Exploring the Hutong

We got to spend a hour on a bicycle rickshaw touring round the maze of alleyways in Beijing know as the hutong. This is where a quarter of Beijings population currently lives. They are rapidly being replaced however by white tile highrises at a rate of 10,000 dwellings a year. Our driver did complain about overcrowding within the hutong and the need to use public toilets. It looked very orderly and clean to me, at a glance of course, in comparison to many other countries.

The Great Beijing

June 24th 2006
From Shanghai we headed straight to Beijing. By this stage, our travels in China were starting to feel like a city tour as all we seemed to be seeing was congestion and high rise buildings. Beijing is huge and already undergoing a lot of contruction and maintence in preparation for the 2008 Olympics. In fact, we even saw a massive coundown clock, counting the years, months, days, hours, minutes an ... read more

Asia » China » Beijing

For centuries China stood as a leading civilization, outpacing the rest of the world in the arts and sciences, but in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the country was beset by civil unrest, major famines, military defeats, and foreign occupation. A... ... read more

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