Highlights:
The Beijing Hutong is one of the "must see" items in Bejing. They are a wonderful glimpse into the world of yesterday in Beijing. Beijing hutong, lanes or alleys formed by lines of siheyuan (a compound with houses around a courtyard) where old Beijing residents live, witness the vicissitude of the city.
Brief Introduction
How many hutongs are there in Beijing? Old local residents have a saying: "There are 360 large hutongs and as many small hutongs as there are hairs on an ox." Laid out in a chessboard pattern which was established as early as the Ming Dynasty, these hutongs cross cut the city into tiny squares. In those days the capital was divided into the eastern, western, northern, southern and central districts, with a total of 33 neighborhoods, divided again into hutongs. In old China, there were clear definitions of what was a street and what was a lane. A 36-metre-wide road was called a big street and an 18-metre-wide road was called a small street. A 9-metre-wide lane was called a hutong.
Hutong culture
Walking through the hutongs, it is common to see groups of elderly citizens sitting together playing cards, mahjong or Chinese chess. In the early mornings and evenings, they gather to practice traditional forms of exercise such as taijiquan as well as to dance and sing folk songs or Peking Opera arias. Also important to hutong life is the traditional foods being sold in carts or small stalls. These change according to the season, from flavoured ice in the summer to long kebabs of crab apples covered in sugar in the autumn and winter.
So imporant are the hutongs to the culture of Beijing that there have been many operas, plays and films about them. Lao She (1899 - 1966), one of 20th century China's greatest novelists and playwrights, is responsible for one such homily. His "Teahouse" is set in what is often the focal point of a hutong community and brings together several characters from the old streets of Beijing to discuss the problems of traditional society. A more modern love song for the hutongs is Zhang Yang's "Shower" (1999) about a tradtional bath house where men from the community gather to drink tea, receive massages, fight crickets and escape their marital problems.
The film laments the loss of such old ways of life as the hutongs are being knocked down to make way for modern blocks of flats.
Many hutongs have a story behind them. Near the Forbidden City in the heart of old Beijing is a hutong called "the Weaving Girl" named after the daughter of a god who descended to the human world with her sisters to swim in a river and then proceeded to fall in love with a cowherd. Her enraged father, the Celestial Emperor, took the girl back and separated the couple with the Milky Way. On the opposite side of the Forbidden City, there used to be a Cowherd Bridge. Flanked by the cowherd and the weaving girl, the suggestion was that the feudal emperors living in the Forbidden City were the sons of Heaven.
Beijing's hutongs are more than just architecture. They are the people who live there. They are a museum of Beijing's folk custom and they are a witness to the city's history. While visit the Beijing Hutongs, you can feel the dramatic changes of Beijing and you can evident the History of Beijing experence its life style and traditional culture.
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