Asia, Far East, news and analysis Times Online, The Times, Sunday Times: "City buries its history in passion for concrete and glass
From Jane Macartney in Beijing
OLD WANG picked his way over mounds of dusty rubble. “This was my home, my home for all my life.” He began to cry. “I can’t leave,” he said.
In a crumbling courtyard house on the other side of the alley, a woman filled a basin with water from an outside tap.
“They are forcing us to leave because they want to demolish this courtyard,” she said. “Don’t ask me why, I’m too frightened to talk.” She scurried into her one-room, brick, lean-to home built within the walls of No 7 Wenchang Hutong — once a graceful courtyard home to a moneyed Beijing family.
Few courtyards remain. When it comes to the tangle of alleys — known by the Manchurian word hutong — that fan out from the Forbidden City, Beijing’s planning authorities swing between bouts of preservation and frenzies of destruction. Developers want to replace the acres of faded quadrangles with glass and concrete towers. Planners are keen to build a sleek new city before the 2008 Olympics.
Fewer than 500 of Beijing’s nearly 4,000 hutong survive, according to Zhang Wei, the leader of a group of volunteers battling to save them. More than a third of the 62sq km (24 square mile) old city has already been demolished and homes are being destroyed at the rate of 10,000 a year.
It is unlikely that any other city has undergone such a rapid and dramatic transformation.
One voice of protest was that of I. M. Pei, the AmericanChinese architect. “They should have preserved the old walls and the city inside and built the skyscrapers outside, as Pa"
