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Roaming Beijing’s Alleys, Shouting Vendors Sow Echoes of the Past
The New York Times visits the vendors who ply their wares in Beijing’s disappearing hutongs:
With more emphasis on song than lyric, they are the marketing jingles of itinerant fruit vendors, sellers of roasted duck and stooped men who have mastered the art of resuscitating blunt kitchen knives. Like the familiar whine of cicadas in August, their garbled calls are the soundtrack of the Beijing summer, and many residents look forward to the return of the hawkers’ glutinous rice cakes, mismatched crockery and pet crickets that sing.
Even more numerous than the hawkers are the recyclers, sun-scorched migrants from the countryside who survive by collecting yesterday’s newspapers, spent computers or tattered cotton blankets that will be spun into next winter’s comforters.
“If you can’t yell loudly, you’ll starve,” said Chen Lin, 37, a bony, animated man who earns about $5 a day salvaging dead appliances and anything else containing metal. “No one really knows what I’m yelling,” he said, “but they remember my song and this brings them out of their house.”
The singing hawkers and recyclers are reminders of the days when Beijing was a thickly populated maze of hutongs, or alleys, that crept outward from the grandiose imperial quarters occupied by China’s emperors and the officials and artisans who served them.
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- September 12, 2009 4:21 PM
From the Hutong, an Ordinary View of the Games (Photos added)
The New York Times watched the Olympics opening ceremony from a home in the hutongs with a architectural preservation activist:
“Beijing,” Jacques Rogge, the International Olympic Committee president, would say with his trademark solemnity as the long and lavish opening ceremony of the Beijing Games neared its conclusion, “you are hosts to the present, and gateway to the future.”
From his couch, Zhang Wei could also look back more than a century.
“That window is 120 years old,” he said, pointing to a complex weave of pinewood on the wall behind the big screen. It was all he could save from the house in the narrow Beijing alleyway known here as a hutong that Zhang’s family had inhabited for 80 years.
Read all the Times’ Olympics coverage here.
Here are some photos taken by a photo journalist on the Wall Street Journal: Beijing locals view of the Games.
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- August 8, 2008 2:52 PM
‘The Olympics Have Destroyed Our Lives’
Spiegel Online profiles a new book of photography by Straits Times journalist Chua Chin Hon:
Chua Chin Hon runs the office of Singapore’s Straits Times. As a journalist, Chua has documented Beijing’s dizzying transformation over the past two years. Chua’s newly published book of photography is dominated by everyday photos of scaffolding, skyscrapers and workers in Mao jackets. Shabby apartment blocks stand side-by-side with amazing feats of architecture. Beneath towering high-tech stadiums built using the most environmentally friendly techniques available, horse-drawn wagons carry stones through clouds of dust.
“Modern China has been shaped by constant and often relentless transformation,” Chua told SPIEGEL ONLINE. Chua has tried to compile a testament of sorts to this series of changes. Some of the upheavals have been inevitably destructive or unsettling “because they happened even faster than we could perceive them.”
A slideshow of his photographs is here.
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- August 7, 2008 8:56 PM
CDT Bookshelf: The Last Days of Old Beijing by Michael Meyer
Beijing-based writer Josh Chin contributed the following review of Michael Meyer’s “The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed,” to CDT:
Western observers have been lamenting the demise of “Old Beijing” since at least the 1920s, when the Chinese capital started itself stumbling in the direction of modernization. Each time, the city’s ancient charms-it’s intimate lanes (hutong) and enigmatic courtyard houses (siheyuan)-are said to be not long for this world. Each time, they survive to seduce the next generation of would-be eulogizers. Now comes Michael Meyer’s “The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed,” due out from Walker and Company this month. How much is there to be gained in listening to yet another requiem for a place that never seems to die?
The answer, in Meyer’s case, is plenty.
An award-winning travel writer, Meyer has done what few other foreign residents in Beijing are willing to do: actually live in the hutong. It’s true, many Westerners rent courtyard houses, but theirs are the neo-imperial mini-palaces of New Beijing, cleared of riff-raff, retrofitted with radiators and equipped with sit-down toilets. Meyer’s perch in the neglected lanes south of Tian’anmen Square is not so luxurious. For heat in winter, he relies on cups of Nescafe and the bowls of dumplings foisted on him by the Widow, his busy-bodied old neighbor. The dumplings and instant coffee processed, he walks across the lane to the public latrine, where one of his students once bowed to him as he squatted, pants around ankles, over the open trough.
The result is an account of life in the hutong rich with lived detail but blessedly absent the romanticism and sentimentality that afflict so much of the expatriate lane literature. At times, there is a postcard quality to Meyer’s descriptions: “Grandmothers push prams filled with vegetables from Heavenly Peach market. The bells of black steel Flying Pigeon Bicycles warn to make way…” But these passages read more like an anxious ledger of scenes soon to be lost than a poem to the exotic, and are few at any rate. Instead, Meyer builds the book around portraits of his neighbors: the Widow, chain-smoking matron of the courtyard; Recycler Wang, who envies the tin buyer at Trash Village; Teacher Zhu, who has put pregnancy on hold until she knows when her school will be demolished.
