The word "Beijing", pronounced "Beijing" in Chinese, means "northern capital" in Russian. I first visited the capital of the People's Republic of China 16 years ago, when I was a fourth-year student of the History and Philology Department of the Institute of Asian and African Studies at the Lomonosov Moscow State University and completed a ten - month language internship at the Beijing Institute of Foreign Languages (now the University of Foreign Studies). Strange as it may sound, but in my opinion, I still found "old Beijing", since in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a significant part of the Chinese capital in architectural and partly in everyday terms retained many elements of the way of life of the previous times. By" former times " I mean, of course, not imperial or republican (before 1949) times. That era of urban life was defeated and "dispersed" by revolutionary cataclysms. The demolition of the ancient city walls, the redevelopment of the central part - the creation of the architectural ensemble of modern Tiananmen Square and the construction of major highways-as well as an attempt to solve the housing problem by evicting previous owners or compacting living space in traditional urban estates in the 1950s did not so much destroy the traditional urban energy system, but rather "dispersed" it, preserving However, many of its artefacts are primarily in the form of the rectangular layout of the old city oriented to the cardinal directions and the famous hutong¹ alleys, which are well known to everyone who has been to Beijing, with their unique rhythm and lifestyle.

However, in the last 10 years, as urbanization and modernization of urban life are gaining momentum, in the run-up to the 2008 Summer Olympics, urban planning policy in the Chinese capital has begun to acquire pronounced features of radicalism. There are serious concerns that this radicalism has now turned out to be aimed not just at "dispersing" traditional energy and the architectural and everyday features that embody it, but also at their purposeful and systematic destruction. Most of the ancient building blocks, mainly in the northern and central parts of the city, which survived both the redevelopment of the 1950s and the pogroms of the Maoist Cultural Revolution, simply disappeared from the face of the earth under the tracks of bulldozers, retaining only historical toponyms. Instead of the old districts, new blocks of high-rise and not very modern architecture have grown up, but not always aesthetically attractive, and sometimes simply tasteless, completely devoid of the cultural and historical flavor of the great city and with some already obvious signs of obsolescence.

A well-known British journalist, Jasper Bakker, who has worked as a correspondent in the Far East for more than a decade and a half, allowed himself to make a sharp statement at the conference on capital modernization held in Beijing in the fall of 2005, noting that, from his point of view, in the run-up to the Olympics, the Chinese authorities managed to do with Beijing, but they did not have time to create Hitler with Berlin and Mussolini with

^Hutong is a traditional name for alleys and narrow streets in Beijing and some other cities in Northern China. The word hutun is obviously of Mongolian origin and originally meant a place where a well with fresh water is located, which has ecological prerequisites for human habitation. It did not appear in Chinese until the reign of the Mongol Yuan Dynasty in China (1215-1368).

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Rome. (Listening to these words, I couldn't help thinking of Stalin's reconstruction of Moscow.) Without in any way delving into the ideological and political problems of comparing these ruling regimes, I note that the architectural programs of the great dictators of Europe date back to the first half of the XX century. Since then, humanity, having suffered irreparable humanitarian losses in wars and totalitarian revolutions, seems to have learned to appreciate its cultural past, including those embodied in urban planning traditions. In this sense, what is happening in Beijing in the last decade (regardless of whether this "skyscraper frenzy" is explained by the actual need for economic modernization or a poorly concealed thirst for imperial greatness) causes sincere bewilderment.

However, in 2002 - 2003, Beijing city planners seem to have caught on. We must assume that the serious and decisive objections of well-known intellectuals, the urban community, including the architectural and artistic community, played a certain role. Obviously, the authorities also took into account the considerations of maintaining socio-political stability in the city. The mass eviction of people from the central historical part of the city to the periphery carried out in record time almost without serious preliminary discussion of the problem with the city authorities and with more than modest compensation could not go without a hitch. Some traditional development areas to the north and northwest of the Imperial Palace, the world-famous Gugong Museum, were declared" inviolable". Restoration work has begun on the territory of these zones. And yet, in recent years, the hieroglyph chai ("under demolition"), written in white paint, has increasingly appeared on the walls of old city estates in dangerous proximity to" untouchable " zones. The process, apparently, did not end. The struggle of urban planning concepts in one form or another continues.

