China's Contested Capital: Architecture, Ritual, and Response in Nanjing

Chapter 4. The Necropolis of Nanjing: The GMD’s Ceremonial Center and Cosmological Microcosm

4 The Necropolis of Nanjing The GMD’s Ceremonial Center and Cosmological Microcosm A distinct culture consists of a web of entangled symbol systems. In his essays on culture, Clifford Geertz described the role of symbols and rituals in religious, ideological, and aesthetic systems of meaning as interacting in a cultural matrix of contending social groups.1 Seen in this manner, the stability of a given society depends on how seamlessly the conflicting patterns of meaning are woven together. Success of a given symbolic system depends on how well it matches (or creates) the community’s “commonsense” understanding of how the world works. Societies in upheaval experience disjuncture between current explanations of world order (that is, the way life should be) and the perceived reality of that existence. In China, the imperial bureaucratic system had been successful for so long because it offered a flexible combination of symbol systems that succeeded in shaping a world order that could reconcile social change with the “primal truths” it offered. It was stable because it was all encompassing, based on a cosmology that directed acts of religious devotion, ideology, and art under a state umbrella. As previously mentioned, by 1911 the imperial bureaucratic cultural matrix ceased to encompass new understandings of the world and China’s role in it. A search for new meanings began, and new constructions competed in the attempt to reinvent a worldview that would unite new ideas of state and nation with new understandings of world order. With the Northern Expedition, the Guomindang firmly believed it had an opportunity to reunite China politically. The party C H A P T E R The Necropolis of Nanjing 126 recognized that fashioning lasting national unity would require more than constructing an apparatus of control. The GMD set out to turn the ideology of Sun Yat-sen into a more powerful system of meaning, encompassing both scientific validity and a religious-like devotion to the nation. In Nanjing, the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum would be the most significant symbol of this ideology, which in turn would transform the capital into a metaphor for an envisioned wholeness in modern Chinese life. Finishing the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum became one of the highest priorities of the GMD-led state. Somehow, in a budget largely devoted to military spending for various civil wars, the government found money to build Sun’s tomb. The GMD recognized what imperial governments in China also knew: ceremonial centers were crucial to creating an aura of legitimate leadership. Capitals in China’s past served important ritual functions that were intricately tied to their military and administrative roles. The ideal capital occupied a central location that, through proper construction of ritual spaces, enabled the leader to manipulate the forces of nature for the benefit of the people. According to the Rites of Zhou, compiled during the Han dynasty, each capital by definition should contain an altar to the god of soil, a temple to the ancestors, a ruler’s palace, and city walls (Steinhardt 1990, 33). Furthermore, the spatial layout of the ideal city reflected the understood layout of the cosmos: it was axial and aligned to the cardinal directions, with square-shaped walls and buildings that represented the earth and round shapes that represented heaven. Though the ideal was never fully realized, through its morphology the capital “projected images of the cosmic order on to the plane of human experience, where they could provide a framework for social action” (Wheatley 1971, 478). It disseminated and inculcated values that sustained the system.2 The layout provided the framework for cultural meaning and social action, but ritual-architectural events in the capital directed those meanings and actions, legitimizing state power and providing models for social order. In her analysis of High Qing imperial sacrifices, Angela Zito (1997) argues that the rituals, by preserving the well-being of the entire realm, created the “Son of Heaven’s” Musgrove_04_ch4.indd 126 Musgrove_04_ch4.indd 126 26/03/2013 9:33 AM 26/03/2013 9:33 AM The Necropolis of Nanjing 127 legitimate authority. He also served as the exemplar of filiality through his sacrifices to the ancestors, modeling relations between emperor and subject, father and son throughout the empire. Though excluded from direct participation, commoners could emulate imperial rites through the mediation of literati and local officials. Local officials conducted similar sacrifices in their jurisdictions, and families performed similar ancestral rites at...