Deep Deep Deep in the Capital

BEIJING - Here's a character all visitors to China's capital should know: 拆. Pronouced "chai," it means destroy, and it's used to mark buildings that won't be around in a month or two.

As the country's preparations for the Olympic Games climax this spring and summer, more and more older buildings are being knocked down to make way for badminton arenas, five-star hotels and fancy Peking Duck restaurants. A BBC Radio documentary I listened to on the Trans-Siberian said that last year there was more construction in Beijing than in the last three combined for all of Western Europe.

Saturday I discovered that not all of Beijing's past is being demolished to make way for the Olympics. As with most things I find, I figured this out by getting lost.

I left comfortable Wudaokou for downtown Beijing to pick up a shoe. That's no typo - I meant shoe singular. Unpacking this week, I discovered not one of the five missing items described in a recent post, and only one Garmont hiking shoe. I also found a key without a key chain. Using Sherlock Holmes levels of reasoning, I realized I'd forgotten the shoe in my hostel locker. So it was back to Qianmen for the shoe and my Y100 locker deposit.

After picking them up unharmed, I decided to head to the Beijing Books Store, a block-long Mao-ist era relic. The crowds can be crazy, the staff surly, but the selection of reasonably priced English books can't be matched this side of Delhi. From a previous visit, a knew the store was not too far west of Tian'anmen Square and set off in that direction.

I walked three blocks, three monolithic blocks of Socialist deisgn, before realizing that I was on Qianmen Lu, and the bookstore was north on Chang'an Lu. I took the first right, and within 100 meters was plunged deep into the hutong world. Here the streets aren't paved, the only bathrooms are public, and spitting apparently is still legal. Old women sold dirt cheap apples, pears and the fruit best translated in English as "apple with a banana taste."

At the tiny Zhongmu Canteen, I ordered by pointing to the handwritten characters on the wall-mounted menu. Five minutes later, a huge bowl of heeping noodles arrived from a old woman with few teeth and nearly incomprehensible Beijing dialect. The food and a large Tsingdao predictably cost less than a dollar.

Across the street from the Canteen was a large fence. Behind it the Great Hall of the People, China's main legislative building, loomed not 200 meters in the distance. Tian'anmen Square was behind that. This neighborhood borders the center of the Chinese empire, and yet life continues as if one of the largest economic booms didn't exist.

Is China's economic boom a chimera? I'm sure the only reason this hutong district hasn't been raised is some historical significance, and that soon even if the buildings remain, they'll be renovated into luxury condos. Right now, though, there's still room in the heart of Beijing to step back in time, and get lost.