At the beginning of the new millennium, against the background of such large-scale and ambiguous changes in the architectural and socio-cultural appearance of Beijing, a lot of literature about old Beijing, its ancient layout, architectural monuments, the way of life of its inhabitants, the traditions of material and spiritual culture appeared on the book market of the Chinese capital. just "dissipate", and quickly disappear literally before our eyes. In fairness, it should be noted that publications of this kind have always been present on the shelves of bookstores, but in recent years they have been represented either by a few author's works of very elderly experts on the life of old Beijing from among the humanitarian intelligentsia with a pre-communist leaven (Liu Yeqiu. Huiyi jiu beijing (Remembering old Beijing). Beijing, 1996), or well-read catalogues of ancient and modern sights of the Chinese capital, devoid of both artistic charm and scientific depth, accompanied by brief expressionless comments, as well as prefaces and afterwords, designed in the ideologized and optimistic spirit of the "march from victory to victory" (Beijing Zhongguo de mingzhu (Beijing is the pearl of China). Beijing, 1993; Chihe wanle guang beijing (Gluttonous and entertaining walks in Beijing). Beijing, 1994).

The noticeable increase in the number and improvement in the artistic and scientific quality of works on the history and culture of Beijing over the past five years is encouraging and probably indicates a deep concern among the metropolitan public about what is happening to the appearance of the ancient city.²

A review of the Chinese-language literature on these issues, I think, will be of considerable interest to the Russian reader, and not only for Orientalists. As far as I know, there have been no similar publications in the Russian press so far. Unfortunately, the limited scope of the journal publication does not allow us to cover the entire volume of literature that has appeared in the last five years in China and devoted to the history and culture of the northern capital of the country.-

² I would venture to suggest that, taking into account the peculiarities of the mechanism of making both political and many other fundamentally important decisions in modern China, such a surge of interest in the capital's past in popular science literature may indirectly indicate that the party and state leadership, at least some of it, is aware of the ambiguity of accelerated economic modernization with the loss of historical and cultural originality and color. In any case, there are signs that the historical memory of society is somehow resisting...

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³. In the proposed review, I will mention only a number of the most interesting and at the same time the most typical, including serial, publications that were published in 2002-2006.

In 2002, the literary series "Library of Folk Customs and History of old Beijing - Tuere"⁴.

The most interesting books in this series, first of all from the point of view of a holistic acquaintance with Beijing, are two books by the capital's local historians Gao Wei and Chang Renchun, " A Leisurely Conversation about the city of Beijing "and" A Courtyard with four Walls. The brick and tile culture of Beijing."

Quite significant in volume (400 pages), the first of these publications simply, but quite scientifically and quite artistically tells about the history of Beijing urban planning from ancient times to the present day. The book consists of ten chapters and begins with a story about the concept of the city in traditional Chinese architecture.⁵ The northern imperial capitals consisted of a square or short rectangle of high and thick walls with a large number of entrance gates on the sides of the perimeter, oriented to the cardinal directions and checked against the tenets of Feng shui (lit.: "winds-waters"; Chinese geomantics). The focus of the planning space is also the square and walled palace of the supreme ruler. To the left of the main southern exit gate to the palace was the temple of worship of cereals (prayers for the harvest), and to the right - the ancestral temple of the ruler's family. To the north of the palace, in the space between its northern wall and the city's northern wall, there was usually a market. The very ancient Chinese word chengshi ("city") consists of the hieroglyphs" wall "and" market", which means"market surrounded by a wall". The history of urban development in the territory of modern Beijing dates back to the Zhou Dynasty (XI century BC), when the legendary Wu-wang singled out the Yan Kingdom as a large appanage, which absorbed the small and very ancient Dozhou Ji kingdom located in this area. It was here, in the place where the Yang and Ji coalesce, that the history of the future northern capital began. The characters Yan and ji are still present in Beijing's toponymy.

However, Beijing really became the largest capital city, a medieval eastern metropolis, a political and administrative center, the center of economic and spiritual life during the Mongol Yuan dynasty. The victory over the "steppe conservatism" of the nomadic conquerors, achieved not without the active assistance of Chinese officials-scribes at the Mongol court, allowed the construction of the Khan's capital Khan-Balyk, in Chinese-Dadu. The city was ready by the early 1780s. One of the most active organizers and inspirers of this grandiose project was not a Mongol, but a Chinese scribe Liu Bin-zhong. It was the architectural features of Dadu (layout, construction, artistic styles of the urban ensemble) that formed the basis of the subsequent Beijing tradition.

³ Historically, there is also the southern capital - the main administrative city of the early Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), Nanjing. It was the center of the empire from 1368 to 1421, after which the second monarch of the Zhong Dynasty decided to move the capital to Beijing. In the 20th century, from 1928 to 1949, Nanjing was the capital of the Republic of China. Few Russian readers know that even after the Chinese Communist Party came to power in 1949, the decision to declare Beijing the capital was not made immediately. Nanking and Wuhan , a major city on the Yangtze River, were considered as possible options. Mao Zedong, a Southerner from Hunan Province, nevertheless insisted that Beijing become the capital of the new China. Apparently, considerations dictated by political and historical symbolism prevailed. The fact is that from a purely political point of view, Beijing in Chinese history has always been the embodiment of the majestic centripetal and state-despotic traditions of the north.

