Promenade on Beijing Lu
By David McRae

Taking a deep breath, we departed for Beijing Lu. But first we had to cross Huancheng Nanlu, a broad boulevard like Beijing Lu, and encountered what I came to think of as 'soft driving' for the first time. Soft driving is like the confluence of streams of water, considerable streams at this intersection. There were traffic lights, but that night they were unintelligible to me. The cars, buses, trucks and bikes murmured to each other with their horns and bells, sometimes a little stridently when the invisible rules of this game were ignored and a rock surfaced in the stream. No one was going very fast and so negotiating within millimetres of each other and of pedestrians was both anticipated and realised. There was a singular lack of aggression and exasperation. We drove a long way in Yunnan, sometimes hair-raisingly, and no doubt there are crashes, but the only accident we saw was a truck with a displaced load which had gone over the shoulder on a mountain road. Soft driving is a very smooth and patient rush.

So, caressed by the traffic, we crossed safely and headed north.

Beijing Lu was lit up, not so much by its shops and street lighting as by its inhabitants. The street was live with young people on a night out, a promenade. Couples arm in arm and small groups chatting excitedly ambled along the footpath, going nowhere special, perhaps down the hutongs (lanes) to the night markets for some barbecue or sweets, or peering into the shop fronts which were now as often as not populated by families watching TV, ironing, drinking tea.

It could have been High Street, Newtown on a Friday night or Lygon Street or Rundle Mall, but it wasn't. Our fellow promenaders looked so healthy, so stylish, so happy and confident, and so sober. It reminded us of a thriving country town in the 1960s - say Warrnambool, Armidale, Toowoomba or Mount Gambier - with all of life ahead of it and nothing in the way. It was in the body language, the sense of things going right, with the voracious appetite of youth to learn and experience innocently, more or less forgotten in our media, on full display. No drugs, no drunks, no gangs, no police, no army. They were all somewhere else that night.

And they were anything but drab. No Mao suits or other mufti. The young men wore 80s suits made out of dark tweed in a vast range of patterns, with very broad shoulders and deep reveres (reveres being the turn of the collar in the front of the jacket). Their shirts and ties were as flamboyant as a scuttle of stockbrokers on a good day. Suits were popular with the immaculate young women as well, in a range of colours that stretched the imagination. Solid reds, yellows, greens, orange with contrasting panels and insets: a dash of velvet here, some lace there, an embroidered rose, some rhinestone set into an upturned collar, remarkable buttons, a belt of black chain. Skirts from very short to very long, like something familiar, but not what we had seen before. The influences were manifold but the effect was local, and prosperous.

A block off Beijing Lu we found a market devoted almost entirely to women's clothing, a hectare or more with hundreds of shops replete with dresses, slacks, gowns and underwear for every occasion. These were arrayed on mannequins, the moulds for which must have been bought in a job lot from the US in about 1958. Fair-skinned (greyish really) and mostly fair-haired, high cheek bones, blue-eyed, unsmiling with fire-engine red pouts, narrow waists with deep breasts, tiny feet, and plaster hair-dos the like of which may not exist anywhere any more. Kiss curls, odd bobs, hair bands, comb-ups, 'I Dream of Jeannie' fringes. Identical mannequins re-appeared in cities and shops, large and small, wherever we went. Someone had a monopoly. Aha! yes! a light dawns - someone also known as the People's Republic of China. A monopoly of mannequins, amazing.

Further up Beijing Lu a vast advertising hoarding was attached to a pedestrian bridge. To its left was another huge billboard, which suggested that the epic art of the revolution with its massive peasants straining for a crack at the future having conquered the past had found a new medium. In separate frames, Steven Seagal, Danny De Vito and Arnold Schwarznegger in full Mr Freeze regalia were, if artistically enhanced, all recognisable. Come and watch guns, knives, swords and romance, the billboard says, in a universal language. China has the largest cinema market in the world, 55 per cent of global movie attendances.

It was a clement evening in Spring City and, although we managed to find some crowds the next day in a department store, the promenade was uncrowded and unhurried. Plenty of fast food, but no McDonalds. We bought some just-baked biscuits from a version of a hot bread shop that might pre-date the word 'shop', and considered our discovery that we were still on the same planet, so very much the same planet, that it was warm and as welcoming as one would expect, that it was temperate and hard-working, and that the sun could shine on Chinese and juwairen (outsiders) alike.

Spring City, until my mind is changed again, will be mellow, and Beijing Lu on a Friday night will be just a treat.