Because of relatively recent renovation, few of the homes can claim to be more than a few decades old. But they are in crooked alleyways known as hutongs, which formed around courtyard houses and date back centuries.

Along their lanes and within their mended walls, an old way of life is still visible – mahjong rooms, shared courtyards, clothes hanging to dry – against a more distant backdrop of skyscrapers.

The plan to redo the neighborhood has raised the ire of those who see it as swapping a real and living piece of Beijing’s history for a recreated artifact.

“They want to restore the Drum and Bell Tower square to the time of the prosperous Qing Dynasty,” but in doing so they will destroy a “rich accumulation of cultural heritage,” says He Shuzhong, founder of the Beijing Cultural Heritage Protection Center, a nongovernmental organization.

For more, see the Beijing Cultural Heritage Protection Center’s website.

Photos of the Drum Tower neighborhood (Click on photo to launch a slideshow):

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Indeed, business is booming for buyers, movers, rehabilitators and sellers of old buildings. No data is available, but anecdotal evidence and business reports suggest increasing numbers of cultural significant structures in underdeveloped parts of the country are being sold and moved to wealthy cities. Other buildings, like the Confucian temple in Zhongyang, are being moved by developers so hungry for land that they’re willing to pay for a delicate relocation.

Many buildings cannot be moved legally. Under Chinese regulations, the central government can designate certain cultural structures state-owned and immovable. But ownership of anything not on list is subject to local government control.

Zhongyang’s director of cultural tourism, Qiao Jinping, told Caixin the apartment building developer and local officials coordinated a “relocation-protection-style” project that combined support for economic growth with historic preservation.

“The developer bought the land (from the government ) and paid a large sum of money that helped us resolve the funding problem,” Qiao said. “Rather than let the Confucian temple collapse, we elected to have it be reborn elsewhere.”

[...]Business interests that jumped on the historic preservation bandwagon, meanwhile, have found ways to leap barriers posed by local government financial constraints.

The solution to Zhongyang’s Confucian temple conundrum, for example, balanced new property development and preserving the old for future tourism growth.

For more on historic design in peril, historical preservation and architecture, see “Razing History” and ”Old Building Restoration Taking Hold in China“, via CDT.

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While Tibetan’s survival seems relatively likely, a report at ChinaNews.com [zh] shows that other minority languages in China are in critical danger. From Bruce Humes’ translated highlights at Ethnic ChinaLit:

• Non-han languages: 55 officially designated “peoples” (民族) speak an estimated 130 languages

• Populations: one-half of non-Han languages are spoken by groups that number under 10,000 members, of which 20+ have 1,000 speakers or less

• Endangered languages: Manchu, Tatar, She, Hezhen can no longer be used for conversation; another 20 percent, such as Nu, Yilao, Pumi and Jinuo are approaching that state; and a total of 40 percent are in danger of extinction in the mid-term.

• Manchu: 11 million ethnic Manchus, but only 100 or so can speak fluently and less than a dozen read and write well.

Language decline and extinction is by no means limited to China: up to half of the 7,000 languages currently spoken may disappear by the end of the 21st Century, equivalent on average to three dying out each month. Technology has helped reverse the decline of some North American aboriginal languages, however, and Tibetan has also been bolstered by blogging and online organisation and resources. Monk, font designer and software developer Lobsang Monlam discussed these developments in an interview at Trace Foundation:

Compared with developed countries, the impact of digital technology on Tibetans is relatively small and not extensive. However, in comparison to smaller communities, the impact in only a few years has been great and the progress is remarkable. To preserve the Tibetan language, there must be an appropriate forum for its use, and we must use it accordingly. There also must be proper conditions for its use. I see this as particularly important inside Tibet.

[…] From a dharma practitioner’s point of view, I serve the Tibetan people by preserving the Tibetan language. Our cultural heritage is dependent on this language. As I work hard on these projects, my motivation is pure, which is very important here.

[…] The Tibetan language still lags behind in the digital technology sphere. We are still only utilizing 5% of Tibetan’s capacity with regards to digital technologies. The language can still only be used for word processing, on the Internet and a few other applications. We have need a comprehensive character, grammar and spell check software. We also need to develop software that reads Tibetan words properly; a computer operating system that can be used in Tibetan, and software to convert old Tibetan fonts to the Unicode system. I feel these projects are very important for the digitization of the Tibetan language. We also need Optical Character Recognition software for Tibetan, various databases in the Tibetan language, speech-to-text software for Tibetan, translation software between Tibetan and other languages, and translations of important websites to Tibetan; all this is also very vital for Tibetan language.