^Tuere 4 is a small clay sculpture with a rabbit's face and long protruding ears; the open mouth forms a triangle, inside which a pair of high, sharp teeth can be seen. The figurine served as a deity-an object of worship during the mid-autumn festival according to the lunar calendar, and in normal times it could serve as a children's toy or souvenir. The initiators of this series of books decided that such an uncomplicated work of folk art of Northern China can be considered a symbol of old Beijing. The original, almost childlike simplicity, the antiquity of religious custom, the baked clay as the main building material of the Chinese north, which is traditionally widespread in Beijing-all this perfectly reflects the unity of the material and spiritual culture of the ancient city.

⁵ Here we are talking about Northern China (i.e., the areas north of the Yangtze River and above all, of course, the Yellow River basin), since in the south of the country the urban planning traditions were somewhat different - perhaps less pretentious to architectural grandeur and more chaotic in layout.

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For the first five decades of the Chinese Ming Dynasty, the capital of the empire was located in Nanjing. However, the son of the founder of the house of Ming, Zhu Yuanzhang, who came to power after a brief civil strife, the second emperor of the dynasty, Zhuni, in 1421 moved the main city of the empire to the north, to Dadu, which was abandoned by the Mongols and partially destroyed. The book tells the legend of how the site of the new city was chosen by the place where the arrow of the most accurate archer of the imperial guard fell, as if on the orders of the ruler who shot his bow in the direction of the northern plains. In reality, the capital of the Zhuni shire was located near Dadu, and the Mongols retreating to the steppes, but still disturbing the northern borders of the empire, made us seriously think about the fundamental strengthening and "calming" of the borders of the settled south and the nomadic periphery. The creator of the new city project was councilor Zhuni and prominent military leader Liu Bowei. According to legend, it was he who justified the need to build a city to the northwest of the Yellow River and became its first planner. His project was based on the traditional concept of a rectangle surrounded by strong walls, the so - called inner city, with the fortified imperial palace in the center and the imperial city surrounding it, also reinforced with walls, as the location of state institutions and services of the court. Minsk Beijing was located somewhat southwest of the Yuan Khan-Balik (Dadu).

According to the legend described in the book, the plan of the new capital helped to draw various mysterious forces that appeared to Liu Bowei in the form of strange babies, then various natural phenomena. When the project was almost finished on paper - there was only the north-west corner of the outer wall to be drawn-a gust of wind shifted the plan sheet and the line of the wall in the north-west came out not rectangular, but slightly sloped to the south-west. This feature of the layout can also be seen on the modern map of the capital of the People's Republic of China: the north-western tip of the second transport ring, which runs along the line of the former walls of the Minsk inner city, really goes not at a right angle, but at an acute angle. The point, however, is not in a "gust of wind", but in the fact that in this area underground water comes to the surface and forms small reservoirs, which did not allow ancient urban planners to build a strict rectangle of the final corner of the wall.

Another feature of Minsk Beijing, also allegedly suggested by Liu Bowei "from above", was the presence of only two, not three, exit gates in the northern wall of the inner city. The third gate did not comply with the laws of Feng shui in this area and could attract "negative energy"to the city. A more materialistic explanation is probably to be found in the fact that strong winds, which still carry clouds of sand dust from the steppes and deserts of Mongolia to Beijing, usually blow from the north and northwest. It should be noted that the entrance gates of the vast majority of urban estates in the hutun lanes are also located in the south-eastern part of the courtyard, while the northern wall of the estate is a high and blank wall.

Thus, the inner city, created by the efforts of Zhong, Liu Bowei, and other emperors, architects, and military leaders, had three entrances on the southern side: Zheng Yang men in the center, Xuan Wu Men to the west, and Chun Wen men to the east. On the west, north, and east sides of the wall were two gates: Fu Cheng men and Xi Zhi men, Te Sheng men and An Ding Men, Dong Zhi men and Chao Yang Men, respectively. More than a century later, in the middle of the 16th century, the Ming Jiaqing Emperor added the so-called outer city from the south to the inner city, i.e., enclosed the city's historic settlement south of the main gate of Zheng Yang Men with a mud wall. Since the outer city wall was constructed using the remnants of the Ji and Yan fortifications of the Dochou and Zhou eras, the outer city took on the appearance of a very elongated rectangle from west to east, longer than the southern wall of the inner city. Therefore, the northern capital, which was finally formed by the end of the 16th century, looked in plan like a connection of an almost regular square with an elongated rectangle adjacent to it from the south and vaguely resembled an inverted letter " T " with strongly thickened lines.

