The story continues
Via cityofsound, Justin O’Connor’s Shanghai Diary #2
…The Forbidden City is in fact a city, not just a palace complex. And there is a sense there, an hour’s drive from the Great Wall, of Planet China. It is a capital established by invaders - Genghis Khan et al - and adopted by the next two dynasties - one of which was also an invader. It was the South, on the Yangtze where Chinese culture was held to thrive - where the mandarins and the literati ruled, not the court Eunuchs. But it remained the capital - here power counts…
…In Beijing the hotel in which I stayed was in the middle of an area of very small one floor houses grouped in quadrangles - Hutongs. Some of these date back to the Ming but most to the Qing dynasty (ie. between 15th and 19th centuries). They were being knocked down as I was there, to make a road to the Olympic Village. They were about 20 minutes walk from the historic centre. One would be there one day and as we passed the next - they were broken, exposed, intimate spaces revealed, wallpaper flapping in the breeze. Looking through the dark alleys into the interior, past sillouetttes of bicycles leant against the wall, a glimpse of window ledge with plants, washing out to dry, old men sitting and staring. The streets in the Hutong district were living rooms - people sat out, lay on camp beds, watched TV, played cards…
Shanghai is another country, and it is a new culture - that of the city dweller. You travel for miles. Then the agricultural plain gives way to big buildings. You arrive here and gawk… Shanghai sprawls, and it multiplies its densities in fractile complications and infills… The new buildings clear a space and leave the rest. Into the gaps and crevices left behind, and into those newly newly created, creep the new uses, the infill uses. Those areas which - aside from designated tourist zones and shopping malls (difficult to tell them apart) - represent the limited, provisional public space in the city….