A couple of weeks ago, I and my friend Dave Hull set out for a day of exploration across downtown Beijing. Our plan was to stroll through the some of the hutongs, Beijing’s rapidly disappearing old neighborhoods. You can find photographs from this day in the July photo gallery.
It turned out to be quite a walk. From the subway station at Jishuitan, at what was once the northern portion of Beijing’s old city wall, we hiked indirectly south for nine hours, cutting across the entire center of Beijing before ending at Qianmen, the former south gate of that same city wall. Along the way we walked past the lakes at Xihai and Houhai, through the hutong behind Houhai, through Beihai park, past the Forbidden City, through Tiananmen Square, and through the hutong and commercial alleyways at Qianmen.
It’s hard to go far in Beijing without coming across something interesting. At Xihai Dave and I strolled past hundreds of men spending their Sunday fishing. The men used enormous, twenty-foot poles to hang slender floats away from the banks and tease tiny fish from the water. A forest of long, slender, bamboo fishing poles jutted into the water. Some wives and children busied themselves at the periphery of the angling, but it was mostly men doing the fishing. I was reminded of my own childhood summers in London, fishing in the similarly concrete-lined ponds of Hampstead Heath. The lake was bigger, the weather hotter, and the spectators more numerous, but the congenial scene was unmistakable, from the placid atmosphere to the spindly floats, tiny fish and keeper-nets.
Further down the chain of lakes that stretches across central Beijing is Houhai. There the fishermen surrendered to rows of tables at which small groups played mah jongg or Chinese chess. This, even more than the fishing, was a spectator sport. Every table and every chess board on the ground was surrounded by a group of fascinated onlookers. It was also a betting sport as the small piles of bills gathered on the tables made clear. Elsewhere, an old woman sang classical Chinese music to the accompaniment of an er hu, a Chinese two-string violin, while twenty more aunties and uncles looked on.
Behind Houhai is a well-known hutong neighborhood. Remnants of old Beijing, the hutongs are areas of narrow, curling alleys lined by close-set brick buildings with gently curving gables and tiled roofs that evoke a Beijing that is fast fading into memory. Occasional doors lead to siheyuan courtyard houses. Chalkboards carry community notices, repeated word for word across entire neighborhoods.
As links to Beijing’s past, the hutongs are popular tourist attractions, brushed with a romantic gloss of nostalgia for a mythical time of red lanterns and opium dens. Certainly, compared to the Stalinist architecture of Tiananmen and the equally unimaginative shopping malls of new Beijing, the hutongs convey a tangible sense of history. They are connections to the Beijing of the Qing dynasty, the Japanese occupation, the Civil War, the rise of the Communists, the Cultural Revolution, and emergence of the new China.
Beijing is notoriously bulldozing its hutongs to make space for redevelopment. This is causing much distress among conservationists, who feel that the hutongs are an essential window into Beijing’s history. That’s an understandable concern, but, for all of that history, two things stand out to me. First, the hutongs do not look like comfortable places to live. Second, while interesting, in their current state many of them aren’t all that pretty.
Beijing has plenty of grimy, uncomfortable places to live. The hutongs don’t stand alone in this regard. Like most major Asian cities, Beijing has excelled at erecting vast fields of dingy, cramped, desperate looking residential towers. Mega City One gone to seed. Those grey blocks, like the one that Wuning and Guan Rui live in are, quite simply, maximum people in minimum space. (See “An Evening Out” in the June postings, http://news.imagethief.com/archive/2004/06/18/161.aspx.)
Today many of the hutongs look cramped, dingy and relatively derelict. In short, they look rather like picturesque slums. I say this without having gone into any hutong residences, so it’s possible that they are marvelously comfortable on the inside. Heaven knows they couldn’t be much worse than the nastier apartment blocks. But from what I can see it is a mistake to imagine the hutongs as splendid pockets of serene, majestic courtyard houses. There are too many people and there is too much disrepair. The tourism, in which I am complicit, can’t make it much easier. Trains of dozens of trishaws snake through the alleyways carrying gawping visitors past the front doors and families of residents. One hutong resident was driven to put a sign on his door announcing, “No entry except for friends and people we know”.
As for beauty, except for the graceful, curving lines of the gables, the hutongs are not aesthetically marvelous. There is a great deal of drab, grey brickwork and overhead wiring. Peeling plaster, exposed brickwork, piles of decaying rubbish are the ornaments of the day, along with the slowly fading Maoist slogans and party notices.
This is not an argument for destroying the hutongs. Living in Singapore, a city that has done a splendid job of paving over its architectural history and destroying its original communities, the kampongs, I see real value in preserving links to the past.