Another feature of the reinforced fortification of old Beijing was the connection of the main towers of the city gate, located in the inner city wall, with the "arrow towers" - structures erected outside the walls of their own city in front of each gate. Thus, each entrance to the inner city was represented by-

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a circular stone sack surrounded by a high wall and locked at the ends by powerful towers. In Chinese, this fortification technique is called wencheng - "cauldron city" ⁶.

Beijing inherited all these architectural and planning features, being the capital of the last imperial (ethnically Manchu) Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) in the history of China.

The authors vividly tell about some features of urban life, such as street trading, temple markets, ice skating on the lakes of the inner city, as well as about the history and socio-cultural specifics of various districts of the northern capital. The property and administrative division of the inner city is considered in detail, which is reflected in its layout: the supreme ruler lives in the center, officials and scribes live in the western part, money people (merchants) live in the eastern part, and the poor live in the south. They talk about the solution of municipal problems, the location of city services, state institutions, parks and residences of the political and intellectual elite.

From my point of view, it is of some interest to study and discuss the location of the Imperial City walls, which were demolished long ago and are little known to today's Beijing residents. I have witnessed that the very existence of this part of the old city was questioned even by some Chinese local historians. The authors of this book vividly and evidently tell about this page of the history of traditional Beijing.

In conclusion, Gao Wei and Chang Renchun focus on the modernization projects of the northern capital. As it turns out, there were several of them.

The earliest comprehensive plan for modernizing Beijing was formulated in 1928 by Zhang Wu, a doctor of architecture who returned to China after completing his studies in Europe. Based on the need to transform the Chinese northern capital into a modern Western - style city, he proposed to demolish all the city walls and gates, leaving only the wall of the imperial palace-the "western city", and to lay an industrial zone to the south of the center and cover Beijing with a network of modern transport highways. In principle, the sound idea of expanding the city beyond the historical walls to the south was combined with clearly dubious projects of large-scale destruction of historical buildings that not only have historical value, but also determine the cultural face of the city. Part of this plan was implemented in the 1920s and 1930s. Walls and towers were gradually demolished, and a new gate-Heping Men ("Peace Gate")-was cut in the southwestern section of the inner city wall to solve the transport and pedestrian problem in this area.

The second reconstruction project was proposed in 1938-1939 by the Japanese occupation authorities. The authors of the book, of course, believe that it had a pronounced interventionist character and "was supposed to serve exclusively the interests of Japanese domination." However, the way Gao Wei and Chang Renchun describe the content of the Japanese plan suggests that, although the project was proposed by the invaders, it contained a number of quite sound ideas and, apparently, differed favorably from the concept of Zhang Wu. The Japanese planned to preserve almost the entire historical part of the old city, separate residential, tourist and park areas from industrial areas, create modern infrastructure facilities on empty squares, develop tourism in Beijing, etc.

In August 1945, the Japanese "sphere of shared prosperity in Asia" collapsed and the Chinese (Kuomintang) administration returned to the northern capital. The project for the reconstruction of Beijing, proposed by her already in the midst of the civil war with the Communists in the spring of 1947, largely took into account the unrealized considerations of the Japanese. However, this plan, probably the most reasonable and appropriate of all, due to well-known historical reasons, also remained only on paper.

After October 1, 1949, the destruction of all the walls began, the gray construction of the same type "in the spirit of industrial socialism", the clearing of Tiananmen Square, which historically never existed (in this place the walls of the inner and imperial city came closest to each other), the solution of the housing problem by "compacting" the ancient city estates, the construction of wide highways in the historical and cultural heart of the city. And then the "cultural revolution" broke out with all its consequences.

⁶ Something similar can be observed, by the way, on one section of the Moscow Kremlin wall: the walled bridge between the Troitskaya and Kutafya Towers is now the main tourist entrance to the Kremlin. Visiting Moscow and visiting the Kremlin, Beijing residents often pay attention to this, as it seems to them, exclusively North Chinese feature of the fortification.

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It seems to me that Zhang Wu's radical plan for urban modernization in Beijing, with a clear disregard for historical and cultural heritage, developed in the late 1920s, paradoxically, was most consistently implemented by the Communists. Undoubtedly, the authors of the book are aware of the price that the ancient city paid for a very dubious modernization, but they prefer not to talk about it. They mention only the metropolitan professor of architecture Zhang Kaiji, who in the early 1980s noted the inadmissibility of further destruction of historical and cultural heritage. The book ends on a sluggish and optimistic note: "With the entry into the XXI century... with regard to the preservation of traditional architecture, there are some sprouts of comforting changes ... "[Gao Wei, Chang Renchun, 2004, p. 374].

