Restoration: An Englishman's battle to save Beijing's Ming heritage

The courtyard houses lining the elegant network of hutong passageways fanning out across China's capital Beijing are under threat, as modernisation and the Olympic construction programme sweep away thousands of homes.

These are the graceful and ancient houses beneath grey roofs made famous by Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, where kung fu warriors swept across them in hushed combat.

The courtyards are hugely atmospheric, Ming Dynasty-era places of solitude, with persimmon trees hanging over carved stone tables where for hundreds of years, scholars, nobles and bureaucrats have sat and reflected, cooled in the shade from the searing Beijing heat in summer, and protected from the worst ravages of winter by the solid walls surrounding the atrium.

Only one third of Beijing 's ancient hutongs, the alleyways along which the houses run, still exist most have been demolished or partially destroyed. Areas such as Qianmen used to house some of Beijing's oldest traditional courtyards, some dating back to the 13th century, but many are gone, removed to make way for new developments.

An Englishman, James Ledger, Hull, has made a labour of love out of rescuing some of the remaining courtyard houses. He leases the courtyards, renovates them carefully and passes them onto tenants.

"I lived in flats here but I always felt there was something missing from my life," he said. "It was because of not living in a courtyard. When I first moved in, my reaction was 'wow'."

The 34-year-old had been a derivatives trader in the City of London but had always been interested in China and the Mandarin language. "It reached the point where I wanted to do something else so I moved to Beijing three years ago. I did up a courtyard house near the Lama Temple, but it was too big, 500 square metres, so I decided to let it out. Since then I've done four courtyards and I have another three on the go," he said.

The sight of a pile of bricks where once there stood a graceful courtyard, built along cosmological lines and an oasis of calm in the bustling city, is one of the most shocking in the constantly changing city. Their history is closely linked to the hutong laneways on which they stand, and they can trace their history back to 1271, when Kublai Khan decreed that Dadu would be the capital of the Yuan dynasty.

The city was laid out in grids of streets, lanes and alleys, known as hutong, which is originally a Mongolian expression meaning "well"; in early Beijing, communities grew up in the streets leading to the wells.

During the early Ming dynasty (1368-1644), there were 458 hutongs in Beijing, rising to 978 during the Qing dynasty (1644-1911).

When the Ming rulers moved the capital from Nanjing to Beijing in the early 15th century, they also arranged the city in a rectangular street pattern, with the imperial palace as the centre. Every building had to be rectangular, including the Forbidden City, which is the largest courtyard complex in the city. The closer your courtyard lies to the Forbidden City, the greater your influence in the court, while peasants lived outside the city walls.

These courtyard houses hold great stories behind their imposing red doors, often with drum stones or Chinese lions on either side of the entrance. The courtyards were where the eunuchs of the imperial household lived. They hosted temples and bureaucratic institutions, schools and brothels. They were lined with historical columns dedicated to the unicorn. The streets outside them held markets for coal, jewellery or goats.

Each courtyard, called siheyuan in Chinese, consists of an enclosed inward looking rectangular compound with just one entrance at the southeast, and windows facing in towards the courtyard rather than out towards the street. The buildings always face south because it's meant to be good feng shui. And the inner door is never aligned with the outer door, to stop ghosts from entering.

Each is single storey and topped with grey roof-tiles, and so tightly packed that no structure shows itself fully. The Chinese believe the true beauty of a siheyuan is in the whole, the way it fits together, reflecting traditional Chinese ways of thinking.

Inside the courtyard, the south-facing building is where the patriarch would live, while the side houses facing east and west were for his sons. Women didn't rate very highly in the imperial pecking order when it came to allocating quarters.

By the 1980s, when China began opening up, there were 3,679 alleys in Beijing, but rampant development has destroyed many of these beautiful lanes. The number of hutongs has fallen 40 per cent since then as planners clear the precincts to make way for roads and gleaming office blocks.

The areas to be demolished are marked with the character chai, which means "demolish". The pace of destruction was expected to slow as 2008 neared, but new chai signs are still going up. Some of the demolition is linked to projects for the 2008 Olympic Games, but much of the old city has been knocked down.