One of the most memorable of the characters in “Last Days” appears early on, as Meyer describes the character 拆 (chai, demolish) painted on the wall’s of a neighbor’s home: “Mr. Yang had never seen someone paint the symbol, and neither had I. It just appeared overnight, like a gang tag, or the work of a specter. The Hand.” Dispatched at the behest of a mysterious cabal of government officials and real estate developers, The Hand terrorizes nearly everyone Meyer meets.
Sadly, “Last Days” never manages to uncover the mechanism behind The Hand. It does, however, rely on Chinese historical sources (most of them new to Western readers) to draw up an enlightening sketch of Beijing’s transformation from a close-knit, teeming maze of lanes named for the products or services offered in their shops (Chrysanthemum Lane, West Grindstone Lane), into an inhuman grid of wider-than-wide avenues dominated by immense structures designed to be admired rather than lived in-what Zhang Yonghe, an architect Meyer interviews, calls a “City of Objects.”
One of the contributions of “Last Days” is to place this transformation it in its proper context. Paris was also erased and redrawn, Meyer reminds us, as were major parts of Moscow, New York City and Athens. In the end, Meyer and his neighbors are preservationists, but it’s not the architecture they care most about. Instead, it’s the refuge the lanes provide, the space they provide for humanity and civility in a city that grows colder and harder by the year. Meyer makes this point with particular force when he describes the numerous kidnapping stories he and his neighbors read in the local newspaper. “None of the missing had disappeared from a hutong,” he writes. “Rather, they vanished from wide roads, high-rise complexes and bus stops. Erasing a city’s urban corners left only straight lines, hollow spaces and nowhere to hide.”
Beijing will probably always have its hutong and courtyard houses, which are rare enough now to have considerable real estate value. But the atmosphere of Old Beijing- the life-is already fast seeping out of them. In Michael Meyer, we are fortunate to have a writer with the clarity, humor and depth to capture that life before it flows away completely.
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- June 13, 2008 2:38 PM
In Beijing, No Answer to The Bulldozer
The Washington Post reports on Beijing residents forced out of their homes to make way for Olympics construction. The report includes a video:
Less than four months before the Summer Games open, the forced relocations in Beijing are highlighting another cost of the Olympics, as residents make way for such architectural glories as the National Stadium, known as the bird’s nest, and the apartment and office towers springing up nearby. Whole neighborhoods have been wiped out. Especially controversial has been the destruction of about 800 of the city’s 1,200 hutongs, lanes full of traditional, courtyard-style houses.
Beijing real estate prices are soaring, but residents are often blocked from realizing the full value of their homes when the government orders them out. Many complain that compensation levels set by authorities are far below market rates, making it impossible for them to find comparable housing elsewhere.
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- April 26, 2008 2:06 PM
From the High-Rise to the Hutong
The Guardian looks at a new generation of Chinese architects who are creating their own style that incorporates traditional Chinese aesthetics:
Say the words “new Chinese architecture” and what springs to mind? Ambitious skyscrapers, soaring apartment blocks, Olympian designs in central Beijing by celebrated international architects, and the unbridled kitsch of suburban estates like Thames Town, a bizarre mock-English development near Shanghai.
But even while great – and likable – tracts of old Chinese cities continue to come tumbling down in the names of change and modernisation, the country’s up-and-coming practices are developing intelligent new forms of specifically Chinese design, even if they do draw from the west from time to time. Whatever other glamorous projects these talented young architects are beginning to scoop up, it is mostly housing for ordinary people that concerns them – that, and a desire to change the direction of Chinese architectural development, all too often a soulless juggernaut ripping the hearts from old towns and cities.
The article also includes an audio slideshow.
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- March 12, 2008 11:39 AM
Photo Series: Romance in an Old Beijing Hutong
For Chinese senior citizens, romance is what you do every day simply for the person you love. Below is a group of pictures of an old couple in Beijing taken by a fengniao photographer.
“On a summer day, I wandered into Houxiwachang Hutong (ÂêéÁªÜÁì¶ÂéÇËÉ°Âêå) in Beijing and encountered an old man who was carrying some heavy planks out of his courtyard house.”

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- November 19, 2007 2:34 PM
Demolition Suspended of Beijing Ancient Hutong – Xinhua
Xinhua reports that the planned demolition of Beijing’s historic Dongsi Batiao neighborhood has been put on hold (though not definitively cancelled) following public protests:
The controversial demolition of houses at Dongsi Batiao, an ancient alley of courtyard homes in downtown Beijing, has been suspended, an official with Dongcheng District government has confirmed.
Suspending demolition, however, doesn’t mean the redevelopment project has been terminated, the official said.
The official said the demolition office would continue negotiating with local residents over the amount of compensation they will receive. [Full text]
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- May 28, 2007 9:05 AM
A Wrecking Ball for Beijing’s History – Peter Ford
The Christian Science Monitor writes about the families facing the demolition of their homes in Beijing’s historic Dongsi Batiao neighborhood:
The conflicting interests of renters crammed into slumlike corners of the old yards on one hand, and owner-occupiers seeking to protect their patrimony on the other, makes a common front unlikely among the 90 families facing eviction from Dongsi Batiao street.