The second book of the same authors in this series (300 pages) tells about traditional Beijing city manors, which appear not just as an architectural monument, but as an integral socio-cultural phenomenon, a kind of business card of the material and spiritual culture of the main city of Northern China. At the beginning of the book, we talk about manors as an architectural and planning phenomenon; then - as a certain social tradition; then-as a way of life that has been characteristic of most Pekingans for at least seven centuries; and finally - as a self-sufficient work of art.

The name of such a manor in Chinese sounds like siheyuan⁷. This is a quadrangular courtyard, oriented to the cardinal directions and checked with the dogmas of Feng Shui, fenced on all sides with a blind brick or, more rarely, adobe wall. Along the walls from the inner side of the courtyard along the entire perimeter there are residential and auxiliary buildings-premises in a certain sequence. The courtyard in the center either remains an empty space, or has several separate courtyards separated by low walls or partitions, which can contain green spaces, small reservoirs, and decorative areas. Such construction in its various variations, not only in cities, but also in rural settlements, has a history of almost two thousand years in China, but it is in Beijing, and most likely since the reign of the Mongol Yuan dynasty, that regular quadrangular manors become the municipal planning basis of the city. "Four-walled courtyards" are also found in some other cities of Northern China - Tianjin, Datong, Shan-Haiguang, but most of them are in the northern capital. When a Chinese person hears the wordsiheyuan, he always thinks of old Beijing first and foremost.

The authors note that in addition to Siheyuan in the capital, there is also a slightly different, but essentially related type of development in Sanhefang - "three-wall courtyard". Unlike in Siheyuan, where residential and utility buildings run along the inside of all four walls of the courtyard, in Sanhefan, such buildings are only adjacent to the western, northern and eastern walls, and the southern wall is just a fence separating the courtyard from the street. In addition, sanhefan usually has no internal walls separating the empty space of the courtyard, and the area itself is noticeably smaller than in siheyuan.

The location and use of buildings and courtyard space in such estates corresponded not only to the canons of Feng Shui, but also to the sociogender hierarchy of the large related family living in the estate. The rules and conditions of traditional Confucian family socialization of a person assumed that children should leave their parents as late as possible, and ideally live with them all their lives. A person was considered not as a self-sufficient value, but as an element of a self-sufficient hierarchical world order, the foundations of which were laid in the family, while outside the walls of Siheyuan they were extrapolated to Chinese society and the state as a whole. The well-known Chinese expression shishi tongtang - "four generations living in one hall", just refers primarily to the realities of life in "four-walled courtyards".

According to the authors, the entrance to the courtyard was in its southern wall, somewhat closer to its south-eastern corner. This is explained by the fact that the plain on which Beijing stands has a certain slope to the southeast, so rainwater accumulating in the courtyard's interior naturally flowed out in a south-easterly direction and did not wash away the rest of the walls. The outbuildings adjacent to the south side of the courtyard, and therefore to the entrance, traditionally housed the family teacher's home, rooms for his classes with children, some storage rooms, and in the extreme south-western corner - a toilet (cesspool, cana-

⁷ I did not dare to leave the literal translation of this transcription, which is incomprehensible to the Russian eye and ear, as "the courtyard of the united four", and for brevity I very loosely translated it with the phrase "the courtyard with four walls".

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the ancient city didn't know whether it was alive or dead). Further, if you stand with your back to the exit and face north, the "Falling lotus Gate" (Chui hua men) appeared before the guest's eyes - a decorative entrance, behind which the construction of an inner courtyard began, thus separated from the teacher's outer courtyard. These gates were so called because in the vast majority of cases they were decorated with carved wood or stone lotus buds falling to the steps. After going up these steps through the gate, the guest got into the holy of holies-the inner courtyard. In fact, exceptional guests were invited here. The usual matters with outsiders were handled in the teachers ' courtyard.

The farthest room of the courtyard, adjacent to the inner part of the northern wall of Siheyuan, was occupied by the head of the family and his wife. In the western wing, very elderly members of the clan could live together with young ones, separately from the head of the family, who usually belonged to the middle generation. This, too, was a kind of logic of Chinese socialization: childish naivety and senile infancy at a distance from the active mature ordering principle. However, in some families, for reasons of filial piety, the middle generation gave up the northernmost wing to the very old. In the eastern wing there was a kitchen, servants lived, and there were storage rooms. In some courtyards, behind the northern wing, there was a large storage shed. The doors of all the outbuildings were very light and either had no locks at all, or opened on the principle of a sliding screen.