Tibetan Dechen Pemba of High Peaks Pure Earth contributed to this post.

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Authorities have teamed with Beijing-based Approach Architecture Studio to breathe new life into alleyways largely considered slums, where residents cram into divided courtyard spaces without plumbing. Buildings in Dashilar, rather than being knocked down, are starting to be turned into galleries, studios or boutique shops.

[...] The plans mark a change from the treatment of neighboring Qianmen Street — which was bulldozed only to be rebuilt in 2008 in a faux late-Qing dynasty style replete with Starbucks and H&M, a fake tram and a giant cement tree.

By contrast, Dashilar residents can choose to sell or stay under the new scheme. Government-purchased buildings are being offered at low rents to designers who want to set up shop. Design Week has, in part, acted as a live mock-up to show skeptical local officials that this gradual approach, which demands a smaller initial capital investment than the knock down and rebuild model, can create dividends as foot traffic increases. A handful of businesses, including a Chinese film studio and a Dutch-owned gallery, have already signed up. Inhabitants will benefit from improvements to the area as the value of their properties rise in tandem, so the argument goes.

[...] Waiter Yue Yao Tong, 22, who works at a bare-bones restaurant serving traditional Beijing snacks, is more optimistic. Above all, Yue does not want to see the old town demolished. “The old buildings are more attractive for visitors,” he explained, sitting next to a vat of bubbling entrails. “You can see the [faux historic] buildings in Qianmen everywhere in China — but it’s very hard to copy a place with history. We want very much to show foreigners that this is the true Chinese style.”

See also the official website of 2012 Beijing Design Week.

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The original 24 Filial Exemplars date from around the 14th century, when Yuan dynasty scholar Guo Jujing collected the tales of obedient children. They were endlessly reprinted in the centuries that followed, until the Communist party banned them as it sought to eradicate backwards thinking.

The heroes of the work include the son who strangled a tiger to save his father and Dong Yong, a Han dynasty figure who sold himself to pay for his father’s funeral rites.

[…] The new list, promoted by the All China Women’s Federation and the China National Committee on Ageing, appears more prosaic. It urges people to ensure their parents have sufficient health insurance, to take them for medical checks and to give them enough spending money.

[…] Changing social mores, the embryonic state of the social safety net and the demographic “timebomb” of a fast-ageing population have made officials keener than ever to promote filial piety.

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In January, 2005, over a decade of negotiations between officials and hutong preservationists culminated in the passage of a sweeping proposal called the Beijing City Master Plan. The Master Plan designated a large swath of hutong in central Beijing as a “historical and cultural protected area,” immune from redevelopment. On a map of protected areas, the hutong around Zhongnanhai glowed in a bright, safe yellow. Obviously, it didn’t do much good.

Overhead satellite images viewed on Google Earth suggest that the protected safe zones were neither safe nor protected. In images from early 2005, a small area by Zhongnanhai’s eastern border appears as a dense cluster of trees and rooftops, virtually indistinguishable from any other hutong neighborhood in Beijing. In an image from April, 2006, it is a construction zone.

A walk through the neighborhood is enough to understand its transformation — the old hutong is now concealed by a high brick wall, the tops of vaulted roofs and boxy office buildings visible from beyond its unmarked gates.

“That over there is Zhongnanhai. You can’t go in there,” said a nearby restaurant owner who only gave his surname, Fu, waving his hands as if to refuse a favor.

Yao Yuan, an urban planning expert at Peking University, told me that he believes that the Zhongnanhai-area demolitions may be a belated consequence of city planning decisions made over 60 years ago, when the ruling Communist Party first came into power.

Over Chinese New Year, the historic home of Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin, architects who fought for the preservation of Beijing’s traditional buildings, was itself demolished. Read more about architecture and hutongs in Beijing, via CDT.

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All around us, workers are tearing down the neighborhood and rebuilding it from scratch. My husband and I wake up to the whine of chainsaws, the roar of stonecutters whittling out statues identical to the ones flanking our doors, the groan of bulldozers moving great piles of dirt and rock.

