Qianmen has always been one of my favorite parts of Beijing. I have a long walk that I enjoy taking through Beijing from either Guloudajie or Jishuitan subway station down past the lakes, through Beihai Park, along the Forbidden City, across Tian'anmen Square, and through the hutongs southeast of Qianmen to Chongwenmen. This stroll encompasses several of Beijing's different neighborhoods and moods, and I often use it to introduce central Beijing to out-of-town visitors who are not afraid to walk for a few hours.

After the sterile expanse of Tian'anmen Square, the commercial riot of Qianmen Dajie is a nice change of pace. I have always enjoyed the semicircular stretch of road that connects the north-south stretch of Qianmen Dajie with east-west Qianmen Dong Dajie. The crush of people, storefronts, hard-case beggars, eating houses and street-vendors reminds me a bit of Hong Kong. An oddball, second-floor coffee shop with a view of Qianmen and the Zhengyangmen has always been a nice (if overpriced) stop along the four-hour walk. The back alleyways here were one of the first neighborhoods I explored on my own in Beijing, and, away from the main road, they get local very rapidly indeed. For extra local color, today's walk took in one of Beijing's singular pleasures, a roaring fistfight outside one of the supermarkets along Qianmen Dong Dajie.

But the inexorable wave of redevelopment is breaking over this area. Demolition has already commenced along the west-side of the semi-circular road, and today the omnipresent chai --the character that marks buildings slated for demolition-- adorned the buildings on the east side. Power was off in most of the shops, and the merchants were all advertising closing-down sales. One enterprising young man had erected a ladder in front of his shop and was perched atop it with a megaphone and a large, yellow sign advertising steep discounts.

A little ways down Qianmen Dajie, south of the semicircular road, is Xianyukou, a ramshackle market-alley that cuts through the hutongs and hosts a spectacularly colorful array of provisioners, beauty parlors, butchers, guesthouses and hole-in-the-wall restaurants. Along with its extensions, Xixinglong and Dongxinglong, its the climax of the walk through Beijing; the piece-de-resistance that I save for my exhausted guests. One of the side alleys is also home to my favorite Shanxi daoxiaomian (knife-cut noodle) restaurant, an intimidatingly grimy hole-in-the-wall run by the perpetually cheerful, chatty and un-intimidating Mme. Wang Zhiping. As she ladled up three scrumptious-as-usual bowls of the good stuff, Mme. Wang told us that Xianyukou was also slated for the chai in order to make room for the transformation of the alley into an east-west traffic artery. The Chongwen district government, she reported, had wanted to do this for some time and had finally got its act together. Mme. Wang was already making plans to relocate her restaurant to a similar alley on the west side of Qianmen Dajie. Many of the neighborhood residents, she reported, were arguing for more compensation from the government.

Although the chai is not yet on the buildings lining Xianyukou, several government notices  concerning the redevelopment (many of them defaced) have already been plastered on walls along the alley. None mention road widening. Instead, they rather plausibly cite dangerous conditions in the tumbledown buildings, especially with the onset of winter and the accompanying fire risk from the myriad potmetal coal stoves that will soon smolder into life. This is a bit at odds with Mme. Wang's road widening explanation, but in traffic-clogged Beijing that story is pretty credible as well. Other notices specified exactly which units were slated for demolition, and what we interpreted (possibly incorrectly) as the compensation to be offerred for units of different sizes, and some conditions, such as refurbishment, under which certain units may remain occupied. The unofficial sign below seemed to be prices for apartments elsewhere in the city, in case you were one of the people being forced to move.

I'll be sorry if Xianyukou becomes another car-jammed main road. It doesn't have the charm of the shady, lakeside hutongs, and many of the buildings are truly dire, tumbledown wrecks. But it is lively and has a unique personality about it. And I've had many a pleasant, afternoon walk there, amidst the drifting odors of freshly cooked da bing, unrefrigerated pork and public bathrooms. The smells of old Beijing.

If they have to knock down something in this area, why not Quanjude? Hard to imagine anyone missing that.


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