Throwback Thursday: Whispers of a Brickening From 10 Years Ago

Joey Knotts theBeijinger

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Throwback Thursday takes a look back into Beijing's past, using our 12-year-strong blog archives as the source for a glance at the weird and wonderful of yesteryear.

There are far fewer foreigners in Beijing now who have been around long enough to lament the infamous remodeling of Qianmen Dajie than there were a decade ago, but at that time the wound was still fresh in the minds of the Beijinger readers. "Qianmen is a monstrosity now," wrote one blog commenter, while our own Dan Edwards described the reconstruction at the time as “a project frequently cited as a glaring example of how not to modernize historic zones." Even the usually sycophantic Global Times had a few jabs, writing, "...the model of the Qianmen street ... was transformed into a [sic] Old-Beijing-themed strip mall that even its developer disavows."

Wangfujing pedestrian street as seen at night

The Qianmen transformation, born out of the 2008 Olympics as a way to show off the Beijing’s modernization to the massive influx of visitors the city was about to receive, turned the street from a mixed-use urban shopping, dining, and residential center with a feeling of genuine history into a 'Qing Dynasty Disney' with plans for an Apple Store that never came to fruition.

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In retrospect, this may not sound like a perfect parallel to the more recent 'Great Brickening' in which bars and stores in the Gulou-area hutongs were forced to close, their doors bricked up, leaving behind a mostly quiet, residential maze of alleyways. But a dip into our archive reveals that the fear that Gulou might become the next Qianmen was harbored by preservation-minded Beijingers as far back as ten years ago, even though the piles of bricks at the ends of the hutongs did not mysteriously appear until 2016.

Hutongs north of the Drum Tower demolished in 2009 also gave credit to rumors that change was coming

It was in March 2010 that a meeting on Gulou “redevelopment” was announced and later canceled. Specifically, the meeting was meant to be a public discussion on a proposal for the 'Beijing Time Cultural City,' which, bizarrely, would have been built underground. Still, it would likely have still resulted in the demolition of many above-ground buildings in the neighboring alleyways. Some of the area’s shop owners and residents fretted not only that they would lose their home or business, but that the area would lose its "historical feel."

Fortunately, talk of a commercialized underworld beneath the Drum Tower drew too much attention, causing the police to put a stop to the meeting due to excessive publicity. It was a key turning point in the history of the area's redevelopment – what is now remembered by many foreigners as the end of the hutong bar era might have been much worse.

Yet, the writing on the wall ten years ago this month did foreshadow deep and significant changes to life in Beijing, and not just for historic alleyways. It was also the month that Google began to redirect its search in China. Meanwhile, the leftovers remain, as the likes Modernista, The Other Place, and Bing.com have all survived.