The Chinese have a longstanding genius for domestic architecture, and a visit to the hutong of Beijing—the fast-disappearing neighborhoods of courtyard houses, laced with small lanes and commerce, sanctuaries of both intimacy and variety in the midst of a city too rapidly doing away with the best of its public character—affirms the singularity and brilliance of their historic accomplishment. Such places offer an alternative vision to the Modernist constructs that shape the city today and provide an irreplaceable element in the urban repertoire that demands not simply to be conserved but extended.
If the hutong of Beijing represent a kind of pure Chinese urban expression (though one with affinities with other courtyard aggregations in Asia and elsewhere), the longtang (or lilong) of Shanghai (and the similar lifen of Wuhan, which I have recently been studying with my students) represent a composite architecture that is the successful outgrowth of a previous encounter with imported models. These neighborhoods developed in the wake of the Opium War, when Shanghai was forcibly opened to foreign settlement as a treaty port (Wuhan, on the Yangtze River, was another). In 1845, the local government promulgated its Settlement Law, defining both the site and the legal character of these foreign enclaves. Among the stipulations of the law was that foreigners could not lease houses to Chinese, who were forbidden to live in the settlement areas.
You have 0 complimentary articles remaining.
Unlimited access + premium benefits for as low as $1.99/month.