The lives of all generations passed under the watchful supervision of the elders in the family hierarchy. Gao Wei and Chang Renchun notice an extremely interesting detail in this regard. The main entrance to Siheyuan was an impregnable fortress, and the courtyard itself was surrounded by a blank and rather nondescript wall, which, as a rule, does not give the slightest idea of the architectural richness of the interior decoration. However, the inner wings were faced with rather wide windows and, in fact, unlocked doors to the courtyard, and thus what was happening in them was always accessible to the attentive gaze or direct presence of representatives of the older and ruling generations [Gao Wei, Chang Renchun, 2004, p. 153]. Collective socialization of a person as an element of hierarchy required an appropriate organization of living space. In the rich and large Siheyuan and sanhefangs, the outbuildings were lined with carved lacquer railings and glazed tile-covered open corridors, where children played, old people sat, and in the warmer months the owners dined or drank tea. On hot summer evenings or in the mild midday chill of autumn, the inhabitants of the courtyards often settled down on the street, outside the main gate.

The authors of this book carefully analyze the architectural and design features of the entrance gates to courtyards, depending on whether these "entrances" protruded from the wall to the street or, conversely, "sunk" in the wall; whether the "entrances" had a roof - a single-pitched or gable; whether there were carved patterned stones in front of the entrance marking the place where the entrance was located. where it was necessary to get off the horse or get out of the cart. A special architectural and artistic detail of the Beijing city manor was the permanent "wall of reflection" (inbi) - a stone slab erected vertically in front of the main entrance to the courtyard and designed to prevent evil spirits from entering the manor from the outside space. The "reflection walls" could be located both inside the outer courtyard and outside it, on the street, being at some distance from the "entrance". The walls themselves sometimes consisted of slabs standing separately at right angles with a stone pattern in the form of the same lotus flower, or they could be located at the edges of the "entrance", as if framing it. In this case, they were necessarily located outside of Siheyuan, on the street, but, despite their impressive size, they did not block the roadway.

In the section devoted to the Beijing city manor as a work of art, Gao Wei and Chang Renchun describe in great detail the decorative techniques of tiled roofs, the variety of stone and wood carvings, the types of ceramic figures of mythical and real animals designed to scare away evil forces on the glaze skates of outbuildings, the features of various methods of bricklaying courtyard walls and internal buildings, characteristics of the main building materials. The authors note, on the one hand, the discreet simplicity, on the other - the exquisite refinement of brick-tile and partly wooden decoration of old Beijing.

If at the time of the imperial capital, large related families of prominent state dignitaries and Confucian scribes lived in the described city estates, then for

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During the years of the Republic, many Siheyuan and Sanhefang became the home of a small, Europeanized urban middle class. In particular, as the authors note, many teachers and professors of Beijing universities rented apartments in such estates or even bought entire courtyards. In the first half of the 20th century, Beijing city estates became primarily a place of residence for officials, as well as scientific and creative intelligentsia. Most of the outstanding Pekingans who have left a deep mark on the history of Chinese culture for many centuries, have given many years of life and creativity to the capital's "four-walled courtyards".

Describing the fate of Beijing manors during the years of communist modernization of the city, the authors of the book quite clearly make it clear that in essence there was a socio-cultural loss of this most important slice of the capital's life. Forced eviction of former owners or "compaction of living space" at the expense of people from the outskirts or villages in general turned the former integral architectural and public ensembles of ancient estates into a kind of communal apartments with extremely low quality of housing in all respects. Restoring their former decor and atmosphere today would probably be quite possible, but it would require a huge investment and, most importantly, time, patience and cultural tact. These latter prerequisites, however, are in acute short supply, especially in the Chinese capital, which is preparing for the 2008 Olympic Games on such a large scale and in such a hurry.

Certain disadvantages of the books in the series "Library of Folk Customs and History of old Beijing - "Tuere" should, in my opinion, be attributed to their artistic design. Apparently, in order to make books as affordable as possible, the initiators of the series took the path of extreme simplification of their printing execution. Both books were published in soft, discreet covers, and the hieroglyphic text was typed on low-quality paper. A large number of black-and-white photographic illustrations are also seriously affected by printing flaws. Nevertheless, the content value of the series is indisputable.

The next book that I would like to draw readers 'attention to is the work of the Beijing local historian Wen Li" The Hutongs of Beijing " (300 pages). As far as I know, it is one of the most comprehensive studies in the modern literature on the history and street layout of the old part of the Chinese capital. The author himself was born and raised in one of the alleys of historical Beijing, which gives the story a bright personal touch.

First of all, Wen Li refers to the semantic origins of the concept of Hutong. The mention of Hutongs by the Chinese inevitably evokes associations with the history and traditions of urban planning in the north of the country, especially in Beijing, and is inextricably linked with the urban estates described above and with the special rhythm and lifestyle of the ancient northern capital. Actually, hutongs are those narrow and not very long streets of the old city, along which Siheyuan and sanhefan were located quarterly.

