A Farewell to Hutongs

by Ernie Diaz

The tourists all have the same poppycock opinion. “How can they tear down the hutongs? The destruction…the loss of culture…so tragic!” Sure, John Q. Westerner, you try living in an unheated, cold-water pile of bricks, padding out to use a public toilet on a brisk January night. It’s all well and good to traipse about Beijing’s more well-kept hutongs for a few hours, snapping photos and dodging cars, then celebrate your newfound Sino-wisdom with a latte at the Pass By Bar. It’s another thing entirely to live in the choking squalor of the Xuanwumen hutongs , slums by any other name.

Then again, not all the hutongs are slums, nor tourist havens; most are just average Beijingers’ homes. No matter. Real estate developers are laying waste to all but the most picturesque hutongs with a ruthless efficiency made possible only by tacit government consent. The demise of the citizen’s hutong is a foregone conclusion, and a darn shame.

But it does not die without protest. The Beijing Cultural Heritage Protection Center has vowed to draw attention to hutong demolition, the injustice as well as the loss of history.

He Shuzhong is that most noble of warriors, fighting a battle he knows he will lose, winning only admiration and awareness for his cause. For besides the work of the BCHPC, which he founded, and the squawk of tourists who wish the hutongs would be frozen in time, a photo-ready wonderland, the clamor of the old world being torn down is otherwise drowned out by construction of the new: the Beijing of bird nest stadiums and egg national theaters, of grade A office parks and five star hotels.

For all its PR magic, that new world exists on the wrong side of a giant glass wall, at least for the average hutong dweller. Any reasonably-dressed foreigner can march right in to a glass office tower and conduct his personal business in the spotless porcelain facilities. A real Beijinger with even the faintest air of hutong about him will be stopped peremptorily by a guard in the lobby and commanded to explain his presence. So the new Beijing is a playground for international architects, and a trophy case for government flacks. For those with the longest, strongest ties to the city, however, it’s Middlemarch.

But He Shuzhong deals with much more immediate, tangible injustice than invisible walls. He’ll take you to Da Mo Chang hutong, where there are hardly any whole walls to be had. The sight of moonscape sandlots and piles of broken brick prompts comparisons to Beirut circa 1983. Especially when one spies the few residents left, sunning themselves stoically in front of the ruinous structures they call home.But the only war is civil: cunning, predacious civilians versus hopelessly out-gunned poor ones.

He Shuzhong will introduce you to Zheng Shengming, who still holds out in a courtyard half-demolished by the construction company that wants him out. His father bought the place in the 1930s. Zheng props up sagging walls with two-by-fours, ducks under exposed wiring, and does his best to ignore the portions of his home that look bomb-hit. Zheng will resignedly show you his most recent eviction notice, a document clearly in violation of the written law. The developers who want him out don’t even have the all-important land use certificate. That they proceed with their suit is an insult to the legal system; that they have managed to knock down most of Zheng’s home, an outrage. Zheng has all the deeds and certificates, and a pittance in relocation money from the developers, who tell him he will not receive more because, “There is no way of knowing what the property is worth.”

The developers have a point – except the unknown number is stratospheric. A strong-armed stone’s throw from Zheng’s last stand lies Qianmen, south gate of Tiananmen Square, and Dashilan, a faux Qing Dynasty hutong constructed under the same principles that gave us Las Vegas’ Venetian Canal. It’s a hundred-million dollar tourist trap, and a slap in the face to the BCHPC, like giving a Native American a parcel of fenced-in crabgrass after you’ve taken his prairie.

He Shuzhong strolls the length of Qianmen’s Dashilan with his compatriot Zhang Jinqi, founder of China Memories. They mark their progress by pointing out ghosts – the dried, spiced beef vendor whose shop is now an H&M, the neighborhood tea house re-conceived as premises clearly off limits to any without money to burn. Zhang doesn’t spend too much time seeing ghosts; usually he’s busy documenting the last remaining traces of living hutong history, photographing a Ming-era commemorative plaque above a lintel, taking a rubbing of a miniature bas relief rendered in Shanxi style, rare as a bird of paradise in this part of China. Zhang and a platoon of his “hutong warriors” make a crusade of it, their work displayed on websites like oldbeijing.org.

For every image displayed digitally, claims He Shuzhong, there are treasures destroyed we’ll never see: the Qing Dynasty temple discovered and razed in the same week during the construction of the T3 terminal, the Liao Dynasty tomb carted off to a land fill to keep a villa development on schedule. He fights not only the developers, but an army of the indifferent, whose banners are of the kind seen waving over old Zheng’s half-demolished courtyard, “Say Goodbye to Unsafe Housing, Dream of New Style Houses Becomes Reality”.

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