That was Beijing
China’s Communist modernisers are wrecking the capital
ON SEPTEMBER 7th they started knocking down the courtyard house of Cao Xueqin, the 18th-century author of “The Dream of the Red Chamber”, China's greatest novel and one that occupies a bigger place in Chinese hearts than “Madame Bovary” or “Anna Karenina” do in French or Russian ones. The house was in the way of yet another soulless road that Beijing's municipal authorities want to drive through a centuries-old neighbourhood of narrow alleyways, called hutong in the Beijing dialect, to the south-east of Tiananmen Square.
This article appeared in the Asia section of the print edition under the headline “That was Beijing”
From the September 9th 2000 edition
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