Gulou demo

The Zhonggulou neighborhood, better known as Gulou, is slated to be demolished to restore the original size and outlook of the Drum and Bell Tower Square in Dongcheng district.

A sign in the window of the House Levy Field Office in the Gulouwan Hutong reads, "In the Zhonggulou neighborhood, we have been old neighbors. In the Shaoyaoju compound, we will be friendly neighbors."

Shaoyaoju in Chaoyang district is the new residence area where the 136 households from 66 courtyards are to be resettled, according to the Dongcheng district government.

Outside the office, on one of its walls, posted demolition and compensation plans have been torn down, an evident protest to the new plans.

The district government announced in a press conference earlier this month that the 66 courtyards in Gulou Dongdajie and Xidajie, Zhonglouwan Hutong and Doufuchi Hutong are to be torn down because they are illegal structures built in the 1970s and have almost no historical value compared to more authentic courtyards in other parts of the city. The demolished area will be used to restore the square and widen roads. The move is also intended to improve the living conditions for residents of the cramped courtyards.

Since the announcement of these plans, Gulou has been in the spotlight, with activists accusing the government of destroying the city's cultural heritage.

The Drum and Bell Tower neighborhood dates back 700 years when the towers were first constructed to help locals keep time. They ceased to function in 1924, and then became a historical and cultural site thanks to the Drum Tower's unique wooden structure. Nowadays it is one of the few lively neighborhoods in Beijing that showcases the authentic, old Beijing lifestyle in hutong, and therefore a popular tourist site for both domestic and foreign tourists.

Views are mixed on whether the courtyards should be demolished to make way for a larger square. Long-time resident Chen, in her 60s, who lives in on one of the houses in the No. 64 courtyard of Zhonglouwan Hutong, was loading her family's furniture onto a truck on Friday afternoon. She's part of the one-fourth who has accepted the compensation deal.

"The houses should really be demolished because they are too shabby to live in. They are not proper courtyards as there is no yard at all," said Chen, who shared a house of 30 square meters with the four generations of her family. "My mother-in-law is quite happy to move since she has never lived in an apartment before."

Wu Wei, an amateur photographer and real estate developer from Beijing, disapproves of the plan. Wu has made several visits to the area since he heard of the latest renovation plan and took Friday afternoon off to take some photos while the natural light was good.

"The Gulou neighborhood is an architectural complex and what it shows is the vivid, everyday life of native Beijing people. A historical place should be about the people living there," said Wu.

"Even though people here are living in cramped houses, they are still striving to make a better life, and that is the human side of old Beijing," Wu said, pointing to several foam-padded boxes placed outside of one courtyard and filled with earth to grow plants and vegetables. "See, that is what old Beijingers are like. They are trying to make a happy life for themselves and those are the scenes that me and my follow amateur photographers would like to capture."

"I would call it 'Qianmenization,' and the renovated Gulou will take the same fake outlook of the renovated Qianmen area," said a local café owner originally from France who asked to stay anonymous. Having run his Gulou-based business for more than two years, he is reluctant to move and is still looking for a new location. Rent in the neighboring area of Nanluoguxiang is much higher than his current place.

News about the renovation of Gulou has been going around for some time. Rumor had it in 2010 that the area would be converted with a 5-billion-yuan budget into a "Beijing Time Cultural City," comprising of restaurants, parking spaces and a museum about timekeeping technology. The plan was scrapped because of a "last-minute shift in upper-level city management that realigned the necessary guanxi," according to an article in the April 2012 issue of Time Out Beijing.

New plans to simply restore the square have aroused suspicion among both cultural heritage experts and locals, and rumors are circulating that the demolished area will eventually be converted into modern, expensive courtyards.

Although locals have been ordered by the Dongcheng district government to move out by February 23, there is no fixed timetable for the renovation or any design plans made public.

The Dongcheng Commission of Urban Planning said it has all the required legal rights to seize the houses, and that design plans would only be mapped out after the courtyards had been cleared out, according to a Beijing News report.

He Shuzhong, founder of the Beijing Cultural Heritage Protection Center, accused the local government of having ulterior motives. He told Metro Beijing last week that the move is "tourism development done under the banner of preserving historic relics" and that history and culture will be destroyed in the process.

"The government overlooked that the houses are also one important component of the whole hutong complex and it would do no good to preserve the city's cultural streets if they are torn down," He said.

A female in her 60s surnamed Zhang lives in a hutong near Zhonglouwan and has strong childhood memories of the area. She said the square was about the same, 4,000-square-meter size it is today when she was growing up and the only difference is that it was a more lively place for locals back then.

"When I was a child, the square was scattered with storytelling folk artists and stands selling different snacks," Zhang said. "The square was not that big, but it had the atmosphere of living in a hutong. If they are going to build a new, modern square, I'm sure it won't have the same atmosphere as before."