2008

Fading Hutongs

Júlio de Matos

ChinaStreet PhotographyCityDocumentary PhotographyHousingMemory

Suddenly, without warning, I entered another dimension of space and time. I was no longer in that Beijing that I had known for almost a week. The great avenues were erased, the memories of an Imperial past were not here. Instead of mirrored glass skyscrapers, I saw single-story houses. 10 minutes before, I was crossing wide avenues with hundreds of anonymous people, and in that place I observed a village of neighbors, with its street market, selling and buying chickens, fish, vegetables, fruits. As a Westerner, I still get goosebumps when I think of that feeling of time travel just around the corner. It was still a Beijing not enchanted with the foreign and with progress, still jealous of its village and banal daily life, increasingly rare in our days. I had the distinct feeling that I was witnessing the end of an era that had inexplicably survived to this day. That that kind of place was incompatible with the other experiences of modernity and progress that he had witnessed in Beijing. That place, with its peculiar form of physical and social organization, was threatened. This was my first contact in August 2005, with the Hutongs of Beijing in the south (southeast). The Hutongs, the traditional streets of Beijing, and the Siheyuan, the square courtyard houses, which bring us back to the urban vision of Kublai Khan, a contemporary of Marco Polo, are disappearing very quickly. Beijing is going through a unique phase of rapid urban transformation, mainly due to urban pressures caused by accelerated economic development, and the approach of the 2008 Olympic Games. …