Bulldozing the Heart of Old Peking

“He who possesses a Chinese courtyard,” the eccentric American scholar George N. Kates wrote, “possesses both by day and night a well of light, which the seasons endlessly fill with incalculable riches.”

Those words, from Kates’ memoir of seven years in pre-World War II Beijing, celebrate an era before the construction of concrete monoliths to mark the reign of Chairman Mao Tse-tung and the emerging workers’ state. It was a time before the city’s ancient walls were demolished to make way for a loop freeway. It was before office towers and gaudy neon signs rose up, representing this nation’s ardent embrace of market capitalism.

It was the age of the hutongs--the honeycomb mazes of narrow lanes and walled courtyard homes that gave Beijing its unique, human-scale character.

Today, under a massive urban renewal program--spurred by escalating land prices that reach $6,000 a square meter (about $560 per square foot) in the heart of this metropolis--the famous hutongs are disappearing almost as fast as bulldozers and work crews can clear the terrain. Huge swaths of old Beijing resemble a war zone.

Wang Zonghai, 74, lived with his family for 50 years in the Ju’er Hutong in north-central Beijing. Now his small home is the only one standing in the rubble of a courtyard that once housed 40 families. After selling the property to a developer, the government offered Wang a new apartment four miles from his old neighborhood on the outskirts of the capital.

“The facilities of the new apartment are quite good,” said Wang, shivering in a thin coat as he surveyed the ruins surrounding his home. “But we were accustomed to living here. The market was near, and the transportation was convenient. When I’m in the apartment, I look down and get dizzy.”

At least two-thirds of the old neighborhoods that once blanketed Beijing are already leveled or are waiting their turn for destruction, their walls marked in white paint with a circled chai, the Chinese character signifying “to be demolished.”

Residents, none of whom have title to their land, have no choice about moving. The government promises new housing for each of the legal residents it displaces, although the replacements are usually miles away, in the outer ring of suburbs. The capital’s huge population of migrant workers, who have no legal work status here, receive no new government housing.

Still, except for a small number of preservationists and urban intellectuals, there is little opposition to the clearance program. Most residents are more than happy to give up their overcrowded, dilapidated hutong housing for a new apartment, no matter how distant.

When the latest phase of urban renewal is complete, city planners estimate that only three small neighborhoods of hutong housing will remain--two east of the imperial lakes and one on the near west side, just beyond the Zhongnanhai compound for Communist Party leaders.

“It will be a big challenge to preserve the three small areas, about 200 hectares [494 acres] fixed in the Beijing master plan,” said Mao Qizhi, a professor of architecture at Qinghua University. “For the rest, I think it will be hopeless.”

There are differing opinions as to what the end of the hutongs means for Beijing. Some welcome the change as a sign of progress. Others condemn it as the assassination of a culture.

In fact, the decline of the hutongs has been a long process--not a swift execution but something more akin to the measured agony of the “death of a thousand cuts.” Their fate was essentially sealed when the Qing Dynasty collapsed in 1911, leading to the expulsion of the mainly Manchu families that had occupied the courtyard dwellings.

The social upheaval of the Cultural Revolution, which ran from 1966 to 1976, and the physical damage and refugee influx caused by the devastating 1976 Tangshan earthquake hastened their demise. The final straw was China’s unprecedented economic growth in the past 15 years, which made inner-city land too valuable for one-story housing with gardens and trees.

But everyone agrees that Beijing, which was once compared favorably with Paris and Rome and Istanbul as one of the world’s great cities, will never be the same once the hutongs are gone.

Soon to be heard no more will be the sounds of the itinerant alley hawkers with their noisemakers, the prune juice salesman with his interlocking brass cups, the needle and thread salesman with his small drum, the blind fortuneteller with his gong, and the knife-and-scissor sharpener with his overlapping metal plates.

Beijing’s secret forest of trees--jujube, willow, poplar, persimmon and cypress, hidden in the central gardens of the courtyard homes--will be gone.

And the world’s most horizontal city, where buildings could never be higher than the emperor’s throne in the Forbidden City, will have joined the high-rise world.

Hutong is believed to come from the Mongolian word meaning “well.” In Beijing, it is used to describe the narrow lanes or alleys that lie like the thin ribs of a fish off the spines of the major avenues, almost all of which run in a north-south or east-west direction.

“The city of Beijing is like a big cake of bean curd, a perfect square,” observed the popular contemporary writer Wang Zenqi. “In the city, there are streets and hutongs. The streets and hutongs are all running straight south or north, or east and west.

“Beijingers have a very strong sense of direction. The rickshaw men of the past would always shout ‘Going east!’ ‘Going west!’ when they came to turning the corner. In this way, they could avoid running into pedestrians. When an old couple was in bed and the old lady felt she was being squeezed by the old man, she would say, ‘Move a bit south.’ ”

Some hutongs are broad enough for car traffic, others so narrow they barely provide passage for a single bicycle. One particularly narrow hutong in western Beijing is known as the “ear-hole lane.”

The width of the hutongs is determined by the outer walls of the courtyard residences that line their edges. In this regard, hutongs and courtyard homes are inseparable parts of the same living space. The standard courtyard house is essentially a walled living compound with one or more interior gardens, depending on the economic and social status of the family that occupies it. Roofs are gray tile and fluted in a gentle curve. Walls are whitewashed.

