The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed

Together, they are the backdrop to a vanishing way of life.

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He crouches, looks up, rises, makes a small bow, and yells, “Good morning, Teacher Plumblossom!”

British attaché recorded that in 1865 Lord Stanley sneered, “Peking’s a giant failure, isn’t it? Not a two-storied house in the whole place, eh?”

The job was a voyeur’s dream, but a bad one.

healthier than living in a high-rise apartment. The concept is called jie diqi in Chinese, “to be connected to the earth’s energy.”

It is Beijing’s—if not the world’s—densest urban environment.

A Beijing courtyard home, in contrast, turns its face inward, hiding its most attractive features behind gates and walls.

The former campus—where I had spent two of the happiest years of my life—had been erased.