The Hutongs
These pictures are from the rick shaw tour I took of the Hutong area of Beijing. The Hutongs are the old, old, old style of Beijing architecture, which many people still live in. This place is extremely fascinating. The buildings were constructed during the Mongol rule, and they're all laid out along a grid format. They're basically rectangular, with a long row of rooms, a corner, a short row of rooms, a corner, a long row and a short row. Little courtyards are in the middle of the enclosure.
The top two pics are by Jake, while moving along (albeit slowly) on his rick shaw. I think they really capture what it was like for me and him to just sit back and marvel at these buildings, which are unlike any dwellings I've ever seen back home.
The third picture down in this row is of us sitting with Mr. Woo. The first leg of the Hutong tour ended with a stop at Mr. Woo's house, where we got to go into one of these little Hutongs and see what it was like, as well as meet an ordinary Beijing citizen (meaning, an ordinary government approved Beijing person). Mr. Woo is very nice. He used to be an arhcaeologist, and did radio-carbon dating on artifacts. He's now retired, and spends most of his time gardening out in his courtyard. He actually owns the deed/property rights to his particular Hutong, which is kind of rare these days. According to our guide, the cultural revolution sort of lumped many different people together in these little Hutongs, and so property rights became a huge headache for the government when reforms kicked in years later. Also, I must note here, just to make our guide (and most likely the government) happy, Mr. Woo does indeed have a COLOR TV. The guide must have mentioned it like five times in the span of two minutes.
The fourth pic down was an impromptu pic that I got Jake to take. Basically we were winding down our tour of the Hutong area, and our guide was about to take us to our THIRD tea ceremony in two days, in the garden of some old noble's palace. When we got out of the rick shaw we saw this really cool statue of this soldier. So I told Jake, "Hey, why not get a pic of that?" And as he was getting the photo, I got our guide to tell us what the story was ... It seems that there was a famous general who lived in that part of town awhile back. And one of his soldiers saw a girl drowning in the river (this place was right next to the river), and he jumped in to save the girl's life. But, alas, the soldier died in the process. The general really liked the soldier who made this ultimate sacrifice, so he convinced the government to put up a statue in honor of the hero who saved the girl from drowning. Neat, huh?
The final pic is of the rock garden in the noble's palace, right before we got hit with another tea ceremony.
