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Plate 5.10 Map of Beijing,
c. 1450, with the deployment of
elephants for the emperor’s
visit to the Altar of Heaven and
Earth to conduct sacrifices

as well as at the three successive gates of the Sacrificial Hall of the two main chariots of the imperial procession to the
at the altar in question (Pl. 5.10). Some of the elephants sacrificial altar in question. Elephants were thus as much
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must have knelt rather than stood, since the Yongle-period part of the scansion of Beijing life as the two-hourly beating
sculpted stone elephants on either side of the spirit road of the drum at the Drum Tower.
leading to the Ming imperial tombs include both kneeling Thinking of Beijing as being at each moment a place in
and standing animals (Pl. 5.11). Elephants also had a second movement and a structure of movement helps us to get away
role within the procession: one pair of elephants pulled each from seeing the city simply as a frame for human activity. It
allows us to see Beijing as a place where human beings
Plate 5.11 Stone elephant from the Spirit Road leading to the Ming understood themselves to be in constant interaction with
imperial tombs, dated to the Yongle period, 1403–24
non-human activity and movement. As a form of ecological
awareness, this is very different from our own, and not
necessarily any better or worse: it possessed its own
sharpness of vision – perhaps a stronger sense of
connectedness, for example – but one only has to think of the
deforestation of the Taihang Mountains and the flooding
that it caused to see that Ming ecological thinking had its
own blind spots. Putting movement back into our picture of
Beijing also allows us to see that the Ming state treated the
urban space of the capital as plastic. This plasticity operated
on different time-scales, from the one-day scale of a
procession to the multi-generational and often multi-century
scale of a tree’s lifetime.
Plasticity is one important corollary of a conception of the
city as shi. At the outset of this chapter I mentioned that there
is no obvious English translation of shi. Place-in-movement

54 | Ming China: Courts and Contacts 1400–1450