Chairman Mao Tse-Tung started the process in the 1950s, when he moved many factories into the city. But the Great Helmsman's impact on the hutongs has been dwarfed by efforts to turn the capital into a world city, complete with world-scale office buildings in the central business district, and the signature Olympic buildings springing up on the former sites of ancient communities.

The Beijing Institute of Civil Engineering and Architecture examined 1,320 traditional streets and lanes and found 15 per cent had been destroyed to make way for new buildings. A further 52 per cent had managed to retain something of their original condition but suffered serious damage. Many traditional courtyard houses were destroyed. Only a third of the hutongs are in their original state.

Many people fear Beijing has lost something of its essence and redevelopment has not been peaceful. After the 1949 revolution, many courtyard houses were requisitioned by the Communists and turned into living areas for many families. Many who have been resettled are often happy to have left cramped courtyard houses, often with multiple families per building, for modern apartments with much-improved facilities, including indoor toilets and heating that works no more coal briquettes.

"Some of my neighbours really like the hutong life but then others say they want to get out of the flats because of things like running water, sanitation," said Mr Ledger. But they also complain that the community spirit is gone and he says one of his favourite things about living in a courtyard house is the way he can spend time with his neigbhours during summer, hanging out and drinking beer. "Then again, during the cold winter people tend to stay indoors," he said.

Alarmed that there may be nothing of old Beijing for the visitors to see during the Olympics, the government has introduced restoration guidelines, requiring hutong to be rebuilt with original materials and retain their grey colour. Many courtyard houses are being rebuilt with interior toilets, and communal toilets along the laneways have been dramatically upgraded.

The market for renovated courtyard homes is a strong one in April, a made-over home in Beijing's Xicheng district sold for a record 110m yuan (7.3). The 3,028 square metre property is on the shores of the Hou Hai, or Back Sea, in the scenic Shichahai lakeland area for 36,324 yuan (3,000) per square metre.

Ledger has no background in building but works with a French architect and has a team of builders that he has developed a good relationship with and believes the business degree he did in France gives him flexibility.

"Finding the ideal site is important it might take 50 or 100 visits, or it might take three. I visit lots of courtyards in various states of repairs, then meet the owners and get into the laws and contractual details. From there it's a matter of deciding how best to use the space is it a family or a person living alone, what are the kitchen and heating and everyday needs, make sure they're in place," he said.

At the moment Mr Ledger is working on a 500 square metre courtyard house just a couple of hundred metres away from Paul Andreu's National Theatre, the concert venue that will be one of the city's signature buildings when the Olympics roll around.

The size of the development means it will probably go to a company, and rents on the bigger apartments of this scale run between 5,000 and 7,000 a month. An individual apartment renovated to Western standards, with a floor space of around 170 square metres, costs between 1,500 and 2,000 per month. "It's not cheap but there is rarity value in what we do with them," said Mr Ledger.

"Beijing needs to retain some of its past, otherwise it becomes like Tokyo. The past is what makes a city interesting. That said, the old and the modern makes for an interesting blend. I think the courtyards are great and it's a crying shame they are being knocked down but China has to move forward," he said.

Most of the people renting the refurbished courtyard houses are foreigners there are still more mainland Europeans, such as French, Dutch or Germans, living in courtyard houses than there are English or Americans. But there is growing interest from Chinese people.

Some are sceptical about living in a courtyard house during the winter, and many fear they may end up using a communal toilet down the hutong, which is generally not the case with the renovated apartments on the market for Westerners.

Some are taking no chances, such as Rupert Murdoch and his wife Wendy, who are renovating a courtyard house in the Beichizi district, just a block from the Forbidden City.

The courtyard apparently has an underground swimming pool and billiard room, is guarded by plainclothes police and among their neighbours is the retired prime minister Zhu Rongji.

But for most people, refurbishment is less elaborate but totally worth it, said Mr Ledger. "It's not as easy as living in a flat, but the benefits in terms of how life is in a siheyuan are amazing. The benefits outweigh the downsides," he said.

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