Farewell to the Hutongs: Urban Development in Beijing

In the best 60 Minutes tradition, a China Central Television (CCTV) producer sent me out last summer to the planned “Jade River” real estate redevelopment for some investigative reporting on the fate of Beijing’s historic hutongs or alleyways. I was armed with a concealed camera inside a made-in-China purse. The producer also equipped me with the cell phone and e-mail persona of “Emily Tinari,” a rich American, charmed by the traditional hutongs of old Beijing, lusting to own a courtyard house of her own.

Courtyard houses or siheyuan (“yard surrounded by four buildings”) exist elsewhere in China. But these traditional, one-story houses with curved tile roofs rising behind gray brick walls lining both sides of a hutong street have long been identified with Beijing. “Hutong” can refer both to the alley and the neighborhood.

With the rush of development heated up by the drive to modernize for the upcoming Beijing 2008 Olympics, even protected hutong neighborhoods are being bulldozed by development companies with CPC (Communist Party of China) connections. The days of the serve-the-people CPC are long gone. Forget affordable housing for the masses. Luxury housing is going up in an economy closer to Darwinian capitalism than anything resembling socialism.

Most of the courtyard houses, once handsome microcosms of the Forbidden City, date from the Qing dynasty (1644–1911). But the oldest go back even further, to the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368). The most elegant houses with carved and painted roof beams and landscaped central courtyards were the homes of the aristocracy. Commoners in extended families lived in simpler courtyard houses lining narrower alleys. Hidden from the sight of passersby, the hutong neighborhoods have endured down through the end of imperial rule, the Republican Period, and the conquest of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), when the troops of the CPC entered Beijing in October 1949.

The traditional courtyards, many now filled with ramshackle housing rented out to migrant workers from China’s countryside, are being leveled to make way for modern high-rise apartments and offices. The ancient neighborhoods, which make up centrally located old Beijing surrounding the Forbidden City, have become prime real estate. With their desirable location and architectural detail, a small number of courtyard houses and their alleys are being preserved, thanks to gentrification. Wealthy Chinese and foreigners, eager to restore the old courtyard housing to ancient splendor, are replacing longtime homeowners who sometimes sell willingly, sometimes not.

Destruction of the old is nothing new in China, though previously it was for political, not economic, reasons. In the early days of the New China, Soviet planners won Mao Zedong’s support to build the new capital on top of old Beijing, saving only the walled Forbidden City at its center. Leading architects argued that the old c...