The most ornate decoration is reserved for the carved arches or fancy door lintels that carry a symbolic code denoting class and trade. The entrances to many courtyard houses are flanked by stone lions.

In 1966, when China entered the dark decade of the Cultural Revolution, many of the families that lived in the courtyard residences were determined to have “bad class backgrounds” and ejected from their homes.

This essentially marked the end of the courtyard home as a single-family dwelling. After the Tangshan earthquake, thousands of refugees poured into the city, taking shelter in the courtyard gardens. Many stayed.

The open spaces that were the special feature of the courtyard homes became warrens of jury-rigged shelters.

“After the Tangshan earthquake, there were no more courtyards in the courtyard houses,” said Gu Wei, an actor and playwright who directed “Galar Hutong,” a portrayal of the downside of hutong life. The play, which Gu said was suggested to him by a senior official, was part of a government propaganda effort to encourage the hutong residents to accept new apartments.

The final, most devastating blow to the hutongs has been economic. China’s surging business climate has sent real estate prices skyrocketing for prime areas in the city center.

Property along Wangfujing Street, a main shopping avenue that is flanked on both sides by historic hutong neighborhoods, sells for as much as $6,000 a square meter, rivaling prices in European capitals. This makes the one-story hutong neighborhoods economically enviable.

Leasing real estate has become a major source of revenue for local governments. And Communist Party officials in the capital have become brokers for billion-dollar land deals. The substantial amounts of money involved became evident last year when Beijing Communist Party leader Chen Xitong was removed on corruption charges--the highest party official ever removed for misuse of public funds.

Central to the case against Chen were allegations that his associates received up to $37 million in kickbacks after they cleared hutong neighborhoods to make way for a massive development near Tiananmen Square by Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing.

Some Beijing residents, such as Shu Ji--the daughter of writer Lao She, who captured the life of the hutongs in his story “The Teahouse”--cling to their family courtyard homes and mourn the death of a way of life.

Interviewed in her modest residence just outside the old Imperial City, Shu, who is in her 60s, spoke of her desire to renovate the courtyard--which still has gaping cracks in its walls from the Tangshan quake--and turn it into a museum honoring her father. As she talked, shafts of winter sunlight shone thinly through the latticed windows. Lao She, she said, lived in the house from 1950 until his death in 1966.

“He wrote between 4 [million] and 5 million characters here,” she said reverently. Outside in the courtyard, several dozen potted chrysanthemum plants withered in the first frost.

Shu’s predicament is that, although her family home has been designated a historic site, the fate of the surrounding neighborhood is uncertain. Meanwhile, the city housing authority has classified the crumbling dwelling as a “dangerous” structure but offered no money to render it safe. Like all homeowners in China, the family owns the building but not the land, a situation that often inhibits costly repairs.

Photographer Xu Yong, founder and general manager of the Beijing Hutong Culture Development Co. and Tourist Agency, is working frantically to document what is being lost as the hutongs go.

About 2 million people still live in the area surrounding the Imperial City that once was Old Peking. With a little ingenuity, it is still possible to bicycle along the hutongs across Beijing. The effect of such a trip--navigating through family squabbles, cooking odors, coal dust and daily commerce--is an unusual feeling of intimacy with the city.

“If you don’t go into the hutongs,” said Xu, “you can’t know Beijing.”

Besides producing coffee-table photo albums of hutong life, Xu manages a fleet of 50 pedicabs that carry tourists on excursions through the few neighborhoods that remain intact. That hutongs, which once blanketed the whole northern half of the city, are now tourist sites says something about their rate of disappearance.

Xu, 41, is a Shanghai native who moved to Beijing with his family in 1965. An engineering graduate, he worked for several years as an advertising photographer and often used old courtyard dwellings as backdrops. During the recession that followed the 1989 Chinese army crackdown in Tiananmen Square, Xu produced his first book of photographs chronicling hutong life.

“I discovered there was something spiritual about the hutongs,” he said during an interview in an office he leases from a Communist Party school. “They are rich in social symbolism. Their doorways, doorposts and steps leading into the courtyard all mean something.”

But many others shed no tears for the hutongs. It is no accident that of the 10,000 people who have taken Xu’s pedicab tours, only 10 have been Chinese. With few exceptions, most Chinese see the hutongs as crummy housing, not precious cultural relics.

Few of the old dwellings have running water, toilets or central heating. Courtyard homes that once held one extended family--the Chinese ideal of “four generations under one roof”--now house up to 12 separate families, sometimes from several provinces.

“Most of the urban poor who live in the hutong system hate it,” said Mao, of Qinghua University. “They want to tear down all the hutongs and move into an apartment building where they have central heating and hot water.”

Those most fond of preserving the hutongs, said Mao, tend to be high-level Chinese officials or rich overseas Chinese who have the money to restore the old buildings and install modern kitchens and bathrooms.

In fact, some contend that one of the few things saving the remaining hutongs is that several retired but still immensely powerful officials--including paramount leader Deng Xiaoping and former President Yang Shangkun--live in hutong neighborhoods. In some areas, an infusion of money from culture-hungry overseas Chinese has saved a few of the more impressive homes.

“Those old courtyard houses were in terrible condition. People lived too close together and quarreled a lot,” said Xiao Zhang, an elevator operator who lives with her family in one room of a crumbling hutong dwelling. Xiao vows that she will not look back when her work unit finally awards her a modern apartment.

“We’ll just walk away,” she said.