Yugong Yishan Has Drifted for 15 Years. Where Does Beijing's Oldest Live House Go Next?

"The courtyard has all these rooftops you can climb onto — just like the opening credits of In the Heat of the Sun."

Five days after Lü Zhiqiang put out his statement, someone came to the front gate of Yugong Yishan and drew a pair of cartoon pigs on the white seal pasted across the red-lacquered door. Over the head of the one with a mohawk, a speech bubble said, in big letters, "Goodbye."

This live house in Beijing's Dongcheng District had been shut for half a year. Dirty Fingers, the independent rock band that played two shows there last year, had been invited to the venue's 14th-anniversary party in the autumn. "Then we never heard another word," says lead singer Guan Xiaotian.

A statement posted in mid-February to both its Weibo page and its WeChat official account confirmed a rumor that had been going around for a while: this landmark music venue would leave its current site and look for a new one. The statement blamed "cultural content approval" and "fire safety."

There is no street number here. Walk a few steps east and you reach the entrance to the former site of the Duan Qirui Government; against the grey brick and old tile, the gate of Yugong Yishan looks like the door of some mysterious warehouse. In 2003, the then-unknown band Hanggai played its first headline show at Yugong; within two years its audience grew from 20 people to more than 800, enough to fill the room. In 2017, three months after The Rap of China went on air, the crew Hong Hua Hui went from a bit over 10,000 fans to 360,000 — and yet Yugong Yishan, which had taken in China's first generation of rappers, never put on another hip-hop show.

What used to be called underground culture looks nothing like it once did, and Beijing's independent music venues have gone through a changing of the guard. Venues as old as Yugong — MAO Livehouse, Zajia, Maque Washe, 2 Kolegas — closed or moved over rent and other problems, leaving the ring of music venues that radiates out from the Drum Tower.

Before 2007, the space Yugong Yishan now occupies was a members-only club. "There were always three insanely expensive cars parked out front," founder Lü Zhiqiang recalls. Today there is nowhere to park a luxury car in front of the red gate; on show nights a few shared bikes lie tipped over by the stone lions at the entrance, and between sets young people huddle together to smoke and talk.

Now, after eleven years here, Yugong Yishan is leaving too, and the sunken hall is expected to become a cultural exhibition space of some kind. The young people straddling their bikes and Yugong Yishan both have to find somewhere else to go.

1

Most people who know Lü Zhiqiang say he hasn't changed much. He is lean, wears his long hair tied back, favors jackets and hoodies, and gets around on an orange electric moped. You can still see the breakdancing teenager he was thirty years ago.

He started dancing at 15. At 17 he won Beijing's breakdancing championship and began taking gigs around the country, which is how he met some of the country's earliest rock musicians, including members of Tang Dynasty. In the early 1990s he put together a heavy-metal band of his own called Sanba.

In 1995, after six months of German at the Goethe-Institut, Lü went to Germany alone. Once he got to Berlin he couldn't make himself leave. There he saw a small underground live house for the first time. "It floored me the second I walked in — standing there, I could feel the sound beating against my trouser legs like wind."

To him Berlin felt a lot like Beijing — also full of young people from everywhere else in the country, none of them with money. "People had that same energy, kind of raw and blunt." He shared a rented flat with a few Germans and studied German from the moment he opened his eyes each morning, renting CDs at record shops and taping the ones he liked. He and his flatmates also put together a night at a small bar called Scheinbar — someone did acrobatics, someone did comedy sketches and stand-up, and he ran the lights and sound and danced. It ran for a month straight.

It was the height of the 1990s underground electronic and rock wave, and Berlin had gathered the most avant-garde and experimental musicians in Europe, and in the world. From Monday to the weekend, hundreds of events were happening every day. That restless, inventive atmosphere stayed with Lü. "I figure everything I do now comes out of what I felt back then. I've been trying to chase that feeling back ever since."

Lü came home in 1999, and within a few years he was organizing live shows of every sort. In his words, he was "putting together gatherings," moving from the stage to the back office, "because a live house can hold so many different things."

The parties could turn up anywhere back then — a hall at the Yanjing Hotel, a small theater, the multi-purpose room at the Friendship Hotel, the International Club. Mostly places that catered to foreigners, so nobody came to shut them down. Eventually he found a permanent site, and many of the people who had followed the parties around town became his shareholders.

Even with a fixed address, Yugong Yishan kept some of the temper of those parties. Everything it booked was underground and off the mainstream, and it was run with a kind of utopian looseness, the door always open to friends.

