Hutong Life

Since I have been living in a modern dormitory building for a month now I thought I'd reflect on my first few days in Beijing living in a courtyard hotel in a hutong, or alleyway, neighborhood.

Before 1949 hutong neighborhoods covered most of Beijing's old walled inner city. After the Communists came to power, Mao began ordering many of them leveled and replaced with new Soviet-style housing blocks. Though most still remained even up through the 1990's, the era of rampant commercial real-estate speculation has finally turned the hutong into an endangered urban species.

A hutong is basically a lane running east to west, lined with traditional siheyuan, courtyard homes. Traditionally, Beijing's urban fabric consisted entirely of these homes patterned across the city like bricks and subdivided by hutongs. Today, there are several preservation districts but even these special restrictions against 拆-ing (chai) meaning destroy, are sometimes not enough to prevent developers with important connections from tearing down neighborhoods and evicting residents, who are often old and powerless people.

Hutong life is a glimpse into the past, quite different from the modern lifestyle that most Beijingers enjoy. There are no cars, residents must use public toilets, and often no heating except for coal burning. But despite the lack of creature comforts, hutongs are living communities. In the alley, local kids play soccer under the watch of the elderly, women buy their groceries, and men play Chinese checkers on the stoop of their home. Often inaccurately called slums, hutongs are more accurately low-rent neighborhoods that have suffered from years of neglect and with some upgrading could be turned into very comfortable modern environments. Hopefully the authorities will realize this and decide that preserving the old environments is essential to preserving the soul of the city.