But if recent experience in Beijing’s 600-year-old hutongs is any guide, neither side can expect much satisfaction from the developer who wants to raze their homes. [Full text]

Also related see “History reduced to rubble” from New Statesman magazine, and the Old Beijing website which is dedicated to preservation of the city. Jottings from the Granite Studio also has a post on this subject.
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- May 26, 2007 8:27 PM
Demolitions Spark Outrage in Historic Beijing – AFP (Updated)

From AFP via ChannelnewsAsia:
The demolition of a supposedly protected section of Beijing’s old city began this week, triggering renewed outrage over the demise of the Chinese capital’s historic courtyards and alleyways.
The homes in Beijing’s Dongsi Batiao are being razed to make way for a new residential development, crystallising the plight of the narrow maze-like alleys known as hutongs that once dominated the ancient city centre.
State media have seized on the destruction of the site, in an officially protected cultural preservation district, as an example of official failure to protect hutongs from an ongoing property boom.[Full Text]
- Read also a personal look at this demolition order from Richard Spencer, who lives nearby. Read also about the planned demolition of a less glamorous section of Beijing in “Olympic construction will send Beijing poor packing” from Reuters:
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- May 16, 2007 1:34 PM
It’s Time to Stop Urban Demolition and Construction – Han Xinmin
Hua Xinmin, an urban preservationist and daughter of architect Hua Lanhong, wrote the following piece in Southern Weekend about the problems with the current urban planning policies in China which are allowing the historical parts of cities to be destroyed while also ruining large swaths of arable land (original Chinese version here). Thanks to David Kelly of the East Asian Institute, National University of Singapore, for the translation:
Hua Xinmin: It’s time to stop urban demolition and construction

Southern Weekend, May 10, 2007
Editor’s note: On April 24, the 27th meeting of the Tenth NPC Standing Committee conducted First Reading of the bill for a Town and Country Planning Law. What is missing from the laws that currently regulate urban and rural planning? What lessons should be drawn by the new Law? As experts note, “Planning involves millions of people’s personal interests; the Law should answer questions as to the legality and rationality of planning by strengthening its statutory, democratic aspects.” In order to stimulate discussion we are exclusively publishing this article by Ms. Hua Xinmin, the civil society urban preservationist.
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- May 12, 2007 9:09 PM
Beijing’s Moment – Ben Brazil
In the Washington Post, a lengthy and glowing portrayal of pre-Olympics Beijing from a first time visitor:
I quickly discovered that no city moves so quickly between massive and modest, between anonymous and intimate. On my first day, for example, I drifted south from the vast, gray expanse of Tiananmen Square into the narrow hutongs, or alleyways, of the Qianmen district.
Immediately, the traffic noise faded. Low, gray-walled courtyard homes lined lanes that were often too narrow for cars but dotted with decrepit bicycles. Through an open door, I glanced at a group of friends hunkered over a board game. Farther on, meat sizzled over small braziers, its aroma mixing with a less pleasant sewer smell. A cat crept over a rooftop. [Full text]
- The article includes a slideshow of Beijing.
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- May 12, 2007 7:10 PM
Property boom threatens old Beijing – Jonathan Watts
As the Olympics fast approach, and old Beijing is rapidly being torn down to make way for new construction, a traditional siheyuan was reportedly sold for 110 million RMB:
Despite government measures to cool growth, the Beijing housing sector has never been hotter. According to the local media, average prices in the city increased by almost 10% in February. Estate agents claim many luxury homes have doubled in value in three years.
Until a few years ago, most speculators focused on modern apartments in inner-city tower blocks and new villas in the suburbs. But the record-breaking home is an old-style siheyuan (courtyard) in the downtown houhai “back sea” area of the city. [Full text]
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- April 16, 2007 8:42 PM
Saving Beijing’s historic neighborhoods – Pallavi Aiyar
From Asia Times:
As Beijing gears up to host the Summer Olympic Games next year, it is anxious to project itself as a modern world-class capital. However, wrong-footed conceptions of modernity combined with a weak legal system and corrupt collusion between real-estate developers and local officials has resulted in the wanton demolition of large swaths of the historical city. In the process, not only have up to half of the physical neighborhoods that once comprised the capital’s center been destroyed, but so has much of the city’s social fabric.
The primary object of Beijing’s demolition spree has been the hutongs, the narrow tree-lined alleyways that used to make up the entire 62-square-kilometer area surrounding the Forbidden City. Hutongs have been both the arteries and the lifeblood of Beijing since Mongol times, in the 13th century. They represent a long-lasting organic connection between the present and multi-layered past of China’s capital city. [Full text]
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- April 8, 2007 9:43 PM
Hutong Chronicles: Luoguxiang – Jeremy Goldkorn
From Danwei TV:
Nan Luoguxiang is one of the oldest hutongs in Beijing and has been a residential neighborhood for hundreds of years. In the last few years, bars, caf√©s and boutique stores have flourished in the alley way, drawing tourists and Beijing residents in search of low key night life and a taste of old Beijing….[Full Text]
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- January 7, 2007 10:37 PM