The Hotel Where They Danced

By daylight the Beijing Hotel is three buildings pretending to be one: a French-built wing from 1917, a fifties block, a seventies slab. It stood on Chang'an before the avenue was the avenue. Until the Great Hall of the People opened, this was where the young republic received the world: state banquets, delegations, the whole theater of a new country learning its manners in an old dining room.

And it is where Mao danced. That is not legend, it is logistics: the dance evenings of the fifties were held here, and the room they used, with its twenties parquet, still exists inside the hotel. I stood on the front steps with my map folded to uselessness and looked up at the facade for a long time, doing the arithmetic of what those windows have overheard.

I am not here for the marble. I am here because this trip runs from one end of an era to the other: it starts where power danced, and it will end inside a mountain where the same era buried a factory it never finished. The hotel is the overture. I intend to hear all of it.