Beijing Activists Press to Save Few Remaining Courtyard Houses

Many Beijing residents have memories of homes like the little walled compound on Abundance Alley.

Not long ago, rich and poor alike lived in Beijing’s traditional courtyard houses. From the outside, a red door and gray brick windowless walls face narrow alleys, called hutongs. Inside, rooms ring an outdoor courtyard full of persimmon and jujube trees, goldfish pools and caged birds.

The quiet gardens and elegant houses--with rounded roof lines of gray tile--once gave Beijing a sense of order and tranquillity. From the city’s high point, a hill behind the Imperial Palace, the city was said to look like a forest, with trees growing above all the one-story houses.

Nearly all that is gone now. Many of the old houses have been torn down to make room for cement and brick apartment blocks, hotels and office towers.

In the last year, the character chai--demolish--has been slashed with white paint on the outer walls of many more of the old houses.

But there are signs that Beijing’s government will not allow the city’s old charm to be completely wiped out. At least one of the city’s many old lanes has been marked for preservation, and a few others probably will follow.

The middle-age couple living at 19 Abundance Alley hopes to save some last traces of old Beijing. Shu Yi and Wang Duan live in the house to prevent it from falling apart entirely while the city government decides whether to make it a museum about the life and work of Shu’s father, the late writer Lao She.

In his plays and stories, Lao She captured the old city’s flavor.

“We naturally want to see the character of old Beijing’s hutongs and courtyard houses saved,” Shu says. “But it’s extremely difficult. They’ve been falling apart for 40 years. Now they’re dilapidated beyond repair.”

Shu works at home researching her father’s works at a long table piled with books and papers that fills the main room of the century-old house. Taking a break one winter afternoon, she shows a visitor around.

The pillars are rotting underground. Grass grows in the gray roof tiles. The rooms on two sides are closed up for fear the roof will collapse.

Beijing’s government has decided to preserve the house, but has not allocated any money for renovation. Unlike most Beijing courtyards that are crowded with as many families as can squeeze in, it remains a one-family home with its courtyard intact.

Lao She’s children hope the city will tear it down and rebuild a replica as a museum where the writer’s manuscripts and memorabilia can be displayed.

Shu’s brother, Shu Yi, belongs to a group of government advisors lobbying the city to create historic districts.

A national drive to promote pride in traditional Chinese values and culture gives their cause a boost, he says. One of the first alleys to be designated for preservation was Guozijian, near the Confucian Temple.

Local residents also have been showing a nostalgic side. Last fall the city decided to restore a small section of the city wall. The 10-yard-wide, 500-year-old wall surrounding the old city was demolished in the 1950s and ‘60s and replaced by a loop highway.

Newspapers urged people who had carted away the big gray bricks to return them. More than 20,000 have been given back.

When the old city walls, towers and gates were torn down, residents “sobbed and sighed,” the Economic Reference News reported. “The tragic thing is this bitter lesson has not really been absorbed.”

Preservationists say most local officials see no reason to block development for the sake of the past.

Salvaging memories is expensive. Traditionally, Beijing’s houses lasted about 100 years before the owners would rebuild. Today, only the rich can afford such craftsmanship.

At Hou Hai, part of a string of lakes northwest of the old Imperial Palace, old courtyard houses are being demolished to make room for new ones. Wealthy Hong Kong owners are spending millions of dollars to live in traditional style, with all the modern comforts, near the garden compounds that once housed the emperor’s relatives.

Most old courtyard houses, however, are the residences of the poor. For heating, they burn coal briquettes. Their toilets are trenches in nearby public outhouses.

“People’s living standards are going up,” says senior city planner Cao Lianqun. “You can’t let the common people live in slums. You have to rebuild.”

The city government is very interested in historical preservation, but only able to preserve a small percentage of what is left, Cao says.

Low-density housing with yards is hard to justify in an overcrowded city of 13 million people, preservationists and city planners agree.

But those arguing for preserving at least some of the alleys say these places are a living museum of ordinary life in Beijing over the last 700 years.

“Just about any Beijing person 30 or older probably has experience of living in a hutong,” says Xu Yong, who produces picture books of hutongs and started a company that takes tourists through them in pedicabs.

In 1949, when the Communists came to power, Beijing was still an ancient city that rivaled Venice in beauty, Xu says.

Then new leaders moved government offices into the old mansions and started ripping down the old city to build factories and Soviet-inspired buildings.

During the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, young people set out to destroy the old--including the modest, elegant carvings on the doors and gates of the old houses.

In 1976, some houses were damaged in an earthquake. Then, as the population grew, people began building brick shacks in the courtyards.

Demolition accelerated in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Today, less than 7% of Beijing residents live in pre-1949 housing.

Those whose houses are being demolished now are being asked to take new apartments several miles outside the city. Many resist because the suburbs lack adequate transportation, hospitals and schools. Others protest that they are being forced out for less than they think their houses are worth.

A house the Luo family owned since 1943 was torn down one fall morning, one of 20,000 courtyard houses razed to pave the way for the city’s Financial Street.

As neighbors gathered on the rubble, Luo, 52, said the government was ignoring the law by offering so little. His wife, meanwhile, was lying in a parked ambulance, moaning and screaming, “My house!”

Most of the houses the city has decided to preserve are those that once belonged to famous people, such as Lao She. The house of another famous modern writer, Lu Xun, was marked for preservation this year.

The original house and the shacks in the courtyard house 36 families, including the extended family of Zhao Hengming.

Zhao, a retired sign painter in his 70s who now paints landscapes and cats on scrolls in Lu’s original study, says he hopes he can stay.

“There’s no room to do anything in those apartments,” Zhao says. No room for his potted plants or caged birds or daily exercises.

Interrupted while making meat dumplings for lunch, Zhao cheerfully shows a visitor around the part of the compound where he and his extended family live.

Although there are only narrow paths through the huts in the courtyard, the crowded compound is quiet, except for children’s shouts drifting over from a nearby school playground.

Out in Eight Zigzags Lane--so narrow it is almost possible to reach out and touch both sides--a young man sells carrots and turnips from a three-wheeled cart. Another peddler yells, “Beer! Return your bottles!”

“There’s hardly any flavor of old Beijing left,” muses Zhao’s wife, Yuan Yuhong, 76.

“What will remind anyone of what Beijing was?” she asks. “It will look like anywhere else.”