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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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