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The Vanishing CityThe life and death of Beijing's alleys.

By Rob Gifford
Posted Thursday, Aug. 7, 2008, at 6:50 AM ET

Also in Slate, Andrew J. Nathan reviews The Man on Mao's Right: From Harvard Yard to Tiananmen Square, My Life Inside China's Foreign Ministry, Minxin Pei reviews Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China, and Ann Hulbert takes on two novels by Xiaolu Guo, one of China's young expatriate stars.

The Last Days of Old Beijing

Once upon a time Beijing, like China, knew what it was. It was static, it was poor, but in the minds of its mandarins, it was a brilliant civilization, and it was the center of the world. Peasant revolutions, new emperors, nomadic invaders came and went, but the Celestial City remained the same, its order set in stone, as immovable as the walls of the city itself.

Beijing as we know it today—including its famous hutong, or alleyways—was initially built by Kublai Khan, the great Mongol emperor, in the 13th century. Then, between 1405 and 1421, the Yongle emperor of the Ming dynasty supervised the construction of the Forbidden City, where he and successive emperors would reside. This beautifully symmetrical edifice—formidable, impenetrable, ordered—symbolized the harmony of the capital, balancing Heaven and Earth.

But it was in those Mongol-built hutong outside the imperial city where real life went on. There were richer hutong neighborhoods and poorer ones, but most were made up of courtyard houses, walled and enclosed, the architecture mirroring the inward-looking nature of Chinese civilization. Many of the narrow lanes were arranged in grids, running from east to west, and, though the houses were enclosed, they formed close-knit communities. Children played out in the lanes, and the shouts of vendors selling their wares echoed off the crumbling brick walls along the alley. Life for centuries in Beijing was lived very close to the ground.

Westerners, arriving in large numbers for the first time in the 19th century, were unimpressed. "There is not a more squalid collection of houses in an Arab village or in the old City of Limerick," wrote a Western journalist in 1861. They set about trying to change Beijing, as they set about trying to prize China open to the outside world.

Slowly, reluctantly, the city, like the country, began to change as it searched for a new, modern identity. In the early 20th century, railroads, telegraph lines, tarmac roads, and street lighting began to appear. But the hutong remained, largely untouched even through the Japanese occupation of the 1930s. The Communist Party, after its conquest of China in 1949, launched an assault on everything old, as it pushed toward its new utopia—a modern, proletarian identity. It wrenched the Chinese from their obsession with the past, tearing down the ancient city walls, and turning the temples into barracks and workshops. New utilitarian apartment blocks were constructed around Beijing, and old hutong courtyards were divided up among the masses as land and property and housing were nationalized. But the hutong themselves remained, saved by the continuing poverty of a country that could not afford to destroy any form of livable housing.

It is only now, in the last 10 years, with Mao long dead and gone, that the Beijing government has set about destroying the city's famous lanes. Their central location has made them prime real estate, and many have been demolished to make way for shiny new office buildings and apartment blocks for the emergent middle classes. The lanes that survived so much else could not survive the assault of the market.

Residents are compensated for their homes, but not enough to buy an apartment in the block that is then constructed on their land. So, most people are forced to relocate to the farthest outskirts of the city. Many have welcomed the upgrade—the offer of an apartment with heating and indoor plumbing—but some have resisted, holding out for more compensation. They hold residents' meetings and attend public forums to discuss how some of the hutong can be saved. But the combined power of the Communist Party and the wealthy real-estate developers is always too great for the little people to resist, and everyone is forced out in the end.

There were 7,000 hutong in 1949; now there are fewer than 1,300. More than 1 million residents out of a population of some 17 million were evicted between 1990 and 2007, as the old parts of the city were razed. It has all been part of the $22 billion makeover to change Beijing's identity forever and to make the 2008 Olympic capital a faster, higher, and stronger city.

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Rob Gifford was NPR correspondent in Beijing from 1999 to 2005. He is the author of China Road: A Journey Into the Future of a Rising Power.
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