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The Last Days of Old Beijing
Michael Meyer
Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed
Walker & Company
July 2008
On Sale: June 24, 2008
368 pages
ISBN: 0802716520
EAN: 9780802716521
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction History
A fascinating, intimate portrait of Beijing through the
lens of its oldest neighborhood, facing destruction as the
city, and China, relentlessly modernizes. Soon we will be able to say about old Beijing that what
emperors, warlords, Japanese invaders, and Communist
planners couldn’t eradicate, the market economy has.
Nobody has been more aware of this than Michael Meyer. A
long-time resident, Meyer has, for the past two years,
lived as no other Westerner—in a shared courtyard home in
Beijing’s oldest neighborhood, Dazhalan, on one of its
famed hutong (lanes). There he volunteers to teach English
at the local grade school and immerses himself in the
community, recording with affection the life stories of the
Widow, who shares his courtyard; coteacher Miss Zhu and
student Little Liu; and the migrants Recycler Wang and
Soldier Liu; among the many others who, despite great
differences in age and profession, make up the fabric of
this unique neighborhood. Their bond is rapidly being torn, however, by forced
evictions as century-old houses and ways of life are
increasingly destroyed to make way for shopping malls, the
capital’s first Wal-Mart, high-rise buildings, and widened
streets for cars replacing bicycles. Beijing has gone
through this cycle many times, as Meyer reveals, but never
with the kind of dislocation and overturning of its storied
culture now occurring as the city prepares to host the 2008
Summer Olympics. Weaving historical vignettes of Beijing and China over a
thousand years through his narrative, Meyer captures the
city’s deep past as he illuminates its present. With the
kind of insight only someone on the inside can provide, The
Last Days of Old Beijing brings this moment and the ebb and
flow of daily lives on the other side of the planet into
shining focus.
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