The Last Hour of Old Kunming
“There’s no way they can move us,” the shopkeeper said. “After three years, they’re still not done with Phase 1. How will they ever get to Phase 2?” He chuckled, pointing at the neighborhood-sized shopping center being erected one block away.
Such is the precarious state of Kunming’s old city. Of the ancient walled city, once four kilometers across, only a single cross-shaped area formed by Confucian Temple Street and Guanghua Street has escaped demolition to date. Yet this tiny area is a treasure trove of pre-1949 Chinese architecture, from wooden shop fronts and stone courtyards to a pair of prewar tenements called the “Sister Buildings” that bend gracefully to the curving streets. Amazingly, most of the shopkeeper’s neighbors have lived here for their entire lives; tea shops and little restaurants continue to do business even as squads of shovel-toting laborers dig up the streets to lay new gas lines.
Recently, the old city has attracted attention, possibly because of simple supply and demand: with the rest of old Kunming wiped away, what little is left becomes commercially valuable for its novelty. One needs only travel to nearby Lijiang, one of China’s best-preserved ancient cities, to glimpse the future of old Kunming: exquisite traditional buildings stuffed with souvenir shops, homes turned into hostels, lines of shoppers stepping carefully around a photographer’s line of sight.
I suppose it’s better for the last of old Kunming to be packaged as a product and sold to tourists, than for it to vanish forever from maps and minds. But what a tragic, beautiful thing is this crumbling neighborhood in the last hour of its 700-year existence.
Tags: China, Kunming, Redevelopment, Urban Renewal
John Massie says:
I can’t remember the last time I’ve been so touched by a picture of a crumbling and dirty back alley. This is a great piece.
June 15th, 2009 at 8:58 am
Christopher Szabla says:
It’s ironic – the Cultural Revolution wiped out so many famous Chinese shrines and temples – Chinese history “from above”. Deng Xiaopeng Thought has wound up wiping out most of the architectural evidence of historical China “from below”.
I wouldn’t call it a loss of “heritage” or “culture” – what replaces the alleyways is, in its own way, as uniquely Chinese as what’s being replaced. (“What is authenticity?” is an old question.) There is, however, a loss of depth, of texture.
By contrast, I think the planned destruction of Kashgar is much more akin to the Cultural Revolution – a thinly veiled political act.
June 15th, 2009 at 8:45 pm
Sam Massie says:
This is how I think of Chinese urban redevelopment: not a loss of “authenticity,” but a loss of individuality: “this is what makes [Kunming] different from other cities.” Not fabrication replacing authenticity, but a single fabrication replacing many distinct fabrications.
June 16th, 2009 at 5:04 am