Ice Cellars: Keepers of a Cool Imperial Treasure

In the sizzling heat of a summer in Beijing, there’s nothing like a cool drink with bits of ice bobbing in it to cool things down a bit, and ice is becoming so ubiquitous these days that some establishments are serving it with drinks whether you ask for it or not.

Perhaps rare a decade ago, ice is now available in most Beijing restaurants, bars and homes, just a refrigerator away, even in rural areas, but what did people do in the old days to cool their heat-burdened hearts and souls?

The work of ice collectors in ancient times was particularly difficult, but urgent, since their main—if not sole—clients were emperors and members of the imperial court. Ice wasn’t available to just anybody, especially in the summertime when it would have been cherished. Today, people shuttle among high rises never giving a thought the once-active world of ice cellars that once existed underground amid the city’s hutong and imperial retreats.

The use of ice can be traced back to the Zhou Dynasty (16th century–11th century BC) in Chinese history, and it was prosperous from the Sui (AD 581–618) and Tang (AD 618–907) dynasties. Ice has played an important role in Chinese culture and Chinese people’s lives; it was an important article used in summer sacrificial ceremonies and was considered an essential article of royal family life in the summertime. When Ci Xi (1835–1908), the empress dowager of the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911), spent her summer days at the Summer Palace, her snacks and drinks were often iced. Even in 1900, when she fled the invasion of the Eight-Power Allied Forces to Xi’an, Shaanxi Province, she reportedly took iced plum syrup with her, but since ice was not available in Xi’an, the imperial kitchen managed to get some ice from a cave in the Taibai Mountains, more than 100 kilometres from Xi’an. From this one tale, we can see only the tip of an iceberg in the story of the uses of ice in China in history. According to some historical documents, Beijing could store 20,000 tons of ice per year during the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing dynasties, enough to have built a very grand ice palace in the wintertime, and they used underground ice cellars to do it.

Turn north from the middle of Zhishanmen Jie, a street between the West Gate of Jingshan Park and the East Gate of Beihai Park, and you can enter the Xuechi Hutong (Snow Pool Alley). Here there are two remaining of six original imperial ice cellars, the Xuechi Ice Cellars that gave the hutong its name. The two ice cellars are being renovated, are not open to the public and may never be, but yellow-glazed tiles on their roofs reveal their imperial past, despite grass growing amid their scattered tiles.

The ice cellar is not completely underground: the roofs’ ridgelines are four metres above the ground covering two-metre-high walls. The underground part of the ice cellar is about four metres deep; its walls and floor are coated with granite. Through its one-metre-wide and two-metre-high arched door, steps will lead you to the bottom of the ice cellars. Since the ice cellar is so airtight, the summer’s heat never intrudes. This is where “natural” ice was stored during the winter, awaiting the summertime demands of imperial families.

According to a local senior citizen, Li Dezhong, the Xuechi Ice Cellars provided ice to the imperial family until 1917, after the collapse of the restoration of the dethroned last emperor of China, Aisin Gioro Puyi. But the Xuechi Ice Cellars were renovated in 1961 and again in 1968, used to provide ice for society until 1979, when cold storage came into general use. Then, the 406-year-old Xuechi Ice Cellars lost their social relevance.

The Xuechi Ice Cellars are only 6 of the 18 imperial ice cellars used during the Qing Dynasty. Still existing are five ice cellars in the Forbidden City and the Gongjian Ice Cellar in Gongjian Hutong, an alley between Jingshanhou Jie and Dianmenxi Dajie, but it’s hard to imagine they have much of a future; and it’s hard to see their real features. The ice cellars in the Forbidden City are located in areas not accessible by the public, and the Gongjian Ice Cellar is used by a company as a storehouse. The city’s other ice cellars have vanished, leaving only names behind that denote they ever existed, such as the Bingjiao Hutong (Ice Cellar Alleyway) off Deshengmen.

There was a reason that ice was an imperial prerogative. It was a luxury and precious good under the sole control of the emperor, so precious that emperors sometimes awarded ice as an official honour. Eighteen ice cellars were enough to meet the needs of the nobles, but later some illustrious officials were given permission to run official ice cellars. Still, there were few, and there were only six official ice cellars in Beijing when China became a republic in 1911. Then some private ice cellars then began to appear.

The quality and scale of the ice cellars were obviously different. The imperial ice cellars and official ice cellars commonly used stones, brick and granite in their construction, whereas the private ice cellars were humble, using only mixed clay, wood and grass as construction materials.

The operation of ice cellars became an industry during this time. At its extreme, a half kilogram lump of ice could be sold for five ounces of silver.

While it lasted, this special industry also brought forth a special group of workers, ice-collectors, and some of them are still around to tell their stories.

In Yangqiaocun, Fengtai District, a group of villagers once worked as ice collectors. Li Dalong, a 44-year-old man, said he took up the gruelling task when only a teenager. With the onset of winter, ice-collecting work began, with workers pledging to work an entire winter. To get the hardest ice, they harvested ice at night, a process that can be divided into three steps: carving the ice from local lakes and streams, transporting and storing the ice. Once the ice-breakers surveyed the amount of ice available, they would carve the ice into 80-kilogram chunks of about half a cubic metre in size with ice chisels. The ice-transporting workers (some of them were women) removed the ice from a river or lake and transported it to the ice cellars. The ice-storing workers stacked the ice cubes. The cold winter work of the ice-collectors was crude and difficult: they suffered much to slake the summer thirsts of the wealthy and powerful only.

Modern science has relieved the suffering of these winter workers, and ice and refrigerators are now commonplace in Beijing’s homes and restaurants, despite the summer heat, even in rural areas.

Like ice houses in other parts of the world, natural ice and the ice cellars used to store it seem destined to naturally vanish into the memories of the people.