At its peak Yugong Yishan had as many as 20 shareholders, the smallest stakes under 1%. They came from every kind of circle — staff at the French embassy, executives at Ogilvy, and plenty of musicians, like Shan Xiaofan, once the drummer of Baojiajie 43. Nobody treated it as a real investment; they just wanted a way in. But it was exactly this patchwork of small sums that gave Lü his first working capital.

2

Yugong Yishan really began at a bar called Lushang Coffee, by the west gate of Tsinghua University.

The shows there were more like one long party — nine times out of ten the crowd was people Lü knew, or people they knew. Secondhand Rose, Reflector and Joyside all played there. The room was always packed and the windows always open, with people leaning out to chat with whoever walked past. Nobody knew quite how to define a place like that; all sorts of performers, musicians and artists drifted through.

He took the Wudaokou space over from a Canadian friend. It was 2003, during the SARS outbreak; the friend had gone home to sit it out, most public venues had closed, and the city was quiet. But the crowd that usually hung out together couldn't stay still — word got around that something was happening here, and they rode in on their bikes from every corner of Beijing and spent whole days there.

"We were a bunch of people who weren't afraid to die," Lü says, laughing.

All the way through the Chunxiu Road years, Yugong Yishan stayed a big living room where the host, Lü Zhiqiang, received his guests. The circle kept widening. "But everyone still had one thing in common," Shan Xiaofan says: "a willingness to take in new things, and a love for live house culture."

"They're all big names now." Any number of famous people can be tied to Yugong Yishan, but Lü doesn't seem interested in name-dropping. What he is proud of is that all of them played here before they were famous.

There is something very plain at the center of what Lü wants: he wants people to "hear something good." So from the start he did whatever he could to bring in avant-garde foreign bands. In 2008 the French electronic band Air played its only Asian show at Yugong Yishan. "We put in more than a million yuan — nobody would have dared think of that back then." When punk was hot, he brought over the Swedish band The International Noise Conspiracy. He has kept at it: last year he opened Zhao Dai, a dance club nothing like Yugong, purely to import the newest underground electronic music from Europe and give it a room with the right sound and the right feel.

Some people call this far-sighted. These musicians, the most experimental in their genres abroad, could not help but influence and set off China's own new bands, in a way records and the internet often can't.

"People say one step ahead of everyone makes you a pioneer, and three steps ahead makes you a martyr. Everyone thinks Yugong Yishan is a martyr." Shan Xiaofan, who has known Lü for years, thinks Yugong survived because its taste in music is so clear — untouched by trends, and therefore never left behind by them.

People often talk about the bands that "got out" of here — young bands that played the room before they were known and slowly found their feet. Besides Hanggai, there were Pet Conspiracy, Re-TROS, Nova Heart. In the early years Lü would have them play Yugong Yishan once a month to build up stage time.

Playing Yugong Yishan has since become a kind of badge in the scene. Guan Xiaotian of Dirty Fingers says: "It sort of means you've hit a certain level, that you're good enough to play Yugong." A venue that puts on more than 200 shows a year can no longer easily give a headline slot to a band with no audience at all, but Lü still assembles bill shows for bands he believes in, or has them open for someone else.

The Chunxiu Road days lasted only two years. The parking lot it stood in is gone, replaced by the Yongli International tower, which went up for the 2008 Olympics and forced Yugong Yishan to move.

The oldest fans still trade stories about what they saw at "old Yugong"; for slightly younger ones, the memory is the gate behind the stone lions on Zhang Zizhong Road. For the new site Lü deliberately picked somewhere quieter and plainer, at a distance from the bars and shops and from Gulou East Street, which was turning touristy and commercial.

He took the place over from a friend and kept some of the old decor. Several outsized red chandeliers hang from the ceiling, and up on the second floor is a lounge-like VIP room with a wall-length cabinet of cigar drawers.

Nearly every move came with another upgrade in equipment. Lü paid a lot to have a new sound system built to order and shipped from the United States; it took a month to arrive. "The lights can be a bit worse, but the sound system can't. People come to a live house to hear the sound, don't they?"

The toilets weren't finished, but the sound system had arrived, so the new venue opened anyway. Word still traveled by email list back then. One email went out, the opening night was free, and more than a thousand people turned up. This is another thing people love to recall about Yugong Yishan: they didn't come only for the music, they came because this was where everyone met. Eight hundred people packed inside, two hundred standing outside talking; the room was stuffy and hot, and people took turns going out for air.

3

Nobody has ever thought running a live house was a lasting business, because it is so hard to make money at it. Eight out of every ten shows lose money, Lü once said. At the start he figured three to five years would be a good run; he never expected eleven straight years on Zhang Zizhong Road, barely breaking even the whole time — and for a big event, like last year's concert, he sometimes had to put his own money in on top.

