Hutong and thanks for all the fish

I am currently sitting in my hotel bedroom in Beijing looking out on a vista comprising of *could be anywhere* mid-height skyscrapers and soulless freeways. It’s sunny, but grey and depressing somehow.

I came to Beijing on a weeks’ holiday about 7 or 8 years ago now … nearly all the Beijing I remember from then has been raised. Crazy. The current redevelopment is all for the Olympics of course, but it feels as though the very heart of the place has disappeared.

Granted that the Beijing I remembered of 7-8 years ago was also full of communist-influenced boulevards and blocked-monolith-buildings … but at least those buildings had a bit of character. These new buildings have no essence – they could have been created out of a set of kid's wooden blocks for all the creativity and design that’s gone into them.

Having said that, there are two new buildings I’m itching to see … the new Olympic main stadium (looks like a birds nest) and the new Olympic swimming pool (perfectly cubic and with walls made of water). Coool.

But they won’t replace the Siheyuans and hutongs – according to yesterday’s South China Morning Post, 33% of which have disappeared this year alone (displacing 600,000+ people). Feels like the UK 50’s/60’s experience (mistake) of pulling down the slums and forcing people into high rises – destroying old communities with a simple push of the bulldozer.
Some great hutong photos here (alas, none of them mine) . And history of hutongs here.

Hutongs (Simplified Chinese: 胡同, Traditional Chinese: 衚衕; pinyin: hútong) are narrow streets or alleys, most commonly associated with Beijing, China.
The word hutong comes from the Mongolian hottog meaning "water well." During the growth of towns and cities, wells dug by villagers formed the centres of new communities.
In Beijing, hutongs are alleys formed by lines of siheyuan, traditional courtyard residences. Many neighbourhoods were formed by joining one siheyuan to another to form a hutong, and then joining one hutong to another. The word hutong is also used to refer to such neighbourhoods.
Since the mid-20th century, the number of Beijing hutongs has dropped dramatically as they are demolished to make way for new roads and buildings. More recently, some hutongs have been designated as protected areas in an attempt to preserve this aspect of Chinese cultural history.

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