Paying homage to what's vanished in Beijing's race to modernize

The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the
Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed
By Michael Meyer
Walker, 355 pp., illustrated, $25.99

A classic of the "When the Going Was Good" genre - the phrase is Evelyn Waugh's - is titled "In Search of Old Peking," an evocation of a then-vanishing culture written in the 1930s by two longtime foreign residents in the city, L.C. Arlington and William Lewisohn.

To readers of their day, who might consider using their account as a guidebook, the authors apologized that "by vandalism and utter neglect," many of the monuments and buildings they describe "have actually disappeared while the authors were still writing about them."

That pace of casual disappearance and deliberate destruction only quickened in the 1950s as Mao Zedong rebuilt Beijing as his urban monument.

The Mao-era destruction of the massive walls that had defined Beijing, writes urban planner Thomas J. Campanella in "The Concrete Dragon" (Princeton Architectural Press), "surely ranks among the greatest acts of urban vandalism in history. The ramparts made the city, and their removal" - to be replaced by ring roads - "changed forever the essence and character of Beijing."

The imposition of martial law and the foreign boycotts which followed the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests brought a pause in the leveling of older sections of the city.

It was still possible for my wife and me, when we lived there in those years, to bicycle through the residential lanes - the hutongs - of the old city, acknowledging the elderly neighborhood committee members, and dodging the knife-sharpeners and peddlers.

But by the time Michael Meyer arrived in 1997, Beijing's old neighborhoods were being gutted and rebuilt skyward in the run-up to this summer's Olympics.

"Although I lamented Beijing's disappearing heritage," Meyer writes in "The Last Days of Old Beijing," "what did I really know about the hutong?" Realizing that "there wasn't much time to find out," he determined to move into one, and a few months later began teaching at the nearby Coal Lane elementary school.

The communal life Meyer shared on Red Bayberry and Slanted Bamboo Street's hutong is the subject of his warmhearted memoir.

Fresh Fish Junction, a neighboring hutong, had been designated as one of the "historic areas" to be preserved, but even so, contractors had marked its courtyard houses with the character "chai" (to raze).

It "was now unlit and silent at night," as Meyer bicycles there one night with Old Zhang, a longtime resident.

"Old Zhang motioned to my [still-intact] neighborhood. 'These people,' he said, 'have no idea how their lives are about to change.' "

Other aspects of Beijing's traditional culture are also vanishing as the older generation of writers, many of them pilloried during the Cultural Revolution, die off; as the Peking Opera becomes a tourist attraction; and as fakes flood the antiques markets.

Their disappearance is the focus of "City of Heavenly Tranquility; Beijing in the History of China" (Oxford), an elegant account by Jasper Becker, a Beijing-based foreign correspondent for some 15 years.

Becker's Beijing is the "ancient, magical city," being devastated "in the name of modernity" - the victim of China's drive "to Westernize . . . the greatest non-Western civilization in history."

At some point in reading these books, Bostonians of at least a certain age will think, "West End," and they will be both right, and wrong, writes Campanella, a professor at the University of North Carolina who has taught at MIT and in China.

"Driving American urban renewal," he writes, "was a perceived need to save 'dying' central cities from economic oblivion."

In China it "could not be more different." Its cities, like Beijing, "have been the engines of China's explosive economic growth." And areas, such as the hutongs, are "being redeveloped precisely because there is such a huge demand for downtown living."

"In the four decades since Beijing's walls were destroyed," Campanella writes, "the capital has been transformed from a city steeped in history" to one that is "constantly torn apart and rebuilt."

Yet, he continues, "even in this contingent and provisional city, the past lives on in haunts and traces - and in a number of virtual reconstructions."

But for the outsiders who found the older Beijing, Evelyn Waugh put it best: "I rejoice that I went when the going was good."

Michael Kenney is a freelance writer who lives in Cambridge.