People walk through Brussels' Grand Place, where ornate guildhalls adorned with gold details provide the backdrop to historical figures. ZHANG WEIGUO/FOR CHINA DAILY
In French, they call it La Grand-Place. In Dutch, De Grote Markt.
Even if you don't speak the local languages, the name is still recognizable: a big, grand place, used as a market. That is exactly what it has been for centuries, as it has been serving as the beating heart of Brussels, dating back to the 1000s when the city was gradually taking shape.
In its earliest days, the square was little more than an open village fairground. Farmers from the surrounding countryside would drive in their horse carts, loaded with grains, fruits and vegetables from the fields. They bartered their goods for bolts of cloth and household wares laid out by peddlers. The air was thick with competing smells from the sharp tang of manure mixing with the aroma of baked bread, while cries of vendors filled the area.
By the 13th century, Brussels had grown rich enough to erect permanent indoor markets at the northern edge of the square: one for meat, one for bread and one for cloth. These stone halls formalized what had long been a rustic gathering into an organized commercial hub.
Over time, power followed money. Tall and imposing civic buildings rose above the merchants' stalls, and mayors and councilors moved in, making the square not only the city's commercial hub but also its political center. The majestic Town Hall still functions today, and although centuries have passed, the Grand Place remains what it has always been: a place where commerce, culture and civic pride intersect.
Now, the square is one of Brussels' most popular tourist attractions. Its cobbled surface swarms with visitors, cameras raised to capture the ornate gabled facades that surround it. Electric vintage cars circle the perimeter for 70 euros ($83) a ride, the drivers dressed in capes cut to resemble 19th-century styles, welcoming passengers with courtly gestures, while the plate number of one car is Brussels-001, one with rich history.
Restaurants fill the square's corners with the chatter of diners, their outdoor tables crowded beneath awnings. Down the narrow side streets, the air is sweetened by waffle shops, where long lines of tourists wait for freshly pressed waffles drenched in molten chocolate. Those who wander off with a cone of fries or a sugared waffle often find themselves trailed by the square's other regulars: pigeons, fat and insistent, waddling close behind in hopes of a careless crumb.
However, beneath the postcard beauty and touristic bustle, the Grand Place holds a deeper grandeur. Its cobblestones echo with the footsteps of exiled thinkers and wandering writers who once lived nearby. If we draw a circle with the radius of a few hundred meters and its center being the square, some of Europe's most brilliant and troubled minds found shelter in the city of Brussels. Their homes may now be ordinary apartments or shops, but plaques on the walls whisper reminders that some of humanity's most brilliant souls had once passed through these doors.
Crowds gather at the Grand Place in Brussels. WANG JINGJING/FOR CHINA DAILY
Karl Marx: The drafting of The Communist Manifesto
Brussels is a city of thousands of narrow streets, most unremarkable to the casual passerby. Rue Jean d'Ardenne is one such street — quiet, tucked away, lined with plain three-story homes weathered by Belgian rain. The walls are streaked with black, bicycles lean at odd angles, and the occasional blue-and-white garbage bag sits slumped against a lamppost.
No 50 is a four-story building that blends into its surroundings. "Ordinary" must be a key word among any writer's hands to describe this old building. However, a modest metal plaque carries shock for anyone reading it. It says:
Karl Marx, 1846-1848
Installed by the Ixelles Historical Society.
Everyone knows this name. Here, in this modest Brussels residence, Karl Marx lived for two years. At first he was expelled from Prussia and moved to France, but later under pressure of the Prussian government he was deported from France again. In 1845, this wandering thinker arrived in Brussels — a frontier city willing to harbor exiles and this house near the Grote Markt is where he once lived.
Marx's life here was far from idle. He spent his days immersed in discussions, writings and debates with his comrades, most often at a cafe on the Grote Markt: La Maison du Cygne, or the White Swan.
The White Swan has long been a fixture of the square. Originally built in the 1500s to serve merchants and farmers, it was reduced to ashes during French bombardments but rebuilt in 1698. Its richly ornamented facade, glittering with baroque details, earned it the nickname "the jewel of elegance" of the Grand Place. Over the centuries it changed hands and purposes, eventually becoming a cafe.
It was here, in 1846, that Marx and his comrade and supporter Friedrich Engels often gathered with friends. Sometimes they sat hunched in animated debate, their words spilling into the smoke-filled air; other times they bent silently over pages, writing feverishly. To this day, the cafe preserves the table where Marx was said to have sat most often, a small plaque marking the place where theory met ink.
Brussels gave Marx a pause from the exile life he had endured. It allowed him the quiet to reflect on years of thought and experience he had accumulated while editing Die Neue Rheinische Zeitung (The New Rhein Newspaper). In Brussels, he digested all those lessons learned from past experiences and transmuted them into something larger.
