China - Part 5 - Zhonglouwan Hutong

Our journey continues as we arrive at, and enter, a hutong.

This was one of my favorite tours on our entire trip. I'm not sure why, other than most Americans have probably seen movie scenes that have been shot in various hutongs across China.


The word "hutong" comes from the Mongolians and originated, roughly speaking, about 700 years ago. The original  word was hottog, (mmmmm... hot dogs...) meaning " water well." Loosely translated,  it means a place where people live because people tend to gather where water is found. In more recent times in Beijing, the word hutong has taken on the meaning of small alleyway or lane. Typical of the older parts of Beijing and formed by lines of siheyuan (a compound made up of rooms around a courtyard ) in which a good majority of Beijing residents used to live. 

The hutong we toured, they claimed, dated back almost those entire 700 years. They had the big wall around their particular area of the city and that essentially formed their neighborhood. Our tour guide said that there is virtually no crime in the hutongs because everybody knows everybody else and any crime that's going to be committed is from an outsider and those people are rarely lucky enough to make it back to the border fences of the particular hutong that they may be attempting to violate.

Off we go!

Here we are at the entry way, or one of them, of the Zhonglouwan Hutong.  We got a briefing from 'Lotus', the woman in the green coat, about what our tour would entail and then proceeded down this alley way.  If I were being 100% honest, it was a teensy little bit uncomfortable walking down this alley at first.  We were heading towards that tall tower-like building in the middle of the photo yet it just seemed like bad things could come out of any little nook and/or cranny.  It also seemed like it took a while to get there.

This was one of many such doorways along the way in that first alley.  These are the entry ways back into courtyards that are shared by a couple of the occupants in the Hutong.  Notice the big electrical box in the upper left of the photo. There are many, many more smaller breaker boxes inside of these little doorways.  Plus, it's where they park bikes, trailers, gardening supplies and other stuff that needs to be stored.

This was on the opposite side of the alley from that last doorway pic. It was two dudes trying to keep warm over a fire in a small metal bucket.  Look closely at this photo.  The white car is a late model Toyota and the darker car was, if memory serves me correctly, a pretty recent Volkswagon sedan.  Then, you have the two guys building the fire. To the left of the guy pretending he has nothing to do with said fire, there is a chair, a couple of tv's, picture frames and various other junk leaning up against the building.  Behind him is an old bicycle, lots of cardboard and junk on the ground but notice the roof above him.  Those are some type of plant growing out of the grooves between the tiles on the roof.  So far, in the couple of blocks that we've walked, I'm not feeling 100% comfortable.

This is the tower that was at the middle of that first photo. It's a drum and trumpet tower that served some type of significance. If I recall at least somewhat correctly, the drum tower was used as a sort of clock containing 24 drums with different tones. The trumpets?  I don't know...  Word on the street has it that there was one of these in every Hutong and they face a certain direction and all kinds of other fancy stuff.

This is the community exercise equipment at the foot of the drum tower (the red banners in the background). There are several different devices for the locals organized in a big square.  The come out at a specific time of the morning to exercise, hot or cold.  There are several machines there that are more than reminiscent of the Tony Little's Gazelle.

This shot was taken with the apparatus that Robby is on in the above photo at my back.  This is looking down the main courtyard of the hutong where the have open markets and other types of gatherings, presumeably in nicer weather than what we're experiencing on this fine day.  On the far left of this photo is some kiddie playground equipment that, much like the exercise equipment, does not date back several hundred years or more.

This is walking in the same direction as the photo above this one.  Just various shops, storage and whatever else along the roadway.  There were so many things that were worthy of photographing you just had to point and click quickly to keep up with your group. You hope SOME of the photos turn out okay... and some of them did.

This appeared to be a little... ummm... convenience store of sorts.  Obviously, it was an 'open air' store and the poor fella manning the booth looked like he was freezing.  I have no idea why there is an office chair directly behind the bicycle with the veggie cart on it.

Here is another one of those little doorways like we encountered in the first alleyway.  Notice inside the doorway directly above the bikes that you can see multiple breaker boxes like I spoke of earlier.  Also, you can tell that these people were very common folks who lived through this doorway.  How you ask?  You see the two little 'posts' sticking out horizontally above the doorway?  Those are, for lack of a better term, status markings.  The more you have of those, the more important the family that lives there.

This was a one-man-farmers-market.  The dude with the bike was getting pretty animated while we were walking by. Not at us but with the guy to his left, who was presumably running this show.  The produce looked fantastic and made all of us silly Americans wonder, as our toes were freezing, where they were growing it.

We went into the real market, you know, the indoors kind.  One of the first things we encountered was the meat counter.  Okay, truly the first thing we encountered was two Chinese ladies line dancing to what sounded like Chinese country western (country eastern??) music.  They were having a good ol' time and could not have cared less that goofy Americans were walking through.  Take a gander at some of the offerings in this photo. I honestly can't tell what some of it is, but the light colored things in the middle, second row back, are chicken feet as are the darker colored items directly behind them.  Most importantly, note the sausages towards the back part of the counter!!!  mmmmm.. sausages...

This room had some of the most gorgeous produce you ever would see. Fantastic looking stuff and again, we wonder where this stuff was being grown!

