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A Walk Through Beijing's Vanishing Hutongs

Michael Meyer has a local peddler fix his shoe in DaZhalan, a 600-year-old neighborhood in Beijing.
Frank Langfitt/NPR
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Michael Meyer has a local peddler fix his shoe in DaZhalan, a 600-year-old neighborhood in Beijing.

Beijing is a city of contrasts: It has dazzling Olympic venues as well as the ancient city, a maze of homes and alleys, called hutongs, that are rapidly being demolished to make way for high-rise development.

Michael Meyer, 36, is a former Peace Corps volunteer. He lived in Beijing for years, but says he felt detached from the city. He then moved to a hutong and finagled a job as a teacher in a local, hutong school.

Out of that experience came his book, The Last Days of Old Beijing.

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Frank Langfitt
Frank Langfitt is NPR's London correspondent. He covers the UK and Ireland, as well as the war in Ukraine and its implications in Europe. Langfitt has reported from more than fifty countries and territories around the globe.