The layout of the streets of old Beijing, which has been preserved until very recently, was based on the construction of the Yuan capital Han-Balik (Dadu), and it is not surprising that the phonetically Sinicized hottog-hutong is still a living, linguistic, historical and architectural phenomenon. There is another explanation for the semantic origins of this concept. The Chinese character hu, used in combination with hutong, was in those ancient times a collective designation for the peoples of the northern and northwestern nomadic periphery. The Mongol invasion of China in the early 13th century and the construction of the northern capital by a foreign dynasty were perceived by the native Chinese population as an intervention and evidence of the political dominance of the Hu peoples in the central Chinese plain. The collapse of the Yuan state and the retreat of nomads back to the steppes under the onslaught of the armies of Zhu Yuanzhang, the founder of the new ethnically Chinese Ming dynasty, received the Chinese name Hutu - "exodus of the Hu peoples". The Chinese language, as you know, has a huge number of homonyms, the semantic meaning of which completely depends on the tonality of phonetics. And although the hieroglyph tun ("common"), now used in the wordhutong, which differs in tone and meaning from the phonetically similar tu ("exodus"), there is a hypothesis according to which in those distant times the Chinese, who associated the restoration of their sovereignty over the north of the country with the defeat and "exodus of the Hu peoples", began to use the concept of Hutu (hutun) as a symbol of their victory. However, as Wen Li rightly notes, explanations of the meaning of the concept of Hutong in principle do not contradict each other, since they relate to the same era and are associated with the same historical events.

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In Yuan antiquity, the author notes, hutong was a street space with a certain width of a certain size and was an independent topographic term, different from da jie ("big street") and xiao jie ("small street"). A large street should have a width of at least 24 steps (about 37 m), a small one-12 steps (about 19 m), and hutuns - no more than 6 steps, i.e. no more than 10 m [Wen Li, 2003, p. 9]. The number of Hutongs has fluctuated significantly in different eras of Beijing's history. An ancient saying from Mongol times stated that " there are three hundred and sixty known Hutuns in Dadu, and nameless ones are like the hair on a bull's skin." In Ming Beijing (1368-1644), there were 459 Hutong streets out of a total of 1,170. During the Manchu Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), there were 2,077 streets in the capital, including 978 Hutong streets. During the republican period and during the Japanese occupation, during the Second World War, Hutuns in Beijing began to be called all streets and alleys of the old part of the city, regardless of their size. Thus, according to the city register compiled by the Japanese occupation authorities in 1944, the total number ofusc-hutuns were 3,200 [Wen Li, 2003, p. 13].

Further detailing the history of the construction and layout of the Yuan capital Dadu, which formed the basis for all subsequent urban development initiatives in Beijing, the author describes the historical and architectural logic of the Hutong formation. The plan for the construction of a colossal imperial capital, created under the Mongols, but, as is known, by Chinese planners and architects led by Liu Bingzhong, assumed a high degree of hierarchy and unification of urban space. The quadrangular layout of the supreme ruler's residence, the imperial palace, and the main temple complexes of the capital, oriented to the cardinal directions, was also reproduced during the construction of a great number of the city estates described above. Thus, the city acquired a pronounced square layout with the absolute majority of large and small streets intersecting at right angles, and an extremely small number of driveways and passageways located at an acute angle or semicircle. At the same time, taking into account the fact that the main gate-entrances to both the imperial city and the numerous city estates surrounded by articulated blind walls and forming entire blocks-were located on the southern side, the longest streets (including hutuns) ran parallel to each other, stretching from west to east. On the contrary, less long, narrower and sometimes curving passages and passageways, for the most part, are located meridonally-from north to south. Thus, the traditional layout and development of the northern capital was formed.

Wen Li details the following varieties of hutong: named after specific people; named after products sold in nearby markets; named in memory of nearby architectural landmarks; named because of their own geographical location and shape (for example, "oblique tobacco bag Street" near Beijing's Shichahai Lakes). The author also describes the longest, shortest, narrowest, best preserved and other hutuns of the old city.

In conclusion, the author focuses on the reconstruction of some areas of the old city adjacent to the Drum and Bell Towers and Beijing's Shichahai Lakes, which began after 2002. Despite the grand finale, the author admits that the time may soon come when Peking alleys will finally sink into oblivion. The book does not contain a deep analysis of the historical, socio-cultural and architectural causes and consequences of this.

