A poem about Sanlitun, Beijing
To commemorate World Poetry Day, here’s a roundel — a poem characterized by stylized rhymes and refrains — about the rhymes and refrains of a certain style of Beijing life during a certain era that now feels bygone.
Sanlitun Road runs north-south through one of Beijing’s embassy districts. In the 1990s, as China’s reform and embrace of the global market economy accelerated, bars and restaurants offering foreign food opened up, forming the capital’s first “bar street” and one of its earliest centers of nightlife. As the area became famous in the Chinese capital and across the country, it began to draw revelers seven days a week, 24 hours a day.
Soon, there was no street frontage on the main Sanlitun Road. New bars, restaurants, nightclubs, tattoo parlors, hairdressers, youth hostels, and shops sprang up in the lane just west of the main drag. Ferraris competed for space in the lane with bicycles, pedestrians, and street vendors. There was a police station on the corner, but the law had a very light touch, and never even used to bother the foreign drug dealers who would openly sell hashish. It was organized chaos, but somehow it worked. Violent crime was extremely rare, and the street was probably safer from pickpockets than the average European capital.
This was Dirty Bar Street. It was never respectable, but it was always interesting. It all came to an end in 2017, when the city decided to clean it up after “numerous violations.” Evictions and demolishment followed, and this lane is now lined with high-end retail shops. To its south is Sanlitun Village, a multi-storied shopping complex where one can find the flagship stores of Adidas and Apple; to its north are luxury malls and hotels. Remnants of its roughshod past are long gone — perhaps only surviving in the memories of those who experienced this neighborhood in all its rugged, bohemian, dirty glory.
The street is the subject of the photo above. It was posted by the must-follow Twitter account China in Pictures, which is run by Beijing resident and photo collector Tóng Bīngxuě 仝冰雪. The photo inspired the following poem by our managing editor, Anthony Tao, a current and longtime resident of Beijing. His poem elegantly captures the spirit of a place and a time that is long gone.
—Jeremy Goldkorn
Dirty Bar Street
Sanlitun, Beijing, mid-1990s–2017
For those who are confused, “dirty” describes the spirit:
Depravity downed with cheap liquor, virtue unused.
Alley stained with slobber, cheats, sin, chunder — that’s vomit
For those who are confused.
Good times made worse, that’s what we signed up for. But we knew
Living gets shorter, youth never younger, and to quit
Meant missing history, our chance to say au revoir, adieu.
Anyway, we found friends; bit of eye candy, some wit.
Past the reaping hours, when sun-smeared haze blighted our view,
We marveled we were here, this Beijing. We took a pic
For those who are confused.
—Anthony Tao
This poem originally appeared in Anthony Tao’s Poetry from Beijing.
