Good Morning, Hutong

Beijing is not a good walking city. Its roads are too wide, its blocks too long — this is a city meant to be experienced on wheels, whether those of a bicycle or (increasingly) a compact sedan.

But as Christopher Szabla reminded us earlier this year, “Beijing is at least two cities”: the city beyond the Second Ring Road, with its new office blocks and apartment complexes, and the older city within it, made up of hutong alleyways and old, low-rise courtyard houses.

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Beyond the Second Ring Road

Beijing is at least two cities. There’s the Beijing of the hutongs, a largely low-slung, grayscaled cityscape lying along the occasionally meandering little streets one can find within the old city walls, a one to two kilometer radius of Tiananmen Square. Then there’s the rest of Beijing, a march of high and midrise office and apartment buildings that have both infiltrated the city of the hutongs and supplanted much of remains of Mao’s capital: the cheaply built factories and shambolic workers’ dormitories built beyond the old city.

There are pockets of modern construction all over Beijing’s historical core, but the incursion of the new Beijing into the old is only really consistent along the ten lane-wide route of Chang’an Avenue, the city’s ceremonial main east-west axis, which slices in half the heart of the city with flanks of flashy new banks and government office buildings. The rest of new Beijing lies out beyond the old city and its present outer limit: the Second Ring Road, Beijing’s innermost orbital expressway, which replaced hutong Beijing’s medieval defenses with a different sort of wall — one formed by bumper-to-bumper traffic.

It didn’t always seem as if this division would persist. Only a few years ago, the Beijing of the hutongs began disappearing at an alarming rate. The outcry among preservationists, though, was loud enough to slow large-scale demolition, and changes to the historic city have proceeded somewhat less rashly since; some hutongs that were spared the wrecking ball have even undergone gentrification. There are exceptions, of course. Limited demolitions still occur — to install new subway stations, for example. But large-scale redevelopment projects, like this year’s plans to wipe out the classic hutong neighborhood around the historic Gulou, or Drum Tower, have gone nowhere fast; after unusually intense local and global media scrutiny, the Gulou project was shelved indefinitely.

The slowdown of Beijing’s “modernization” has brought with it a stalemate between high-rise and hutong. It’s particularly evident in Xicheng, in the western part of the old city, where the shimmering but somewhat stumpy towers of Beijing Financial Street, intended to form the new commercial heart of China, rise awkwardly against a backdrop of some of the city’s dustiest laneways. And not far away, across the Second Ring Road, the chaotic streetlife of the hutongs has even found a foothold even amid the seemingly hostile, modern streets and plazas of the new city.

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The Gutting of Gulou

The view from Beijing’s Gulou, or Drum Tower, is dominated by the labyrinth of threadlike lanes — the city’s famous hutongs — spreading in all directions, filling in the superblocks formed by the city’s broad, rectilinear avenues. Gulou, built in the 13th century by the Mongol Yuan dynasty, is one of Beijing’s most popular — if not immediately recognizable — attractions, drawing thousands of visitors each year. The resulting crush of tour buses making their way into the drowsy, low-slung square outside the landmark may seem incongruous with the humble hutongs, but the area profits immensely. The square is lined with bars popular with both Beijingers and the Lonely Planet set, and rickshaw tours of the environs take off in all directions.

As a result, the neighborhood, also known as Gulou, has gentrified just enough to make it a good example of how the hutongs might prosper if preserved. Such slow, organic improvements to city life don’t seem to have impressed local government officials, though. The entire Gulou area is set to be demolished and “restored” with historicist buildings that will, allegedly, evoke the look and feel of Ming-era Beijing. This facelift will be for the supposed benefit of tourists alone; the neighborhood’s businesses will be purged, and its residents moved elsewhere.

The widespread eradication of Beijing’s hutongs has been well-documented for several years, and criticized as vehemently by locals as outsiders. Civil society opposition to the demolitions is now formally organized; in 2003, opponents of this form of destructive form of urban renewal founded the Beijing Cultural Heritage Protection Center. But mere attempts to gain detailed information about the government’s plans for Gulou have proven as fruitless as any to limit or stop the neighborhood’s destruction.

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Chilly Day Around Houhai

Houhai is one of three lakes (the others are Qianhai and Xihai) in central Beijing. It dates back to the twelfth century, after which it became the northernmost part of the Grand Canal, linking the northern capital with Hangzhou in the south. Houhai today is surrounded by one of Beijing’s largest remaining collections of ancient hutong neighbourhoods. Some have been aggressively redeveloped as nightlife and tourist destinations, but further from the lake there are still some streets whose gentrification has taken a more gradual path.

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The Many Chinese Words for “Lane”

Suoyi Hutong, Beijing

There’s several different names in English for small, secondary streets that run between blocks or behind major roads. Alley and lane are the words most often used in North America, but there’s significant variation in the UK, where regional words like vennel, chare, wynd, twitten and jigger are common.

It’s a similar story in China. Just about every city has a lu (路), which is the word mostly commonly used to describe important roads. And even though there is a basic word for lane — xiang (巷) — there are also many regional variations. In Beijing, it’s hutong (衚衕); in Shanghai, it’s longtang (弄堂) and in Chengdu, it’s xiangzi (巷子).

I don’t know anything about the exact origins of these different words for alley, but I imagine they have roots in local languages and geography. In Guangzhou, for example, a common name for alley is tung jeun in Cantonese (衕津), which literally means “alley dock” and refers to a lane near the Pearl River. Nobody uses this word in Hong Kong, where two other words are used to refer to alleys: fong (坊) and lei (里), which is a Cantonese transliteration of the English word “lane.”

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Have a Laugh

Deep in the Hutongs. Beijing, China

Destroying Beijing’s Hutongs

Last year, Danwei TV, an internet television station that produces short videos about China, produced a series of episodes on Beijing’s famous hutongs, old neighbourhoods built around narrow laneways and courtyards. Over the past couple of decades, the number of hutongs in Beijing has dropped dramatically as they have been bulldozed for new residential and commercial developments.

Scale aside, the systematic destruction of hutongs is not much different than the urban renewal programs of postwar North America. In both cases, complex and multifaceted neighbourhoods — diverse places that evolved naturally over decades and centuries — were razed for far more homogenous, centrally-managed building complexes. When a hutong is destroyed, its residents are often relocated to far-flung housing developments on the fringes of Beijing. Their community life and social networks vanish along with their homes.

Western criticism of Beijing’s hutdong demolitions is often greeted with accusions of colonial condecension. Fair enough — North American cities are hardly good models of development. It’s refreshing, then, to hear from a Beijing person who also takes a critical view of his city’s development. In this episode of the Hutong Chronicles, Danwei TV talks to author and historian Zhang Jinqi, who wrote a book about the history of the “eight big hutongs” west of Qianmen, the former front gate of Beijing’s Imperial City.

Much of what Zhang says is relevant not only to Beijing, but to North American cities where efforts to restore, renew or gentrify old neighbourhoods leads to hollow mockeries of their past lives.

“A lot of restoration is done by completely destroying the buildings and then rebuilding them,” he says. “It makes me worried about the area. To restore something to Ming or Qing dynasty condition I think is very strange. History cannot be brought back — history develops. The houses around are 200 years old, 150, 100, also 50 years old. There are buildings from each era. There are many types of buildings side by side. So if we demolish them all, how do we restore them? If you keep tearing down the hutongs, where is old Beijing?”