The work of Wen Li has a very attractive printing design and an abundance of black-and-white, excellent quality photographs of Beijing alleys from different eras. The book is accompanied by a unique map-a rotaprint reproduction of the color tourist and transport scheme of Beijing, published in 1934 by the city cartography department, indicating the location and names of all streets and alleys in the historical part of the city. It is extremely interesting to compare this edition with modern Beijing maps and diagrams.

To the northwest of the former "forbidden city" - the imperial residence, and now-the world-famous Gugong Museum-is an interesting area of old Beijing, in which the historical buildings and layout have been preserved almost completely to this day and which, judging by publications in the Chinese press in recent years, is not going to be demolished. We are talking about the quarters of hutuns and city estates adjacent to the architectural ensembles of the Drum and Bell Towers and encircling three partially natural areas.,

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two man-made lakes, united by the name of Shichahai. This is undoubtedly a very unique historical, cultural and tourist mecca of modern Beijing. Those who are coming to the Chinese capital for the first time should definitely visit these places.

Among the high-quality works of local history content that have recently been published, two books are devoted to the neighborhoods around Shichahai Lakes and the lakes themselves. The first one belongs to the pen of the historian Zhao Lin, is included in the local history series - "Records of Beijing districts: Customs, sights, cartography" - and has a concise name - "Shichahai". The second one, called more figuratively " Shichahai. A workshop that reflects tradition and youth, " wrote Beijing-based journalist Qiu Yang. These books are very different, but each one deserves attention in its own way. The first, brilliantly printed, is a detailed account of the history of the emergence of a whole chain of lakes in the center of Beijing. These reservoirs are remnants of the old channel of the once very wayward Yundinghe River, which changed its course in the 12th century.

The author of the book meticulously lists and describes the architectural and cultural attractions located in the neighborhoods near the lakes. There are more than enough of them. Here are the apartment museums of the writers Guo Mozho, Yu Dafu and Tian Jian, and the residence of the former Honorary President of the People's Republic of China, the widow of the revolutionary democrat Sun Yat-sen, Song Qingling. Parks-residences of prominent dignitaries of the Qing dynasty, princes of the imperial blood Gong and Chun, a dozen and a half Buddhist temples, as well as quite numerous urban estates of the Ming and Qing eras, which belonged to numerous and now unknown owners. In conclusion, Zhao Lin dwells on some of the folk customs that traditionally existed on the shores of the Beijing lakes - temple markets, ice sledding, the festival of ice lanterns, etc. The book is provided with high-quality black-and-white illustrations and maps of the Shichahai area from different eras. It should be noted that the language of the book is somewhat dry and in some places even official. This, however, is fully redeemed by the lack of political and propaganda pathos and the high informative content of the text. In general, Zhao Lin's work is written in the spirit of one of the traditional genres of Chinese historical literature, zhi-catalog-description.

The book of the writer and journalist Qiu Yang, not inferior to the work of Zhao Lin in the quality of printing execution, belongs to the genre of describing the monuments of Beijing history and culture of the Shichahai district, made in the style of a literary and artistic essay, because the atmosphere and landscapes of ancient city quarters near the lakes are quite suitable for this: "On the shore of a distant lake, the figure of an ancient old man will occasionally cast a shadow with the stamp of relaxed relaxation on his face, with a waddling gait, with an inner sense of fullness of life; young couples seek solitude in deserted places closer to the water, hurry up minutes to quickly plunge into the romantic warmth of feeling; kids, engaged in playful play, rush next to the sounds of laughter that accompany the fun are drowned in waves in the thick of shady trees; the long-drawn cries of peddlers at the bridge; the calls of bicycle rickshaws, bird song through the wind and the rustle of falling leaves - this is the ancient and unassuming charm of Beijing" (Qiu Yang, 2005, p.127).

list of literature

Gao Wei, Chang Renchun. Hu Yuyuan. Manman hua beijing cheng. Tuere lao beijing shidi minxu punshu (A leisurely conversation about the city of Beijing). Library of folk customs and history of old Beijing-Tuere. Beijing, 2004.

Gao Wei, Chang Renchun. Siheyuan. Zhuanwa jianchende beijing wenhua. Tuere lao beijing shidi minxu cunshu. (Four-wall courtyard. Brick and tile erected culture of Beijing). Library of folk customs and history of old Beijing-Tuere. Beijing, 2004.

Wen Li. Beijingde hutong (Hutuns of Beijing). Beijing, 2003.

Zhao Lin. Shi chahai. Beijing diming zhi, feng tuzhi congshu (Shichahai. Records of Beijing districts: customs, attractions, cartography). Beijing, 2005.

Цю Ян. Shi chahai. Chuantong yu qinchunde yinxiuan (Shichahai. A workshop where traditions and youth are reflected). Beijing, 2005.

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