But I suspect the worst crime in the redevelopment of the hutongs isn’t the destruction of the buildings, but the communities that inhabit them. One of the glorious things about Asia is that life is lived on the streets in a way that is frankly unimaginable in much of the urban US, where I grew up. Across much of Asia, families, children, friends, all gather outside and socialize en masse in the afternoons and evenings and on the weekend. In Beijing, we saw some of this in the fishing and game playing at Xihai and Houhai.
From what I have seen in Southeast Asia, this style of social living is something that the move into apartment blocks destroys. Singapore has made a stab of preserving it with apartment void decks in the HDB blocks, but there is a visible gulf in who takes advantage of those spaces. Grandparents, aunties and uncles congregate. Youth and middle-aged adults stay in front of the television.
I haven’t been in Beijing long enough to see if the community living I’ve seen elsewhere in Asia exists in the hutongs, but they ought to be more conducive to it than the sprawling apartment complexes that are springing up everywhere. After all, one of the great things about a courtyard house is that it has a courtyard. But, having said that, one of things I like about my giant, soulless apartment complex, is that it is not, after all, so soulless. The enormous central courtyard has a playground and large common areas that are always thronged in the evenings. Fruit sellers run their stalls, classes are advertised and dogs, scampering children and snogging teenagers are everywhere.
One way or another, days of most hutongs appear numbered. A few which will be bought up and restored into exclusive clubs and hotels, or perhaps gentrified into loft-living for the nouveau riche of Beijing. Most of the rest will end up as wider roads, new apartments or office buildings.
But perhaps Beijing can still keep a sense of community alive. Even if the hutongs are gone, that would be worth something.
Comments:
re: In the Hutongs
Will sez: "Elsewhere, an old woman sang classical Chinese music to the accompaniment of an er hu, a Chinese two-string violin, while twenty more aunties and uncles looked on."
Jose replies: Was she any good? I ask because there's an old guy at Embarcadero BART (in San Francisco) that plays (what I assume is) one of those 2-string violins. He plays it like a mini cello while squatting. I feel bad for the guy becuase he never has any money in his hat. But not bad enough to put any money in because the music, well, it isn't music but a horrible high-pitched screech. I just hope that your ears were spared that.
re: In the Hutongs
Hutongs appear to be similar to the street gatherings in the row-house sections of Phbiladelphia when I was a child. They met and flopurshed on theior front porches or stoops, bnut left whenever there was occassion to join i a neighbor's game, listen to someone's radio, or simply children pklaying together, in games like stick-ball
How different in our suburban communities, and our high-rise center city apartments. The gathering of neighbors has provided a socialization that simply does not exist today, although there is some effort at a recommunitization(?)in affinity groups., professional groups, tradde associations, unions and so on. But not neighborhoods which are just for sleeping in miost American cities.
re: In the Hutongs
What Brad describes in Philadelphia in his childhood was also true in London (see, for example Bill Brandt's photographs on East End children in the streets) and New York (photos and stories abound) but even in suburban Philadelphia in the 1940s. Parents sat outside and smoked on front porches while children played hopscotch and jacks and gathered fireflies into jars, and neighbors visited back and forth. But this was before television was widely available.
In the Hutongs
Will sez: "Elsewhere, an old woman sang classical Chinese music to the accompaniment of an er hu, a Chinese two-string violin, while twenty more aunties and uncles looked on."
Jose replies: Was she any good? I ask because there's an old guy at Embarcadero BART (in San Francisco) that plays (what I assume is) one of those 2-string violins. He plays it like a mini cello while squatting. I feel bad for the guy becuase he never has any money in his hat. But not bad enough to put any money in because the music, well, it isn't music but a horrible high-pitched screech. I just hope that your ears were spared that.
re: In the Hutongs
Hutongs appear to be similar to the street gatherings in the row-house sections of Phbiladelphia when I was a child. They met and flopurshed on theior front porches or stoops, bnut left whenever there was occassion to join i a neighbor's game, listen to someone's radio, or simply children pklaying together, in games like stick-ball
How different in our suburban communities, and our high-rise center city apartments. The gathering of neighbors has provided a socialization that simply does not exist today, although there is some effort at a recommunitization(?)in affinity groups., professional groups, tradde associations, unions and so on. But not neighborhoods which are just for sleeping in miost American cities.
re: In the Hutongs
What Brad describes in Philadelphia in his childhood was also true in London (see, for example Bill Brandt's photographs on East End children in the streets) and New York (photos and stories abound) but even in suburban Philadelphia in the 1940s. Parents sat outside and smoked on front porches while children played hopscotch and jacks and gathered fireflies into jars, and neighbors visited back and forth. But this was before television was widely available.