466 Old Beijing

Key words:

mishmash n. 混合物，大杂烩

liminal adj 过渡的

shoo v 挥手赶走

Oh, yeah. And so, to make room, some of these courtyard houses were predictably just demolished, which left an empty site for denser, taller architecture to be built up. But a lot of them were just filled in instead. 

So filled in in what sense? 

Well, as in those open courtyards I was talking about became packed with these new buildings. But of course, the hutong alleys running alongside these big residential blocks–well, suddenly there were buildings inside of the former courtyards that they couldn’t reach anymore. 

So they basically had to make more hutongs to reach everything inside. Was this, like, a planned thing, or it just kind of happened?

I mean, as far as I could tell, it really wasn’t. It was pretty organic, and residents just sort of negotiated this mishmash of remaining voids so that everybody could have at least some narrow path into and out of the complex to get to their house. And these new paths that were formed in these courtyards aren’t exactly public spaces, but they aren’t exactly private spaces either. They’re liminal spaces. Or at least that’s, I hope, why I was shooed away from one when that was in Old Beijing.