|
In
the Southern Song Dynasty, when the
Imperial Court had been
driven from the north of China by invading Mongols, a man named
Scholar Jia Wen wrote a guide to the beauty spots of their former
capital, which none of them would see again. ‘For us,’ he wrote,
‘these places exist only in our memory.’
There was a similar sentiment to
the 1935 edition of In Search of Old Peking, which laments ‘Once
beautiful temples have been left to go to wrack and ruin….Peking’s
silver pines renowned the world over have been ruthlessly cut down
and sold for timber….{this book} describes not only buildings that
are to be seen to-day, but also those that have disappeared
completely. Nothing can be more painful than to be the unwilling
witness of the slow, but sure death, of a place one has learned to
love for its quiet beauty and for the wonderful tradition that it
holds’
The book has a striking
melancholy: because so many of the remaining sites described in 1935
have now disappeared. A special melancholy for me, who got to know
Beijing in 1993, who arrives there and stand on streets I thought I
knew, and feel lost.
Beijing’s hutongs are rapidly
becoming one of those places that you will soon be unable to visit.
|
|
‘Hutong’,
means literally allyway, and arrived with Gengis Khan’s Mongolian
troops, the word ‘hottog’ in Mongolian meaning ‘well’. They’re
medieaval neighbourhoods, close-packed and chaotic; a narrow vista
of constant surprises; glances through doorways, old carvings,
temples, shrines.
The houses
were originally siheyuan (literally ‘four-building courtyard’):
quiet and private retreats from the busy streets. The largest were
palaces that comprised a number of courtyards, while the houses of
artisans and merchants might often be shared.
There were
978 hutongs listed in Qing Dynasty, but with the break down of the
feudal system, social discord and the rise of unplanned hutongs on
the edges of town, this number rose to 1,330 by 1949, with nearly
5,000 tiny alleys threading their way between the legitimate hutongs.
Many hutongs were cleared after 1949, giving way to the four-lane
highways and high-rise.
But
affluence, corruption and the construction boom – not to mention the
Olympics, has accelerated this process. In 2004 alone 20,000
households were demolished in 2004. These pictures were taken in
the Chongwen Hutong, just south of Tiananmen Square, in Summer 2006,
which were being demolished to make way for new luxury apartments
and a highway that was to be part of the 2007 Beijing Olympics.
links:
Hutong
Photography: home site of freelance Iain Masterton, who has
worked for National Geographi, Economist, Lonely Planet among others
http://www.oldbeijing.net/
A site in Chinese about Beijing Hutongs
|