But from the regulatory side, things have never looked as unpredictable as they do now. "At the start we were within the rules — otherwise we wouldn't have put that much money in. But the rules have changed."

Live houses have multiplied in recent years, with no small push from property developers and investors. Something that nobody knew how to define a decade or so ago is now everywhere. The business still has no standard to work from.

Three years ago the Ministry of Culture called Lü and more than 700 other operators from around the country to a meeting, planning to pick a few venues for a pilot set of rules. The pilot came to nothing because they could not reach agreement with the fire authorities. "If it had actually been settled then," he says now, "that would have been great. We wouldn't have had to close."

At the same time, he has plainly felt cultural regulation tighten. Now everything about a show — the band's name, the exact setlist, the lyrics — has to be translated and submitted for approval. For a venue like Yugong Yishan, which used to bring in a foreign band every month, policy risk has become almost impossible to get over; some of the bands it used to book can now hardly be seen in China at all.

Even with approval in hand, shows are often stopped at the last minute — sometimes for political reasons, sometimes because someone reported them. "If somebody wants to hurt you and light a firecracker under you, there's no way to stop it." Lü files all of this under the industry's "bad actors."

Any tremor in the business, anything outside anyone's control, lands here directly. After the pro-Tibetan-independence remarks at a Shanghai concert in April 2008, every international band show here was stopped for three months. In 2016, an Abramović-style performance piece at DDC (Dusk Dawn Club) got Yugong Yishan ordered to "suspend business for rectification" for a week.

This latest, total shutdown started last August, before the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, when venues and rehearsal rooms in the area were inspected door to door and told to close for the time being. Then the fire department came by and said there would be no reopening without approval paperwork. The two sides have been stuck there since.

"Honestly, if we really wanted to, we could pull some strings. But this year the mood is so touchy, there's so much going on, and they can shut us down at any moment — you can't work like that. You can't put your energy into what you actually want to do, so I stopped fighting it." Early this year Lü decided to give up the site, hoping to get through a year of closure and moving as smoothly as he can.

4

In early 2005 the old Yugong Yishan put on two shows fans still call classics: one by The International Noise Conspiracy, the other Zhang Chu's comeback.

Li Xiao was at both. He was a student then, and had followed Yugong Yishan from the west gate of Tsinghua to the Workers' Stadium parking lot and then to Zhang Zizhong Road. He was studying photography, so he began documenting live shows in bulk.

Shows in those days were always one step from an "accident" — the crowd and the musicians both had something to work off, the stage and the floor egged each other on, and fights broke out from nowhere. His favorite band then was Gadiao, one of those bands you supposedly "have to see live." "They burned themselves up on stage. Every show felt like it could be the last," Li Xiao says. "So in the end they really did break up."

At Yugong Yishan you could regularly run into musicians who were idols to them at the time, and actors like Zhou Xun and Huang Jue turned up often. But for those students, going to shows was mostly the thrill of a small group closing ranks — digging through CDs at record shops together, buying real and fake Vans and Converse at the Wudaokou wholesale market. Dyed hair, studs on your trousers: these "oddballs" in "strange getups" seemed to exist only in a live house.

"Oh right, and I remember there were a lot of pretty girls, especially at Yugong."

At some point the frenzied, angry, slogan-shouting shows suddenly thinned out, and a batch of once-busy rock bands broke up and vanished. For Li Xiao that was around 2008, after which he rarely shot a show again. Going to hear live music stopped being special — the biker jackets only rock kids used to dare wear were, overnight, on everybody.

"You could look cool whether or not you listened to music." Li Xiao thinks this has to do with how music information spreads now: the need for a small crowd to huddle together for warmth faded, and the energy people used to let out in one night gets spent in scraps across a week. "Maybe people are still listening, but everyone seems to have gone into hiding. The internet is very good at breaking everything into pieces."

He is sentimental, and although he seldom goes to shows now, he still thinks it's a shame Yugong Yishan is moving. He says the current site at the former Duan Qirui Government has "exactly the right feel." "You've got these old pre-1949 buildings mixed with dormitories put up after 1949 — a bit of the Beijing flavor our parents' generation knew. A lot of films and TV shows have shot their collective-dormitory scenes in this courtyard. The courtyard has all these rooftops you can climb onto — just like the opening credits of In the Heat of the Sun." He has photographed many bands up on that roof.

