Memory Lanes

Amid the frenetic activity and architectural upthrust of contemporary Beijing, there’s one place where you can still walk and barely see a car, and where people play ping-pong outdoors and sip tea in their slippers. In the Back Lakes district, fat orange fish burp in the water, pagodas peel, and you feel you’ve stepped into a China long forgotten.

The Back Lakes or Houhai district lies just north of the Forbidden City in central Beijing. It was once home to courtiers and master craftsmen who depended on imperial largesse, and who built large residences arranged around central courtyards hidden behind high walls, which created narrow walled laneways called hutongs.

While the Forbidden City and Summer Palace showcase history on a grand scale, the Back Lakes are a last remnant of imperial China writ small. In a buzzing city of vast apartment blocks and shopping malls, this is one of few places to see Beijing’s locals enjoying a more laidback life – reading newspapers, fishing from bridges and poking around markets.

The committed can stay in the Back Lakes and avoid Beijing’s monster hotels. Retro chic has come to some old courtyard residences converted to boutique accommodations, such as Han’s Royal Garden Hotel, with its red lacquer doors and antiques. The revolutionary optimism of 1950s China is recreated among period furniture and Maoist kitsch at Red Capital Residence, which even offers a city tour in Madame Mao’s old limousine.

The Back Lakes lie just beyond Di’anmen East Road, where taxis drop you into a horde of pedicab drivers. You’d do best to ignore them, since they’re accustomed to pedalling high-tipping American tour groups around. Besides, this area is about slow appraisal and good walks. Although you’ll find a few temples, defensive towers and small museums, Prince Gong’s Mansion is really the only significant sight. The mansion was built in 1777 by a court favourite and brings together a collection of cedar-wood pavilions set in traditional Chinese gardens of pocket-size ponds and covered walkways.

Other than that, the Back Lakes make a pleasant change from Beijing’s serious cultural sightseeing. Families will appreciate the chance to let their kids run about, ride bicycles or take to swan-shaped rowboats. The district’s walled alleyways and lakeshore promenades are virtually traffic free, so you only need look out for bicycles and pedicabs.

Looping around all three lakes on foot will take you several hours, but if you don’t have time, walk to humpbacked Silver Ingot Bridge, where two of the three lakes meet in a charming vista of waterlilies and willow trees. Little seems to have changed since an eighteenth-century emperor declared it one of the city’s Eight Great Views.

Take time to visit the lakeside house of Song Qingling, wife of first Chinese president Sun Yat-sen. The Communist sympathiser was given the mansion by Chairman Mao after her husband’s death and lived here until 1981.

It’s a fascinating shrine to a doctrine now all but vanished, though the 1950s Communist décor it displays is making something of a nostalgic comeback in contemporary China. Couples favour the residence’s gardens for their wedding photography, posing in Qing Dynasty pavilions set among willows and cypress.

In the old day, various Back Lakes streets were named for the goods sold there, such as Fresh Fish Alley or Tobacco Lane. These days, residents shop for knobbly eggplants and packets of pumpkin seeds at street stalls, or poke through ingredients for traditional Tibetan medicines. Visitors can rummage in shops for ceramic teapots, Tibetan jewellery, calligraphy scrolls and memorabilia from the Cultural Revolution. 

The shopping is informal and old-fashioned. At first glance, the same might be said of the dining. 

The western shore of Front Lake is lined by the bamboo chairs and dusty potted plants of eateries dishing up ho-hum food, though in late afternoon they make for a scenic perch as you enjoy a cold beer and snacks.

Hunt down alleyways instead and you’ll find better eating options. At Private Kitchen No. 44 you’ll find tasty Sichuan and Guizhou food, such as eggplant in pepper sauce or spicy shrimps. In Dali Courtyard, a lovingly renovated courtyard residence, you can sit under swaying red lanterns and tuck into Vietnamese-influenced southwest cuisine, such as papaya salad and chicken with pineapple.

Evening can be lovely in the Back Lakes, not just for a stroll but a night out, with scores of petite bars to choose from. This is the fun of the Back Lakes district. You can slurp noodles from a simple outdoor eatery table or sip lurid cocktails to the sultry sounds of an in-house DJ.

You can do both within minutes of each other along Lotus Lane, which is lined with popular bars glowing with the latest videos of Korean pop sensations and along South Luogu Lane, the prettiest of Beijing’s hutongs.

This 800-metre laneway east of the defensive Drum and Bell towers got its first polishing prior to the Beijing Olympics as a showcase of sensitive preservation, even though many other hutongs went under the wrecking ball. It was laid out in 1267 and preserves a Yuan Dynasty urban landscape virtually intact, now discreetly housing tiny student and expat bars. Along this lane, red lanterns hang from upturned eaves and the centuries unwind. Above the distant hum of the city a songbird in a cage trills, a lovely lament to an old Beijing almost obliterated.