Jottings from the Granite Studio

Two recent articles on historical preservation in China. The first is by Lindsey Hilsum of the New Statesman. Hilsum writes about Shanchang, a village near Macao and Zhuhai, where over 21 homes and buildings dating from the Ming and Qing dynasty have been torn down to make way for developers. The homes had originally been slated for preservation by local authorities. In fact, the only building still standing in Shanchang is a temple to the Daoist god Beidi. Now, it seems that even Beidi might be given his papers, too.

Some local residents are taking action.

“It’s unusual to have a thousand-year-old temple,” said an old lady in a sparkly pink T-shirt. “Does the country really need to tear it down? This is our gift from history.”

The scandal of Shanchang has been exposed by a local man, Wu Liufang, who asked the elders of the village about its past when redevelopment was first mooted last year. Although he had no background in history - he runs a computer support company - he was inspired to turn to the archives, where he learned that Shanchang was the earliest village in the region, a unique monument. Wu bought a video camera and began to film the intricate wooden carvings and stone work in the old citangs or “ancestor halls”, hoping to persuade the local authorities to preserve them. He was disappointed.

“I asked the cultural department, but they said they had submitted a report and it got buried in an official’s drawer,” he said. “They said, ‘What can we do? We want to keep our jobs.’”

Wu’s footage shows the bulldozing of houses that had been marked in red with a character indicating that they should be protected. He saw thieves making off with antique carvings and granite pillars.

A lot closer to home (about 3 blocks away actually) another redevelopment drama is playing itself out as the residents of Dongsi Batiao hutong fight against the steamroller tactics of developers in cahoots with local officials. Richard Spencer of The Daily Telegraph–who lives a few hutongs down from Dongsi Batiao–blogged about the proposed demolition last week. Today the Christian Science Monitor picks up the story.

At No. 21, Li Xiaoling cannot wait for the bulldozers to roll up. After 17 years living with her daughter in a decrepit one-room rental shack thrown up in the middle of an old courtyard “this is a good chance for us to improve our living conditions,” she says.

A few doors down, Xia Jie is determined to defend the traditional “four-walled yard” house that she inherited from her grandfather. “It is Beijing’s cultural heritage,” she says defiantly, “and it’s my private property.”

The conflicting interests of renters crammed into slumlike corners of the old yards on one hand, and owner-occupiers seeking to protect their patrimony on the other, makes a common front unlikely among the 90 families facing eviction from Dongsi Batiao street.

But if recent experience in Beijing’s 600-year-old hutongs is any guide, neither side can expect much satisfaction from the developer who wants to raze their homes.

City ordinances drafted to protect the capital’s historic heritage have been brushed aside by developers who are in league with local officials in search of profits, experts complain.

“There has been some enforcement of rules protecting preservation zones, but not always,” says Hou Zhaonian, deputy director of the Beijing Ancient Architecture Research Institute, a branch of the city government. “There are a lot of ‘interesting’ relationships between the authorities and property developers.”

On Dongsi Batiao Ms. Xia, whose vocal defense of her house has attracted widespread attention from Chinese journalists and bloggers, says she found evidence of such collusion when the developer seeking to evict her called her on her private cellphone number.

Investigating this breach of her privacy, she says, she found that the local government heating bureau had provided the company with details of all residents on the street.

The Monitor was also granted an interview with Bai Hua, the vice president of the development company overseeing the project. Bai insists that the new plan will incorporate traditional architecture including new ‘renovated’ courtyard homes (the kind that only rich Chinese, foreigners on an expat package and Wendi Deng can afford) and that the development does not violate any protection ordinances. Except that the project DOES violate the ordinance. Section 61, Article 1 of the “Old City Preservation Regulations,” stipulates that the traditional style, characteristics, and unique feature of the Qing/Ming city be preserved for a 7.8 km zone centered on a north-south axial running between Gulou/Zhonglou and Yongdingmen. (保护从永定门至钟鼓楼7.8公里长的明清北京城中轴线的传统风貌特色). I’m sure the statute is open to interpretation, but the company has already ripped down all of the buildings on Dongsi Jiutiao–including a Ming Dynasty temple–to make room for the project. I’m guessing that they’re not huge history buffs at the development office.

But I have to admit I’m impressed that Bai even went on the record, it’s the smart thing to put out your own spin when under attack, but Chinese companies facing negative publicity in the past have not been…particularly forthcoming as a general rule.

As the Monitor notes, this is an issue with many shades of gray. Reducing it to “heroic residents” and “evil capitalists and their corrupt official cronies” might do well for a revolutionary opera but life in Beijing is rarely so simple a story. Some residents want to move. Some residents want to move but want more compensation and time. Other residents want to stay and remain part of the hutong community.

I jog down Dongsi Batiao every morning. The area tagged for demolition isn’t the most attractive part of the hutong. (In fact, the buildings to come down include no less than three “barbershops.”) But people DO–or did–live in the other buildings. We walked around the hutong last Sunday evening, it’s a real community. YJ remarked nostalgically about how the hutong reminds her of growing up with everybody sitting just outside the door of their houses swapping gossip, eating dinner, the old guys chugging baijiu and making bawdy jokes…on the other hand, she’s less nostalgic about sharing one bathroom with the whole neighborhood so it cuts both ways.

But the fact is: Beijing is losing its historic architecture at an alarming rate. More troubling still is the heavy-handed manner in which such redevelopment is being carried out. Whether they want to move or not, residents face the combined forces of developers and local officials so corrupt in some cases that they walk around with a permanent dusting of lint from having spent so much time in the developers’ pockets.

For people interested in the issue of historic preservation in Beijing, the community at the “Lao Beijing” website (mentioned in the Monitor story) is devoted to saving the hutongs and the historical architecture of Beijing.

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UPDATE 5/28: Xinhua is reporting this morning that the proposed demolition of Dongsi Batiao has been suspended pending further negotiations with local residents over issues of compensation.