmen had to be expanded to accommodate public gatherings and parades.They envisioned their own version of the Moscow Kremlin plus Red Square.Although not approving, or at least not answering, Sicheng's proposals, the party center sought his help in its planning.The Liangs were both appointed as members of the team that designed the national flag and national emblem.They proposed that the national emblem should have Chinese characteristics (no sickle and axe), and finally the golden and red Tiananmen front pattern became the national emblem, which is still in use today.

An important historical symbol requested by the new government is the Monument to the People's Heroes, commemorating the martyrs of the revolutionary movements that ultimately led to the victory of the Communist Party. Planning began in 1951, and it was finally erected in the center of Tiananmen Square in 1958. What should it look like?a tower?a pavilion?Sicheng convinced the design team that it should resemble a stone monument that can be found everywhere in China.Since the stele cannot be too small in the huge Tiananmen Square, he imagined a height matching the city gate.Huiyin participated in the design of the pedestal and introduced the egg-and-point pattern she had studied in the Yungang Grottoes.Evergreen pine trees were planted nearby in accordance with Chinese tradition as a permanent memory of the dead heroes, but they were later removed.

The Liangs were shocked by the authorities' decision to tear down the Great Wall and Gate Tower.The reason for the demolition was that the walls were feudal imperial fortifications, now useless, that they hindered traffic and restricted the growth of the city, and that they were a source of bricks that could be used to build houses or pave roads. In May 1950, Sicheng put forward a suggestion on this point, advocating that the city walls and gate towers should be preserved to serve the health and entertainment of the people.Spaces "ten meters or more wide" at the top of the walls could be turned into permanent parks with flowerbeds and gardening sites, he noted.The gatehouse and turrets with double roofs can be built into museums, exhibition halls, kiosks and teahouses.The moat at the base of the walls and the open space between them could be created as beautiful "green areas" for the "majority of working people" to boat, fish and skate.He added another powerful argument citing the example of the Soviet Union, which in 1950 was the "big brother" that China was trying to emulate.

"Smolensk in the Soviet Union has a city wall with a circumference of seven kilometers. It is called the 'Russian Necklace'. It was destroyed in the war during World War II. The people of the whole Soviet Union devoted their love to repairing it. The city wall in Beijing cannot just be called 'China's Necklace'. Necklace', and Yingsuo is the 'Necklace of the World'. They are the treasures of our nation, and they are also cultural relics of the peoples of the world. We have inherited this unique and priceless treasure in history, how can we destroy it now?"

However, the authorities were unmoved, and it rejected Sicheng's simplest and feasible proposal, that is, without destroying the integrity of the gatehouse and the city wall, a passage for vehicles should be opened on both sides of each city gate, so that the traffic jam problem can be solved. be mitigated and controlled.Over the next 20 years, the entire city wall was destroyed.All the beautiful towers have been demolished, leaving only the southeast corner tower and the Qianmen in the south and the city gate tower in the north, the watchtowers of both have been demolished.The moat is gone, and the city's sprawl has even erased the outlines of the city walls of the once prestigious Yuan, Ming, and Qing capitals.

In 1953, the Party Central Committee formulated a policy to guide and control architectural design: "Economy, practicality, and attention to beauty under possible conditions."Sicheng was tasked with designing a national architectural style in line with this policy (Note 2.).After years of war devastation and a new government, there was a great need for new buildings.But there are very few architects with practical experience, and Siben himself, although a famous architectural historian, does not belong to this range. He encountered a huge problem.Although he is a recognized expert on the national style of Chinese architecture during the past two millennia, the building specifications for this period were buildings of no more than one or two storeys built around courtyards, with extensions only added at ground level when necessary. some other buildings.The only larger structures are royal palaces and tombs, and Buddhist, Confucian or other temples.