There’s a surreal, surprising beauty to the process. We go around a bend in the road and find a lone kitchen sink standing guard over the wreckage of a home; a facade sheared off, red Chinese New Year posters still clinging to the exposed walls with yellowed tape; a building where before there had been a pile of rubble.

In a way, we are the lucky ones. On the other side of a nearby lake, one of Beijing’s most beloved neighborhoods is getting ripped down, to be replaced with something called the Beijing Time Cultural City.

Preservationists, of course, are outraged. But few ordinary people seem to care.

As reported yesterday, plans for the Beijing Time Cultural City have been put on hold and the historic Drum and bell Tower neighborhood will be preserved for the time being.

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Extensive plans to “restore” Gulou into something dubbed “Time Cultural City” by the former Dongcheng district director Yang Yiwen have all been shelved, according to a government insider who requested anonymity.

“The Time Cultural City is a thing of the past,” an anonymous deputy director of the new Dongcheng district was quoted as saying in a Beijing Times report Monday.

While the authorities maintain Gulou’s future is unclear, culture heritage preservation experts were celebrating Monday what they characterized as new hope for one of the city’s last remaining pieces of authentic hutong culture.

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This modest and slightly shabby theater is part of the Beijing Opera Academy, in a neighborhood in the southwest part of the city that has not been entirely torn down and rebuilt yet. The academy occupies the former site of the Beijing Dance Academy and does not seem to have been physically upgraded or modernized. It still has dingy corridors, ancient washrooms, rusting bunk beds (six to a room), a single fluorescent bulb hanging from the ceiling and an ancient radiator in front of the window.

And, of course, nothing could more suggest old Beijing than Beijing opera, with its masks, its stylized movements, strangely modern arias, its fantastically intricate scenes of battle, and, probably most important, its audience of connoisseurs who know when to shout a throaty “hao!” — good! — after an especially well-executed movement or song.

The worry, though, is that, like the old neighborhoods, Beijing opera could fall victim to China’s rampant commercialism and modernization. If it did, it would be a bit like Italy consigning Verdi or Donizetti to a few small halls in Milan and Rome, or to those folkloric shows for tourists who mostly do not know much about what they are seeing.

“Objectively speaking, right now there are some difficulties,” said Qiao Cuirong, a senior professor at the National Academy of Chinese Theater Arts, summing up the current state of the opera. “People are interested in money and modernity and Western things, so our own culture has lost something.”

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The original Palace Museum in Beijing was split in two — its staff as well as its collection — in 1949, when the Nationalist government fell to the Communists and retreated to the island of Taiwan with thousands of supporters and a huge cargo of museum pieces.

For decades there has been debate about ownership of the divided treasures. But in recent years the two museums have begun to collaborate on exhibitions in a stunning show of cross-Strait cooperation. On the scholars’ journey this summer, the talk was not of unification but of shared history and of a common desire to understand the remarkable events that both preserved the treasures and eventually led to their division.

“We had a rough idea of how things happened, but we didn’t know the details,” said Li Wenru, deputy director at the Palace Museum in Beijing. “But we knew it was a miracle that in wartime over a million treasures were moved 10,000 kilometers, on roads, in water, by air, and nothing was lost.”

The museum staff members who protected the artifacts on that 16-year odyssey, hiding them in bunkers, caves, temples, warehouses and even private homes, have all died. But some of their children were invited to participate in this year’s trip.

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Over the last 20 years mile after mile of Beijing’s “hutongs”, or alleyways, have been bulldozed to make way for gleaming skyscrapers and apartment complexes as the city engages in a whole-scale, and at times brutal, program of modernisation.

The plan is allied to an ambitious 20-year project to create an “underground city” by digging out three square miles of northeastern Beijing to create a network of shopping malls, car parks and even a three mile underground road.

The area around the Drum and Bell Towers has been a vibrant part of Beijing since the days of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) and in recent years has reinvented itself as a faintly bohemian cultural quarter with chic boutique shops, small galleries, restaurants and courtyard hotels.

Conservationists point, with horror, to previous cultural “restoration” attempts by the Beijing government such as the Qianmen area around Tiananmen Square which is widely derided for its soulless, Disney-style rendering of Old Beijing.

