New Language

Remembering the old ways

By Qin Zhongwei
Updated: 2011-05-17 07:55

The Hutong Zhang Peking Traditional Style Gallery provides a survey of the city's folk life, with a huge street sculpture as the highlight. Photos provided to China Daily

A little-known museum provides a fascinating glimpse into history, Qin Zhongwei reports.

Tourists, who can easily be overcome by the size and magnificence of Beijing on their first visit, tend to flock to central areas such as Wangfujing and Qianmen to find the city's flavor. However, a hutong museum outside the downtown area deserves more attention.

The Hutong Zhang Peking Traditional Style Gallery, at Wanping town, Fengtai district, is a 700-square-meter showroom, divided into two floors. Arguably the only museum in the city that provides a comprehensive survey of Beijing folk life, the museum displays an extensive range of objects collected by Zhang Yujun, the former curator.

From an old Dutch woman's bicycle made in 1912, to the kerosene lamps that were widely used when few households had electricity; from the red alarm clock bearing the slogan "Long Live Chairman Mao" to the old radio that still works all these objects inform the memories of Zhang, a diehard hutong lover born and bred in Beijing.

But the most eye-catching exhibit in the museum is the huge micro street scene, a project made by Zhang and his partners over eight years.

Zhang taught himself to make the clay sculpture and visited many hutong for inspiration. The 50-centimeter-tall, 100-meter-long mini-street features those time-honored shops that sold shoes, handmade hats and pickled vegetables, some of the city's landmark architecture, the vendors selling traditional snacks, the exotic merchants with their camels and all the other scenes that are part of old Beijingers' memories.

Zhang's street vividly evokes those old black-and-white photographs of Beijing streets back in the 1930s, and all the notes are written in English as well as Chinese.

The museum, which once faced closure due to the small number of visitors, will reopen on Wednesday. The museum will add more services on its second floor to attract tourists and those interested in old Beijing. Visitors can order tea and listen to traditional opera performances on its new opera stage, according to Wang Peng, the museum instructor.

There are also old toys collected by Zhang that today's children can play with. He has old wooden pistols for games of hide-and-seek, handmade slingshots for catching birds and bamboo dragonflies.

"Older people become melancholy here, as they are reminded of their childhood," Wang said. "And they were so close to nature back then.

"Probably now, most of the post-1990s generation who have grown up playing computer games will never get to know what these old toys were for."

The museum's staff members also treasure a notebook that contains messages written by visitors from all over the country, and even from overseas. The comments describe the pleasant surprise people felt when the displays reminded them of their own childhood.

"What you have shown us helps me to realize that Wangfujing isn't what real Beijing is like," wrote Xiao Liang, a tourist from Hunan province. "But this place is."

(China Daily 05/17/2011)