Now is the 20th century, and the agencies of the various ministries of the government need offices, many of its universities need student dormitories, hotels, auditoriums, research institutes, museums and factories, etc. also need large houses.The limited open space in the urban area requires buildings to be developed high-rise.what to do? In order to meet this need, especially in Shanghai and Nanjing, in the 1920s some foreign architects designed and supervised the construction of several four- to five-story reinforced concrete houses at the request of some Western and Chinese companies.These buildings are often topped with large concave, curved temple-like roofs and overhanging eaves to indicate their Chinese origin. For this kind of uncoordinated house, Sicheng once criticized it as "wearing a suit and a melon skin hat".However, the use of reinforced concrete was still essential to create a huge modern half-tall building in the national code style.He has long been amazed at the similarity between the steel skeleton of modern buildings and the column-beam support of traditional Chinese wooden structures. Both are designed to support the weight of the roof and cancel the load-bearing walls so as to allow full freedom of opening windows. His recommendations for a national canonical style are not very clear, but he was criticized in 1955 for engaging in "formalism and archaism" while ignoring "economics and utility".The large roof with glazed tiles is a waste of state funds, as is the painted beams.It is ironic that the ancient style has been transferred to modern architecture.Call for criticism of Sicheng: "anti-formalism, anti-archaism and anti-waste".He became the object of criticism from all opponents and supporters, colleagues and students, and everyone was called to criticize him harshly, and no one dared to defend him publicly. By 1955, Sicheng's years of relentless party work and what he saw as a struggle against mistakes had brought him to the brink of failure.He was hospitalized at the beginning of the year.In the hospital he was found to have tuberculosis, and for many months he had to stay in bed. Not long after Sicheng was hospitalized, Huiyin also went to the same hospital and was admitted to the adjacent ward. Dr. Eleusel told me in 1945 that her condition was very serious and she might have only five years to live.It was an incredible miracle to her that she survived another 10 years.Yet by 1955 the premature end of her life was near. She passed away on April 1, at the age of 51. For Sicheng, who was already seriously ill and humiliated under orders, the death of his dear wife after 27 years of living together was a devastating blow.He fell into a deep depression.How could he live without her? In the same year, he moved from the hospital to the Summer Palace for a three-month recuperation. During the Thought Reform Movement from 1952 to 1953, he criticized his father's conservative reformism, which had a profound influence on him.He admitted that he once had a feudal outlook, "secretly determined to make my famous father proud." He studied Marxism-Leninism in the next few years and was finally admitted to the Communist Party in January 1959. Due to his international reputation, it was advantageous to send him as a member of a delegation to an international conference.As early as 1953 he was sent to the Soviet Union with a delegation from the Academy of Sciences. In 1956 he participated in international architectural conferences held in Poland and East Germany. In 1958 he went to Prague and then to Moscow.The following year he participated in the Stockholm World Peace Conference. In 1963 he went on an extended trip abroad to Cuba, Mexico and Brazil, where he had the pleasure of meeting again with the architect Oscar Niemeyer.The last time he went abroad was to attend an international architectural conference in Paris in 1965. Apart from being interrupted from time to time by these overseas schedules and the many domestic committees, societies and professional meetings in China, not to mention his occasional illness, Sicheng continued to teach at Tsinghua as the head of the Department of Architecture.Until 1953, he taught the history of Chinese architecture without textbooks, but that year Tsinghua University used offset printing to reproduce the handwritten manuscripts he and Hui Yin had studied in Lizhuang.This is not a monograph on Marxism, it is considered unsuitable for official printing and distribution, it can only be circulated internally, and there is no signature of Sicheng or the Institute. In 1955, Tsinghua reprinted a brochure of architectural pictures of the Institute from microfilm taken by Sicheng in Chongqing.They are also unattributed and are for internal student use only.Some pictures were passed to Europe, where some authors who studied Chinese architecture published them, and they did not sign Sicheng or the name of the institute.It seemed like a brazen act of plagiarism at the time. During that period, due to going out and being away from home for a long time due to various official duties, Sicheng's life was in trouble.In his department office, unopened letters and magazines piled up.He needs help.In order to solve this problem, he found a young woman Lin Zhu. Her marriage to a teacher of the Department of Architecture of Tsinghua University ended in divorce in 1957, leaving a young son and a young daughter to be raised by her.Her mother, who lived in another part of the city, took care of the children while she continued to work in the architecture department.When Sicheng asked her to help with his paperwork, she readily accepted and arranged to come to his house every other day for this purpose.She herself described it this way: "About a week later, I opened a letter and couldn't help laughing. I hurried over to congratulate Mr. Liang. It turned out that a representative of the National People's Congress proposed himself to Mr. Liang, and attached the middle-aged woman's own Photo. Mr. Liang also smiled. That day we talked about the problems in our respective lives. Later, we talked for a while after work every day. From life to work, from art to architecture, we talked about everything. I am not a talkative person, but He always listened to me quietly and exchanged views with me. I only met this time in my life with a bosom friend with whom I could have a heart-to-heart conversation. At that time, Mr. Lin had passed away for seven years. Well, being lonely too, made us emotionally close and value each other. We decided to live together. "If we say that after Sicheng and I got married in 1962, due to our differences in age, knowledge and life experience, many people, including some in Sicheng's family, did not understand and did not approve of our marriage. If I have ever felt confused, then the years of living together have made me understand him better and realize his value. Our destiny is closely bound together and cannot be separated." Note 1. This is the original text, and other sources say it is different——Translator's Note. Note 2. This is the original text.Other sources say otherwise. ——Translator's Note