The eerily quiet bar that speaks of 'The Great Empty'

French photographer Gilles Sabrié captured this dystopian scene as the world headed towards lockdown in February 2020.

On Saturday 25 January 2020, millions of Chinese people started celebrating the Lunar New Year. The country's megacities saw huge temporary migrations as people left to celebrate with friends and family in distant towns and cities, as they did every January.

That year, however, there was a dramatic difference. Many of the people who left to celebrate were unable to return for weeks or even months. A type of pneumonia that had appeared in the western Chinese city of Wuhan the previous December had quietly became a concern. By the time Chinese revellers boarded trains and planes home a month later it had become a crisis.

French photographer Gilles Sabrié was in Beijing at that very moment, as the seriousness of the Wuhan virus became more evident. "The photo editor at the New York Times had asked me to roam Beijing and take some pictures of the atmosphere. I just gotten back from holidays and I didn't know what to expect."

Wuhan was already in lockdown, though these measures hadn't yet been adopted by other Chinese cities. Even so, Sabrié found the city sombre and eerily quiet. "There were very, very few people anywhere. Most restaurants were closed. Everybody was worried that the disease would spread to Beijing.

"What made the situation probably more anxious is people didn't have much trust in what the authorities were saying. Initially, they had said there was no human-to-human transmission, then, just a few days later, they reverse and then go into full lockdown for Wuhan, a city of 10 million."

Sabrié says the Chinese authorities had stressed that there had been few deaths in Beijing, a city of 23 million people. "The question is, could we trust those figures? That was a big thing," Sabrié says. Beijing's citizens began to shy away from the routines of city life, encouraged by public health messages to limit the spread. "It was not a firm lockdown, like you had to stay home, but basically, you were encouraged to limit your movements," Sabrié says.

The result was an eerie emptiness in a city usually bustling with life. The subways were empty; those who hadn't left for the provinces were staying home. The stillness was dramatic, but lacked a human reference point. "It was quite paradoxical, because when you need to shoot something empty, actually you need people. If it's fully empty, it's not as strong."

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Sabrié had an idea. Near Beijing is a resort area called Lake Houhai, a locale with many traditional houses and usually packed with sightseers day and night. When he turned up, "it was around dinner time", Sabrié says, when the area would usually be crowded with people. "This place is a must-see for any tourist, Chinese or foreign, who comes and visits Beijing. It's full of bars [and] tourist shops. Those bars usually play very loud music… each bar is louder than the next one, trying to attract more people."

Instead, the bars were silent and the streets empty. Then Sabrié spotted just one bar that wasn’t completely void of life. Behind the pane of a large window, sat a lone man, softly illuminated by an overhead light. "He was there by himself in the middle of this place which should have been bustling with life and music and sound and people," says Sabrié. But there was this man "having his dinner from plastic dishes, his only companion a cat unaware of what was going on, of the tension and the anxiety".

The photo is a scene in which more appears the longer you look at it. The man sits amid the normal detritus of a makeshift meal, his face gently lit by the glow of his phone. Around him lies the plush bar seating, a red pillar, the lights of bar in the background. At the bottom of the frame, a cat crouches on the back of a sofa. It could have been snapped in the small hours, once all the revellers have headed home. But instead, it's a marker: the end of normal life as a megacity hunkers down.

"I didn't get into the bar," Sabrié explains. "I just put my camera against [the] window. I don't think he ever noticed me, and I took the picture and moved on." 

Sabrié says he thought little of the image after he took it, but the picture clearly resonated with the New York Times picture desk: the image was used as part of their The Great Empty special, published the following month. Sabrié notes that the figure is unmasked – something that was becoming rare to see on the streets as the pandemic ramped up.

Sabrié's appreciation for the image has grown with the distance of five years. "You have the darkness that reflects the darkness of the time, and the anxiety that we were feeling," he says. "If you look closely at the picture, the [man] is looking at his phone."

This, Sabrié adds, depicts another kind of darkness "in terms of information and knowledge" as people scoured the internet for information, in a desperate effort to understand what was happening to the world.

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