Drum Tower: The sounds of old Beijing

**David Rennie** (0:00)
Hello, David here. You're listening to a free episode of Drum Tower.
To listen every week, you'll need to be a subscriber. For a special half price offer, click on the link in the show notes, or just search Economist Podcast Plus.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:19)
This is Paige, the co-host of Giggly Squad, and I want to tell you about a company that I've been loving, Olive & June.
Olive & June gives you everything that you need for a salon-quality manicure in one box. And if you break it down, it really comes out to $2 a manicure, which is absolutely insane. It's also so easy to get salon-worthy nails at home with Olive & June. The difference between how your nails used to look when you did them yourself and now with the Manny system is a complete game changer. The best thing about Olive & June, too, is it's a quick dry. It dries in about one minute, lasts for five days, and full coverage in up to one to two coats. Visit oliveandjune.com/perfectmanny20 for 20% off your first system. That's oliveandjune.com/perfectmanny20 for 20% off your first system.
The Economist.

**David Rennie** (1:34)
Thank you for. Those drums were recorded by Colin Suyuan Chinnery, a Chinese-British sand artist.

**Colin Chinnery** (1:54)
We're in the drum hall of the Drum Tower. It's quite high up above the city, and there used to be 25 drums here that used to be beaten every two hours to announce the time for the city.

**David Rennie** (2:06)
In Imperial Beijing, sand was remarkably important, and the Drum Tower was used to keep order.

**Colin Chinnery** (2:14)
And the way that the drums used to be was, the saying is in Chinese, which means you hit the drums 18 times fast, 80 times slow, and 18 times neither fast nor slow, which makes 54 times, and that's one cycle, and you have to hit it two cycles. That makes 108 times.
And all these numbers, 18 and 72 and 54, every single one of those things has a meaning.

**David Rennie** (2:45)
The Drum Tower has lost its official role. It's a museum now. And in many ways, today's Beijing sounds like any big modern city. I'm going to take you to places where Beijing's ancient soundscape is being kept alive.
I'm David Rennie, The Economist's Beijing Bureau Chief. This week, Alice is taking a break from all her reporting, and I'm going to take you on a journey with your ears into Beijing's sonic past. I'll be asking, why has sound been such a vital part of Beijing's spirit? And is that still true today?
This is Drum Tower from The Economist.

**Colin Chinnery** (3:42)
Beijing is very, very sensitive to sound, Beijing traditional culture, that is.

**David Rennie** (3:46)
Colin's an artist, and he's made it his mission to preserve the unique sand scape of China's capital.

**Colin Chinnery** (3:51)
So this is a sound art museum, which is an institution that focuses entirely on sound. And this is our permanent show called Sound Terminus.

**David Rennie** (4:00)
Colin's a bit of a powerhouse. Last year, he co-founded one of the world's few museums entirely dedicated to sound. It's a brand new modern complex in the suburb of Tongzhou.
Colin moved to Beijing as a young boy in the late 1970s. His father was a British sinologist, and his mother is from a famous family of Beijing writers. As a kid, he trained at a tough martial arts and sports academy, and he acted in a kung fu film.
In the 1990s, he was a vocalist in a rock band called Xue Wei, or Pressure Point. There was kind of a homage to Talking Heads.

**Colin Chinnery** (5:01)
So, this is the first room of the museum and the sounds of old Beijing. And we're in a room which is a combination of a theatre set and a museum exhibition show.

**David Rennie** (5:15)
So, in that first hall of Colin's Sound Museum, you're transported back to a much older Beijing. If you grew up in a courtyard house on one of Beijing's ancient alleyways, then this is the sound of summer.
I talked to older Beijingers whose first memory of a cold, sweet summer treat is an ice cream, because that was a luxury a half century ago. They remember slices of watermelon cut up and sold on the corner of the street, even in the days when food was rationed. And this is the cry of the watermelon seller.

**Colin Chinnery** (6:13)
I think it's also for lazy people. I mean, you just had to sit in your courtyard and wait for these people to come over.
And it's a little bit like using your phone to order, you know, some food or whatever. But instead of it, you just wait for the right person to come and then you go to the front gate and call them in. So everybody came over, you know, like it could be the knife sharpener, it could be the barber, it could be, you know, even selling kind of makeup and all kinds of foods. So you really didn't have to leave your home.