Coming Down Alert – Nanluoguxiang

I haven’t been up to Peking for a while so apologies to all the Pekingren who know more about this than me – in fact I’m posting in the hope someone will clue me in? Rumour reaches me of the bulldozing of the old hutong at Nanluoguxiang. Nothing new in an old hutong being bulldozed in Peking of course, most of them already have ans the rest will sooner or later we can safely assume. We called time on architecture in Peking, with the exception of a few grand buildings, a long time ago – the destruction has gone too far now to turn back.

However, Nanluoguxiang was a success. Ask anyone who visited for the Olympics – it was the only ‘site’ anyone commented to me they found interesting. Put aside any snotty remarks about the tattiness of many of the shops (and many of them are but…), the repetitive nature of it all (and anyway neither Shanghai’s Taikang Road nor London’s Camden Market etc etc are particularly innovative places to hang unless your 17 and Japanese), at least it existed and was popular. Watching young Pekingers enjoying a weekend snapping photos of the older parts of the city was encouraging – were they reconnecting with their heritage? I hope so – certainly it seemed to attract more people than the latest piece of architectural Viagra from some Swiss-Dutch-Luxembourgeois wunderkind that nobody else in any other city globally would contemplate due to its ridiculousness, or some old fart Starchitect notching another one on the bedpost courtesy of Beijing Municipal Government. I don’t see so many people snapping those!

Anyway, a major row has been brewing over the destruction of some buildings along Nanluoguxiang (reported here by the AFP). I’ll leave the details to the foreign hack pack (if they can get roust themselves out of bed for this one) but it does result in the loss of several properties along the street for, wait for it, wait for it… ‘subway line construction’. The row is, as usual, about compensation, though once again a hutong is going. I have no idea whether the whole hutong will go – any news gratefully received.

Meanwhile I’m also told that another hutong, Beiluogu Xiang, that has been gentrifying and attracting interest from retailers and visitors, may be for the bulldozer before it even really gets going.

I have no idea what to take from all this except that none of this will stop till the last hutong is gone presumably. I’m afraid I don’t spend nearly enough time in Peking to be comprehensive on the destruction in the way China Rhyming tries with Shanghai but here’s a few previous posts on lost hutongs:

Gulou

Jinbao Jie

Dayuanfu Hutong

Beihe Hutong

Kuijiachang Hutong