Down at the far end of Tiananmen Square, opposite the grandiose Forbidden City and Great Hall of the People, both built to larger-than-life scale to intimidate the mere citizen, and past the Mao-soleum, ditto, a warren of alleyways and lanes shuffles off to the east. Built to intimately human scale, this hutong, or old traditional neighborhood, is the subject of a book written with extraordinary warmth and good humor, called The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Back Streets of a City Transformed, by Chinese-speaking American school teacher Michael Meyer.
On our most recent visit to Beijing, Olympic trinkets were all the rage. Precisely those Olympics, and the rush to modernize Beijing in time for the games, caused the downfall of many of these old traditional neighborhoods. Meyer rents an apartment (sort of), in a hutong, becomes a teacher at the neighborhood school and tells us the stories of his friends and neighbors with grace and a really good nature. You're pretty sure you'd like Meyer if you knew him.
In this photo, from the China Gallery at EarthPhotos.com, we're just about bowled over by a man carrying a tub of water out of his food shop in the hutong just southeast of Tiananmen Square.
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