A Brief History of
Beijing's Hutong
 Hutong
refers to an ancient alleyway unique of Beijing with siheyuan or
''4-sided house" on both sides.
The name hutong dates back to the Yuan
Dynasty (1279 - 1368 A.D.). According to some experts, the word originated
from the Mongolian language, in which it is pronounced as hottog
and means "well." In ancient times, people tended to gather and live
around wells. So the original meaning of hutong should be "a place
where people live around".
Another explanation, however, is completely
different, saying that hutong derives from the Mongolian word
huotuan meaning passageway. After Kublai Khan and his men swept across
China and moved the capital of the vast Mongol empire from Karakorum,
Mongolia, to present-day Beijing (thus the beginning of the Yuan Dynasty),
the city was divided into 50 residential sections each with its own
administrative head. Between these sections, there were passageways for
people to travel through as well as functioning as isolation zones against
fire risks. In Mongolian, passageways of this kind were called huotuan.
The two explanations are quite different, but
they have one thing in common, i.e., they both agree that the word
hutong came from Mongolian. It has now been generally accepted that
hutong first appeared in the Yuan Dynasty.
During the last Chinese dynasty, Qing
(1644-1911), Beijing boasted a total of 2,077 hutong. An estimate
in 1944 put the number at 3,200.
Soon after the Communists took over China in
1949, Beijing witnessed rapid urban redevelopment when the historic city
wall was all but destroyed while the number of hutong continued to
grow due to construction of new residential areas. But in recent years,
the number of hutong has experienced sharp decline as a result of
rapid economic expansion. To preserve this ancient cultural heritage, some
of Beijing's hutong with distinctive characteristics have been
designated as historic heritage sites under the protection of the state.
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