Qi Qi's Own Temle of Heaven

Until last month, Jiang Qi Qi's Beijing office/studio was so icy cold in winter that she and her staff often sat huddled in overcoats and scarves. Come summer, it's usually so suffocatingly hot that business with clients is conducted outside in a tree-shaded courtyard. Despite what sounds like workaday masochism, Jiang still rates her place of business as akin to her own Temple of Heaven, a beautiful, unique base where, in her dual role as director of Dade Public Relations and Cultural Imprints Consulting -- a museums' souvenir design company -- she finds tranquillity and a creative charge that eludes her in any other city location.

Don't be fooled by the address on her business card: No.5 Lumicang Hutong, Dongcheng District, for it's merely the postal address of one of the capital's most famous cultural sites, the former Buddhist Ming Dynasty Zhihua Temple, which dates back to 1443. Since 1992, the 20,000sq.m temple complex, including other buildings, grounds and huge courtyards, has been the Beijing Cultural Exchange Museum.
The main Ming and five other temples, collectively named the Zhihua Meditation Temple by the emperor Ying, are the only wooden structures in Beijing dating from that period to have survived intact, despite 1930s monks selling almost priceless artifacts, including two ceilings, and damage and thefts during the Cultural Revolution. Today the temple, deemed a national preserved cultural relic, is defended by the Four Protectors in the form of Buddhist statues.

Jiang explained: "The complex, famous for its tradition of Buddhist art and as a conservatory of Beijing's classical music, is now owned by the Beijing Relics Bureau. My temple office, about seventy square meters, is known as the Gate of Wisdom, or Zhi Hui Men in Chinese. While it is the perfect workplace for my staff and I, its heating and air-conditioning systems were inadequate from the day we moved in two years ago.

Qi Qi wirh top British fashion designer Vivian Westwood, center, and opera singer Cecilia Bartoil.

"We were not allowed to improve either of them for fear of damaging the building's ancient fabric, which of course we understood. Now the heating has been improved, a great relief for all of us." She hopes the air-conditioning can be upgraded before next summer, even though she and some clients prefer to do business under the courtyard's pear trees.

Meanwhile, her Dade and Cultural Imprints firms are the only commercial enterprises officially allowed to operate in the museum complex. "It's such a great privilege ...", mused Jiang. "I found peace the very first time I came here."

How did she become a tenant, and is the rental as huge as such exclusivity would suggest? "The rent is now affordable," she disclosed, "but it was high when I moved in. I had been based near the Forbidden City, but as my activities increased I needed a move to somewhere special. Friends introduced me to this museum.

"After I began operations here, I mounted two exhibitions for the museum and cultivated its contacts with its United States counterparts. The museum authorities kindly thought these things to be very helpful, and thanked me via a rent reduction."
Jiang's PR and cultural-consultancy companies are closely linked in several respects, mainly because of her keen interest in all aspects of China's arts and culture, especially very rare 13-14th century Chinese cobalt blue ceramics.

Currently she is helping to organize a visit by Chinese experts to the famous Topkapi Museum in Istanbul, Turkey, which houses some 300 pieces of the famous Chinese ceramics. Herself an expert in ceramics, she said excitedly: "At last we may discover the origin of the blue cobalt. We have no idea where it came from."

Adding to her many other activities, Jiang also recently became consultant to the Palace Academy, a popular monthly activity run by The Palace Hotel to give Chinese as well as foreigners an insight to Chinese culture. "Sometimes we take the attendees to famous local sites, or to see rare artifacts," she said.

She could do worse than put her own office/studio on the itinerary.

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