Today's audience is nothing like the old one. The new Yugong is much bigger than the old one, with capacity up to 800. The regular audience, Lü estimates, has grown from a bit over 2,000 in the Chunxiu Road days to about 50,000 now; walk into the room and 80% of the people are strangers to him. A live house is no longer the only way people find music, either. For some bands he has barely heard himself, the crowd sings along. Staying out in front is not so easy anymore.

When Yugong Yishan's statement went up, Wu Ruiqi happened to log into Weibo for work — an account she hadn't opened in a long time — and the statement, later shared and commented on everywhere, was in her feed. "It got to me all at once. Even Yugong is closing."

A few years after graduating she had seen her first live house show at Yugong Yishan. "My first thought was, wow, it's dark in here." Over the next two or three years she went often, at the peak almost every week.

The show that stayed with her longest was by the Taiwanese musician Summer Lei. "I'd never heard music with no words before, one piece after another, and the crowd was still going wild." She heard some more experimental things too, which struck her as "a bit odd." She was not the devoted-fan type; she always stood at the very back, wandering over to the bar now and then for a drink.

Yugong Yishan gave her a strange feeling of being somewhere unfamiliar and new. "At a place like Maque Washe, when you're a woman being looked at by men, they look at you the way a male classmate looks at a female classmate. But at Yugong Yishan you get treated like a woman." A few years into working life, she felt she had suddenly gained some control over her own life there, a sense of becoming a separate person. "A very male state, fighting to claim resources — I could feel that in a lot of the people in that room."

In that period she tried plenty of new things: she learned to smoke and drink, got her ears pierced, and later moved abroad by herself, all of it connected in some degree to that experience. "When I'm not in a place like that, I'm extremely well-behaved. But if you made me follow the rules forever, I'd probably suffocate." She has worked in IT ever since, and once the job got busier she stopped going to shows for a long time. A couple of years ago she asked her closest friend from those days, the one who used to chase Zhang Weiwei from folk bar to folk bar, and found she had stopped being a fan too.

"But back then I really needed a gap like that to breathe through. It's like being under water, isn't it? You have to come up sometimes."

5

However much a live house gives off an air of underground rebellion, Shan Xiaofan thinks Yugong Yishan has only ever gone with the current. It filled a role the times were bound to produce — "if it hadn't been Yugong Yishan, it would have been someone else" — because people need somewhere to go. "You have to allow different things to exist. That is really the crucial part."

Yugong Yishan has been open fifteen years. Bands of every kind have sprouted here, grown, gone out into the world, or disappeared. In recent years live house audiences have grown noticeably and money has begun moving in. New rooms like Yue Space and DDC (Dusk Dawn Club) have opened one after another, and well-funded companies like Modern Sky have started building live houses of their own.

Even so, Lü thinks it is a long way from amounting to anything. Against the boom-and-bust enthusiasm for niche music, he sees this as work that takes patience and slow cultivation. "Without those first two or three thousand people, there might be no today."

As what used to be niche turns into one hyped trend after another, Yugong is still playing a slow hand. Six months of closure have given Lü his first chance in more than a decade to stop and look hard at what has happened and what is in front of him, and he finds there is still a lot he wants to do. He doesn't seem cut up about the move; he thinks eleven years have "used this place up," and that upgrading the equipment and the room really does mean finding somewhere else.

From breakdancing kid to live house owner, Lü still holds the idea he started with, and he is fairly sure he can keep at it indefinitely. He has few complaints about the world outside: being able to keep doing what he wants to do is, to him, already a good environment.

But that environment is plainly changing. Yugong Yishan's moving statement drew a bigger response than anyone expected, and Lü was approached by a great many property developers and investment firms from all over the country. Yugong Yishan has always paid its own way, and with operating costs climbing, it is now planning to end the way it has been run for more than a decade, take in outside investment, and open venues in cities like Guangzhou, Shanghai and Shenzhen.

"If back then the problem was money, now it is precisely not only money." Shan Xiaofan says investors today all want a hand in the running, but a live house has its own logic, and profit is not the only thing that decides matters. Some newly opened venues have adopted a mixed-use consumption model, squeezing everything they can out of non-performance space and off-hours, which plainly runs against Yugong Yishan's original wish to stay away from commercial districts.

There are plenty of problems a move can't solve. And until a standard exists that the business can point to and follow, small underground rooms remain in a grey zone — undefined, and liable to be stopped at any moment.

(Wu Ruiqi is a pseudonym.)

The cover image shows the Yugong Yishan stage; unless otherwise noted, images in this article come from QDaily. The long-format image shows Chen Haoran of In3 playing saxophone at the new Yugong. Photo courtesy of Li Xiao.