After two years' working, by the time he left the city in 1848, Marx and Engels had completed the draft of The Communist Manifesto. Published in London that same year, the pamphlet would reverberate across continents, inspiring workers' movements and shaping the course of world history.
Victor Hugo: The most beautiful square in Europe
Directly across from the White Swan stands another building named for a bird: La Maison du Pigeon, the Pigeon Hotel. Like its neighbor opposite, it had been destroyed in the French bombardments and rebuilt in 1698. For centuries, it served travelers passing through Brussels, offering rest to merchants, soldiers and occasionally exiles.
In 1851, three years after Marx had departed Brussels, the Pigeon received its most celebrated guest: Victor Hugo.
Hugo had once supported Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte but turned into a fierce critic after the latter declared himself Emperor Napoleon III. Forced into exile, Hugo fled to Belgium, where he first lodged at the Pigeon Hotel.
Hugo's exile didn't dull his creative fire. He would stroll the Grand Place, absorbing the square's dramatic Gothic facades with the eye of a poet. He left some of the most enduring tributes to its beauty: "The Town Hall of Brussels is a jewel comparable to the spire of Chartres; a dazzling fantasy of a poet fallen from the mind of an architect. And then, the square that surrounds it is a marvel. Save for three or four houses which modern pedants have allowed to be distorted, there is not a single facade which is not a date, a costume, a stanza, a masterpiece. I would have wished to draw them all, one after the other."
Hugo didn't linger at the Pigeon long, but his time there was productive. He composed Napoleon le Petit (Napoleon the Little), his scathing denunciation of Napoleon III's regime, a pamphlet that spread across Europe and reinforced his reputation as both a literary giant and a political conscience.
Today, a plaque on the building reminds passersby that Hugo once lived here, gazing out at the square that awes visitors still.
The White Swan House on Brussels' Grand Place WANG JINGJING/FOR CHINA DAILY
Charles Baudelaire: A poet's bitterness, legacy
From the Grand Place's northeast corner, a short walk past several gray-stone churches leads to a quieter street of aging buildings. On one of its dim walls hangs a plaque:
Charles Baudelaire, 1864-1866 The Grand Mirror Hotel
The name needs no introduction. Baudelaire, author of Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), is among the greatest poets of the French language. His verses, heavy with eroticism, decay and mortality, still appear atop best-seller lists in the Francophone world.
Yet in life, his fame was more fraught. Les Fleurs du mal, published in 1857, earned him both notoriety and legal trouble. French prosecutors accused him of obscenity; the courts banned portions of the book and fined him 300 francs, a crushing sum when a skilled worker earned only 3 or 4 francs a day.
By 1864, weary and broke, Baudelaire sought refuge in Brussels. He took up residence at the Hotel du Grand Miroir — the Grand Mirror Hotel — a modest boarding house favored by struggling writers. To make ends meet, he delivered lectures and sold books. But his oratory lacked decorum. At one lecture to young, female students, he startled his audience by saying, "It was with you that I lost my virginity as an orator" — a line that sent many young women fleeing in embarrassment.
During his stay, Baudelaire continued to write. Alongside poetry, he penned Pauvre Belgique! (Poor Belgium!), a manuscript filled with biting critiques of the country and its people.
Yet, rather than holding his bitterness against him, the city chose to honor his memory. Today his former residence bears a plaque, and in 2017 the Brussels City Museum mounted an exhibition on Baudelaire, featuring Pauvre Belgique! as a central theme.
Marx, Hugo and Baudelaire were not the only intellectual exiles who found their way to Brussels. The roll call of names who once lingered in its cafes and boarding houses reads like a who's who of 19th-century Europe: Alexandre Dumas, Heinrich Heine, Mikhail Bakunin, and many more.
They had little money but immense ambition. They spent long hours in smoky cafes, sipping cheap coffee, arguing over politics, literature and the future of humanity. They were dreamers and revolutionaries, carrying the weight of centuries on their shoulders even as they struggled to pay their rent.
Brussels, known for its tolerance, provided them with a haven in which they could write, reflect and continue their debates with words. That's what makes the Grand Place grand in the spiritual sense. While being a tourist magnet, a commercial hub, a civic square, its true grandeur lies deeper, in the layers of history and memory embedded in its stones. It was here that Marx sharpened his theories, that Hugo praised the beauty of architecture, that Baudelaire vented his frustrations.
To walk across the square today is to tread the same ground where these restless spirits once walked. The ornate facades are not merely architectural marvels; they are the backdrop against which some of Europe's greatest ideas were debated, some of its most scathing criticisms penned, and some of its most luminous literature conceived.
With such residents in its past, the Grand Place is not just the heart of Brussels. It is, in a sense, a crossroads of human history — where thought and art, politics and poetry, have converged, and where great thinkers and great writers clashed in minds.
That is what will make it truly grand for another 1,000 years.
