The Last Days of Old Beijing -- Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed by Michael Meyer, Walker & Company, $25.99, 355 pages, ISBN #0-8027-1652-0, Index, bibliography, source notes, appendix, b&w images sprinkled through text.
Sadly, progress across the world seems to be the enemy of community. Perhaps quotation marks should bracket the word progress, since new physical construction too often enriches the few to the expense of the many. In his new book, Michael Meyer demonstrates how this principle has played out in pre-Olympics Beijing.
Meyer's symbol of social change is the "hutong," "derived from either a Mongolian word for 'a path between tents' or a Chinese one describing narrow passageways in Genghis Khan's thirteenth-century capital..." Hutongs used to knit together "communities of interconnected courtyards and marketplaces, shaded by locust trees and barely wide enough for a vehicle."
Whatever one's background, the concept resonates, as one imagines a setting in which neighbor can relate to neighbor and family to family. But though several thousand hutongs existed as recently as 1949, Meyer reports than some 600 lanes a year are being torn down "to make way for Wal-Marts, shopping centers and high-rise apartments." Now less than 1,300 in Beijing remain.
