09/05/2025
BEIJING
The Last Hutongs of Beijing
In the autumn of 2018, Li Wei, a young photographer from Shanghai, arrived in Beijing with a mission: to document the city’s vanishing hutongs—the ancient alleyways that once defined its soul. Skyscrapers and shopping malls now dominated the skyline, but tucked between them were pockets of old Beijing, where neighbors still shared courtyard homes and bicycles clattered over uneven stones.
One morning, in a narrow hutong near Gulou, Li Wei met Grandma Zhao, an 85-year-old widow who had lived in the same brick house since the 1950s. Over steaming cups of *jasmine tea*, she told him stories of the neighborhood—how children used to fly kites from rooftops, how the sound of street vendors once filled the air, and how most of her friends had moved away when developers came.
“They call it progress,” she sighed, pointing to a half-demolished wall where a luxury apartment complex was rising. Li Wei’s camera captured the cracks in the old beams, the fading Mao-era slogans, and Grandma Zhao’s wrinkled hands holding a black-and-white photo of her family.
On his last day, as Li Wei packed his gear, he noticed a red chai —“demolish”—character painted on Grandma Zhao’s door. She smiled sadly. “Even memories must make way for the future.”
Months later, Li Wei’s exhibition, "Fading Beijing," drew crowds. But the photo that moved people most was of Grandma Zhao’s empty courtyard, a single persimmon tree still standing—its branches stretching toward a skyline that no longer remembered her
