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The Death and Life of Old Beijing
A firsthand account of the Chinese capital’s struggles to preserve its past in the face of rapid development and Olympic glory.
I live in an old courtyard home shared by several families on a hutong (lane) in Dazhalan, Beijing’s most venerable neighborhood, located just south of Tiananmen Square. The former mansion dates to the early 20th century, though no one—not even the city’s archivists—knows exactly when it was built. The lacquer has faded from the double wooden door, the gate stones are cracked, and the tiled roof needs weeding. What is certain is that the house is under threat from an unseen specter residents call the “Hand.” It enters the lanes at night and paints the Chinese character that means “raze,” in ghostly white on the courtyard’s gray walls. There is no arguing with the Hand. And so, my neighbors wake each morning and on the walk to the public latrine or Heavenly Peach farmer’s market, glance first at our home’s exterior. Last night, the Hand did not come. Another day in the hutong begins.
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Because they don’t own the home outright, my neighbors have put little of their meager salaries into its upkeep. Since the 1950s, that responsibility has fallen to the Municipal Bureau of Land Resources and Housing Administration. It holds the property rights to most of Beijing’s vernacular architecture, the single-story courtyards that line the hutong. Decades of subsidized rents, budgetary shortfalls, overcrowding, and neglect have eroded the houses, built with perishable materials such as wood and earthen bricks. As the homes rot, they are condemned in lots by the municipal government and auctioned to developers who raze the neighborhood, erasing not only the homes and the hutong, but also a unique pattern of life.
In China, preserving the past usually means resurrecting the dead—restoring imperial, uninhabited structures, or rebuilding them in an idealized form to put on display for paying customers. What’s “old” looks new, because the wooden beams are freshly lacquered, the roof tiles unbroken, and the painted details vibrant for lack of grime. Restoration of Asian buildings has long followed this pattern, and so they do not display the romantic decay of Europe’s stone monuments. Pulling down and rebuilding structures made with perishable materials is cheaper, and more efficient, than repairing them. The result is that truly old artifacts—such as courtyard homes—evince the decrepitude of the past, instead of its glory.
According to MIT Department of Architecture head Yung-Ho Chang, whose Beijing studio, Atelier FCJZ, is located at the Old Summer Palace, “One reason people in China don’t understand the notion of preservation as Europeans do is that Western architecture is characterized by different eras and governments, whereas Chinese building materials and design remained largely unchanged over 2,000 years.” While a highly visible and visited site such as a cathedral was a portal back to a specific time, in Beijing, old buildings were seen as reminders of one, pre-Communist period: feudalism.
Yet as Beijing has evicted whole communities, it has raced to repair structures that it had until recently derided as fossils of a backward regime. Now the buildings represent Chinese culture, and earn revenue. Between 2000 and 2003, the capital spent three billion yuan ($360 million) preserving sites popular with tourists—an amount nearly equal to that spent in the same period on preservation nationwide. Another six hundred million yuan ($72.6 million) was budgeted for heritage protection from 2003 until 2008. The total investment equaled Beijing’s heritage protection outlay “for several decades before 2000,” according to the state-run newspaper China Daily, and went to tourist sites such as the Forbidden City and the Summer Palace.
Old Beijing’s ardent defender, the late architect Liang Sicheng, warned officials that they would regret razing the city walls, whose last sections came down in the 1960s. “In regard to this question,” he wrote in 1955, “you are backward. Fifty years from now, history will prove that you are mistaken, and I am correct.” After the city won the bid to host the 2008 Olympics, workers tore down 2,000 homes to rebuild a mile-long portion of the demolished city wall. The structure was attached to the single remaining corner tower and incorporated 200,000 of the original wall’s gray bricks, returned by scavengers following a government appeal.
Matthew Hu, managing director of the nongovernmental organization Beijing Cultural Heritage Protection Center, said that preservationists faced the hurdle of pitching conservation to a government that prioritizes new development. In his office, set on the grounds of a former temple, Hu explained, “Even when people want to preserve architecture, they often do not know how to do it correctly, using traditional materials and methods.” Hu cited a recent initiative to fix nearly 1,474 courtyard homes in the inner city. The plan is well-intentioned, yet tears down homes and rebuilds them cheaply, using red brick. Though original residents remain in the community, the historic fabric has been rent, making the homes easier prey for developers, who can argue they are devoid of heritage value.
Hu also admitted that NGOs and preservation activists are hamstrung, given that land rights to most inner-city neighborhoods have been transferred to developers, often linked to the local government. Across Front Gate Avenue at Fresh Fish Junction, posters on condemned courtyards urge, “Build a New Beijing to Welcome a New Olympics.” Yet the fate of city-center hutong neighborhoods had been decided before the city won the rights to host the 2008 Games. From its start in 1990 until 2003, the city’s Old Dilapidated Housing Renewal (ODHR) program has evicted more than 500,000 residents from the city center, the municipal government admits. Unofficial estimates go as high as 1.25 million residents.
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