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The eyewitness
Amateur photographer Zhang Wei fights to save Beijing’s hutongs with a camera
Even as this capital city and its citizens hurtle toward modernization, there are many who wish some things would stay like they were. Zhang Wei is one of them. On any given day, 31-year-old Mr. Zhang can be found wandering through a Beijing hutong, one of those centuries-old narrow lanes that once filled the city center. Armed with a camera, the amateur photographer walks the lanes, snapping the clay-tiled roofs and the wooden doorways of the courtyard homes that line the alleyways. Sometimes, he finds only rubble where once families had a home. Other times, he catches the destruction on film as it happens. He’s seen it before: His family’s courtyard home—where the Zhangs lived for 80 years—was razed by a bulldozer to make way for a five-story office building and road in June 2000. Since then, Mr. Zhang has devoted himself to preserving Beijing’s hutongs the best way he knows how, with a camera and his Chinese-language Web site, www.oldbeijing.org. He even quit his job at a public relations agency in late 2002 to focus fulltime on the Web site. “I just wanted to use this Web page to mourn for my old home, where I left all my childhood memories of growing up,” says Mr. Zhang, who photographs Beijing hutongs by day and loads the images onto his Web site at night. Not so long ago, hutongs were the main arteries of life in Beijing. They spread out from the city center—the Forbidden City—and served as community meeting places, markets, playgrounds and roads for all who lived there. This hutong way of life — which is present in other Chinese cities, including nearby Tianjin, but is unique to Beijing in its concentration — is quickly disappearing. Old courtyard homes, or siheyuan, and hutongs are being torn down to make way for shiny office towers, modern apartment blocks, shopping malls and new roads. According to a nonprofit hutong preservation group, the Beijing Cultural Heritage Protection Center, Beijing had more than 3,000 hutongs in the 1950s.The group estimates that only 1,000 remain. “Some of the hutongs have gone forever,” says Mr. Zhang. “That’s why I want to record them in the pictures.” Little did he know that many others would be drawn to his cause. On weekends, 20 to 30 people—foreign and local, students and professionals—join Mr. Zhang in the hutongs, snapping photos from different angles. Taking pictures in groups “is a kind of protest,” says Mr. Zhang, whose Web page currently hosts more than 120,000 photos of about 700 hutongs in varying conditions—refurbished, crumbling and demolished. The site draws nearly 20,000 viewers a day, says Mr. Zhang, and has 16,000 registered members. Chen Li, a 37-year-old manager at a local branch of international home products retailer Ikea, is a weekend regular. “In the oldbeijing.org, there are many kinds of people coming together with different purposes,” he says. “Some are more interested in architecture, some are lovers of Beijing culture, some are just fans of photography.” Mr. Zhang’s Website hasn’t yet saved any hutongs from destruction, but the group has raised awareness. “What we are trying to do is to catch people’s hearts,” says Mr. Zhang. The effort has cost him. In the past five years, Mr. Zhang has run through 300,000 yuan (about $44,000) in savings. Nowadays, he has to ask his parents, both of whom are retired, for pocket money (about 25 yuan a day). “I am sure what I am doing now will be justified by history,” he says. “No matter if it’s hutongs, courtyard homes, or even the ancient walls…I just think we should get them protected for our children, and our children’s children.” —Sue Feng | 
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