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The Chinese authorities in the far-west Xinjiang region of the people’s republic declared in early 2009 that 65,000 homes in Kashgar’s old city – an area that encompasses nearly eight square kilometres – were unfit for habitation due to poor drainage and concerns over potential collapse in the event of an earthquake. It is unclear exactly how much of the old city has been demolished since then; but it is known that a significant number of Uyghurs have been relocated to new apartment-blocks eight-to-nine kilometres from Kashgar’s centre, and find their new residencies conveniently fitted with the trappings of modern surveillance such as CCTV cameras.

The demolition of Kashgar’s old city is in itself a great loss to world heritage and a serious threat to the survival of what is most distinctive and precious about Uyghur material culture, architecture, and human community. What makes the process all the more insidious is that is being accompanied by a relentless marginalisation of Uyghurs in their own homeland as the demographic increase of the Chinese is reinforced by a tightening of political control.

See a previous report from Open Democracy on Kashgar here. See also a photo essay of the demolition of Kashgar, and more reports on the city from CDT.

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Linden’s parents had run an antique shop in Chicago, and through the 1990s Brian and Jeanee built an Asian-arts-and-antiques business. They spent much of each year traveling to Asian villages to buy paintings, furniture, and objets, which they then sold in the summertime at a gallery in the upscale resort community of Door County, Wisconsin. All the while, Linden says, they were looking for something more—a place where they could build a cultural center that would preserve and honor Chinese arts and handicrafts and, they hoped, provide a haven for creative artists from around the world.

Throughout my time in China, I was attracted to dreamers—to people, Chinese and foreign, with big plans for what they’d like to achieve in the country. This is no doubt what drew me to the Lindens when I met them in Beijing last year and what led our families to become friends. After they had spent years considering locations, including three years in which they home-schooled their two young sons in hotel rooms, they found what they were looking for. (The two boys, now ages 13 and 10, are still being home-schooled.) They sold their house in America and put the proceeds into a derelict four-courtyard compound in the Yunnan village of Xizhou.

Watch Fallows’ slideshow of Xizhou and the Lindens’ project:

Learn more about the Linden Center via their website.

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Nine hundred families already have been moved from Kashgar’s Old City, “the best-preserved example of a traditional Islamic city to be found anywhere in central Asia,” as the architect and historian George Michell wrote in the 2008 book “Kashgar: Oasis City on China’s Old Silk Road.”

Over the next few years, city officials say, they will demolish at least 85 percent of this warren of picturesque, if run-down homes and shops. Many of its 13,000 families, Muslims from a Turkic ethnic group called the Uighurs (pronounced WEE-gurs), will be moved.

In its place will rise a new Old City, a mix of midrise apartments, plazas, alleys widened into avenues and reproductions of ancient Islamic architecture “to preserve the Uighur culture,” Kashgar’s vice mayor, Xu Jianrong, said in a phone interview.

Demolition is deemed an urgent necessity because an earthquake could strike at any time, collapsing centuries-old buildings and killing thousands.

Read previous coverage of the destruction of Kashgar, via CDT, here, here, and here.

Update: The Silk Road is currently under consideration to receive UNESCO Heritage Site status. This application may be under threat if Kashgar’s old city no longer exists. Read more from the Beijing Cultural Heritage Protection Center.

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A government plan worth US$440 million (Dh1.6 billion) calls for the relocation of 65,000 Uighur households, about 220,000 people, whose families have lived in the Old City for centuries. Until a few weeks ago, the area housed 40 per cent of the city’s residents in its labyrinth-like alleyways, where the naturalness of the life made it a popular tourist destination and one that was not ruined by tourism.

For centuries, children played on the cobblestone streets of the Old City, mothers standing in the doorways of their mud-brick dwellings chatting with neighbours, their faces covered by scarves. Bearded men wearing embroidered doppas (skullcaps) have walked daily to the many small neighbourhood mosques that pepper the area for prayers, passing by coppersmiths hammering pieces of metal into shiny pots, butchers cutting lamb in the open air and bakers slapping traditional flatbreads on to the sides of a tandoor, a makeshift clay oven.

According to the state media, the ancient district – which provided the exotic backdrop for Kabul in the movie The Kite Runner – chosen for its close resemblance to that vibrant Afghan city of the 1970s must be torn down because of poor drainage, unsound construction and susceptibility to earthquakes.

Irritated residents claim the government made no attempt to discuss the demolition plan with them or to consider other ways of dealing with the problems.

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