Yet more produce.  I took this photo for no other reason other than to document that huge looking cucumberish thing towards the middle of the photo. It was as big as my head, to be sure!

Spices, and piles of them!  This counter smelled really, really GUUUUUUUD!!

And, as every good market in China has, more of the same old touristy stuff. I sound as if I'm speaking ill of this stuff, and ordinarily, I would be, but they really had some cool things.  The small scale terra cotta warriors were really cool and made me desire to see the real things.

And what good market doesn't have a woman riding a scooter through it?  Apparently this was no big deal as the locals did not scurry out of her way nor so much as give her a cursory glance.  Okay then.  I say it's fine as long as you don't get your exhaust on my sausage... or something like that.

As we exited the market on a flight of broken up concrete steps (note those barely at the bottom of the photo), we see what will be our convoy!  Yes, a convoy of rickshaws! In a China hutong to boot!!  Check out the bicycle wagons, and also the red sign on the building on the opposite side of the rickshaws from us. That is the Chinese Coca-Cola logo.

Here is our bulky little family crammed into rickshaw # 10.  The guy was nice enough to have a blanket to toss over us, but alas, it was not big enough to cover my toes.  Have I mentioned they were frozen?  You can see the shoe covering my right piggies sticking out from underneath the blanket.  My toes were angry for about an hour after we got back to the hotel that night.

Here is the man, or should I say, the MAN!  This man of fairly slight stature was tasked with pedaling our robust beings around the hutong and did a fine job of it.  He helped Robby and Momma off and on the rickshaw (but not me) and had to pedal like a madman at one point to catch up with our group as we were separated due to a near accident with a car whose driver was putting it into places the Good Lord never intended cars to go!

I really don't know anything about this photo because we were just pedaling on by.  Okay, WE weren't doing the pedaling, but rather our poor rickshaw driver.  The photo was snapped simple because of it's fancy decorations.

This is the doorway that we stopped at with our guide ans she explained the concept of the status markings above the door, this doorway has four, why they have such high thresholds, and also the lion on both sides of the door (you can only see the left one in this photo).  The thresholds were as high as they are because they believed that it kept little knee-high ghosts/spirits out if your door happened to be opened.  As for the lions, there is always a pair of them, one on the left side of the door and one on the right.  The left and right is determined from the owners of the house positioned inside the doorway, so the lion that you can see in the photo is technically the female.  How do we know that? Because, as the Chinese say, "woman always right". We must have heard that a dozen times...

This shot is of parents picking up their little dudes and dudettes from school.  There were some really cute little kids being picked up which kinda made the heart ache to stop this tourist non-sense and go get our Caleb.  It was interesting, some moms picked up their kids by foot, some by car, some by bike and some by scooter, but we only saw one daddy picking up a kid.

This shot, while blurry, is the only shot that was even at all decent of the "gardens" within the hutong.  There was no grass that I can recall, but many people had little tubs and pots set out to grow stuff in.  The really fancy folks had trellis made out of long branches tied together with twine. Some of those got to be quite fantastic, but alas, non of the photos turned out due to the bumpy rickshaw ride.

This is the courtyard to the house that we got to visit. When I say visit, they took us into the room just inside the white door on the left side of the photo.  The "house" wraps all the way around this courtyard and belongs to one family. The guy on the right side of the photo taking the picture has his back to a kitchenette type area. This family was wealthy so they occupied the entire space.  Most of the time, there will be several families living around a single courtyard and they may share such facilities as the kitchen/dining room and family room areas. Again, note the wiring running down the building under the awning on the left side of the photo. There is conduit, wire outside of the conduit, random breaker boxes and the occaisional junction sans a box.  That pole looking thing that runs from above the door over to the kitchen area was a form of conduit too.  Osha guys would have a heart attack within the first five minutes in places like this.

This was just inside that white door from the photo above.  On the right side of the picture was a big doorway covered with really heavy curtains. On the left side of the photo was basically what I would call a family room. It had a love seat, another pair of nice chairs, and some decorative furniture.  There were many paintings and such hanging on the walls not so unlike American homes.  The heat was VERY welcome at this point! We could have taken more photos in her house but I felt kind of weird just taking the one, so I passed. 

This is looking the opposite direction in the courtyard from the previous photo out here.  I have no idea what the room is that is behind that black door, but there were some fancy things displayed in there.

This little garden display had a specific name too but since my memory is like a steel trap... an old rusty one that never shuts...  I have no idea what it was called or it's 'purpose'.

This is still from the courtyard and the room that you can see in the background is the room off to the left side of the inside photo from above.  You can even see a couple of our fellow adopters still in the room.  While the heat was nice, I really didn't feel right being in somebody's home like that. Not only that, but a LOT of lit candles and a hyper Robby who is growing tired of the tour is not a great combination.

Our hutong tour comes to a close.  I wish all of the photos we attempted to take here would have turned out better because there is no shortage of interesting things to photograph.  I'm sure I've already forgotten plenty so I'm happy we have the photos (and memories) that we do.

So that wraps up this post. I believe the next subject on the docket is Tianamen Square and the Forbidden City. I may have to break that into two posts as well. We'll see when the time comes.

Thanks for reading!