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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It was knocked down by developers over the lunar New Year, despite the fact it is rare for labourers to work during the festival, raising suspicions that the company hoped to avoid publicity.

A Beijing official told state news agency Xinhua the firm wanted to prevent the residence being harmed during last week’s holiday, apparently referring to the fireworks which are let off.

Other Chinese media quoted an unidentified developer as saying that the demolition was “in preparation for maintaining the heritage site” because the buildings were in bad condition.

But heritage protection activist Zeng Yizhi – who alerted city officials to the demolition – said they should have repaired the buildings.

“Liang and Lin made such a great contribution to the protection of Chinese ancient buildings. If their home can be torn down, then developers can do the same thing to hundreds of other ancient houses in the country,” he told China Daily.

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Post tags: architecture, Beijing architecture, demolition, historic preservation, hutongs, liang sicheng
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As housing prices and rents soar, hutongs get ripped down and “crazy bad” air becomes the new normal, will Beijing maintain its heart as a cultural capital, or is the city losing itself and our affections?

Filled with stories of pig excrement, SARS babies, and enough Chinese cursing to satiate even the Beijing Profanity Alliance, this show was a pleasure to put on and we were really glad to see everyone who came out. Joining Kaiser Kuo on stage were two Sinica stalwarts: Chinese media export Jeremy Goldkorn and David Moser, jazz pianist and head of the CET Beijing program. We were also thrilled to be joined by Zha Jianying, author of China Pop and Tide Players, and a now-expat Beijinger from New York who admits to being torn between her two homes.

Listen to the podcast here.

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Post tags: Beijing, Beijing architecture, Hutong, hutongs, redevelopment
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In the face of China’s rapid modernization, the world’s most populous country is struggling to preserve its cultural heritage, and nowhere is this more visible than in the ancient alleyways and courtyards of Beijing.

Once a ubiquitous feature of Beijing, the hutongs are more than simply housing; they are actually a way of life. Entire families live in single, crowded courtyards, often with no bathrooms. Yet despite the lack of modern amenities, the communal aspect to life within the hutongs means that few want to leave – even as their neighbourhoods are being demolished and redeveloped. UNESCO estimates that more than 88 percent of the city’s old residential quarters are already gone, most torn down in the last three decades.

In a three-part series, filmmakers Jonah Kessel and Kit Gillet explore the vanishing world of Beijing’s hutongs, the realities of life within the narrow streets, and the future for these culturally-irreplaceable areas of China’s capital.

Chapter One is below: click through to see the rest.

See also: Monuments to Clan Life Are Losing Their Appeal, on Fujian Province’s tulou clan houses.

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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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Nanluogu Xiang is located in one of the richest neighborhoods in the city — once in terms of its sprawling old hutongs (or alleyways), its culture, and now in terms of the revenue generated from tourism driven bars and shops selling handicrafts and souvenirs made by fashion or arts students. The old neighborhood has cultural stopovers such as the former home and now museum of Mao Dun, the writer whose name is lent to one of the most luminous literary awards in the country. Modern writers, like Chun Sue, also live in the neighborhood.

According to Auntie Fu, rent prices in Nanluogu Xiang rose by 40% last year. She said: “When the south side of the street gets its planned subway stop, there will be even more people about.” She points to the pressure on commercial renters: both Xiaoxin’s Café and Zha Zha Café (two popular stops on the street) have their second shops on Wudaoying Hutong nearby. When asked, Auntie Fu admitted that everyone is aware of the possibility that they might be forced out of Nanluogu Xiang.

The street is in danger of selling just tack, which does not help retain its boutique status. It may end up like Sloping Tobacco Street in nearby Houhai, a completely commercialized area that has no authenticity but instead shops selling the same things over and over again.

Auntie Fu talked about the ethnic Xinjiang people who appeared, taking advantage of the busy street selling jewelery, with or without stalls: “Police cars will come one by one to stop them, giving customers bad feelings and pressure.” Once the police are involved setting up regulations and codes for a gentrified area, the formerly freely developing cluster of bars and the street on which they run become highly regimented. It’s a sign of how things become – developing commercially, but strictly regulated at the same time.

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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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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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“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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