Beijing’s historic hutongs (part two)

A flock of birds fly over the Bell Tower in the heart of old Beijing.
© Andrew Brown/2025/China

This year, I’ve continued to explore Beijing’s historic hutongs. My first photo walk of the year was in May, with some friends from work. We started early at the Bell and Drum Towers, which were used in imperial times to announce the time of day. From the towers, we explored the narrow side streets, looking for interesting details of local life. Although this can be a busy tourist area later in the day, at 8am on a Sunday morning the square between the two towers is mainly used by local people for exercise. We saw groups of older people practicing tai chi, some of them in traditional costumes and armed with fencing swords or spears. Others performed a colourful ribbon dance, swirling long strips of fabric around in time to Chinese pop music from a portable stereo.

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Cao Kun saves water to help protect the planet

Cao Kun adjusts a passion fruit vine on the trellis he made from recycled bed frames.
©UNICEF/China/2025/Ma Yuyuan

Cao Kun walks up the hillside from a small lake to his family farm in Chengmai, a rural area of China’s southern Hainan Island. It’s sunset and the air is filled with the sounds of birds and crickets. A white egret flies across the sky from the marshland. Cao Kun pushes aside the leaves of a tall maize plant and follows the winding earth path in the fading light. He turns to look back across the valley.

“When I was a boy, this lake was much larger and had lots of fish in it,” he recalls. “But there was a very severe drought a few years ago. The lake became so dry that only the central part had some water left. The mud at the bottom of the lake dried up and cracked because of the sun.”

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Yeming overcomes bullying, thanks to mental health lessons

Yeming, (left) 13, plays with her friend Jinghao at Zhangqiu No 4 High School, Shandong.
©UNICEF/China/2024/Zhang Yuwei

Thirteen-year-old Yeming stands on her own by the window of an empty classroom at Zhangqiu No 4 High School, Shandong. She looks out across the vast school campus, which hosts 9,900 students in huge red-brick buildings. She watches other students walking between yellowing trees beneath her, their footsteps echoing, towards a lake in the centre of campus. It is autumn but unusually cold and windy, and many of the children wear padded jackets over their uniforms.

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Zihan rebuilds her mental health with help from a peer supporter

Zhu Zihan (right) with peer supporter Wenhao at Zhangqiu No 4 High School.
© UNICEF China/2024/Zhang Yuwei

After a long day at school, Zhu Zihan, 17, returns to her family home in an ordinary apartment building in Zhangqiu, Shandong Province. She climbs the plain concrete stairs to the sixth floor and knocks on the last door. Her father, Zhu Chulin, welcomes her. It’s a bitingly cold autumn evening but warm and cosy inside. The small apartment is decorated with paintings of lotus flowers and red Chinese characters for good luck. Soft toys from Zihan’s early childhood, including the purple starfish from Spongebob, still sit along the back of the sofa.

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Wenfeng gets the best start in life

Xiuxiang plays with Wenfeng in the fields outside the family home
© UNICEF China/2024/Ma Yuyuan

How UNICEF is helping rural caregivers in China with early childhood development

A cow bell clanks gently in the otherwise still and quiet morning on a ridge high above Tongjiang river, Sichuan Province. The hillside is sculpted into terraces where farmers grow rice, wheat and potatoes. An older woman, Li Xiuxiang, walks down the terraces towards the clanking cow, past ancestral gravestones. On her back is a small boy, her grandson Wenfeng, who is one and a half years old. He is alert and curious, smiling and pointing at things as they pass.

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China: another brick in the wall

Hiking the Great Wall of China at Gubeikou (water town) towards the end of spring, May 2024.
© Andrew Brown/2024/China

It was an unusally warm day in February, when I arrived at Chongbian, north of Beijing, to hike the “wrong Great Wall.” We started climbing up through terraced farmland, along the way greeting some locals on a motorbike pulling a farm cart. On reaching the Wall, we turned right and hiked along a mountain ridge to the east. The watchtowers had been renovated with new cement but there were no stairs, so we had to climb up precarious piles of rocks to reach the doorways and rooftop – in Imperial times, there would have been wooden ladders here. In between the watchtowers was “wild wall,” crumbling masonry that was wide enough for two people to walk along safely. The trees were bare from winter, but long yellow grass still grew along the top of the wall, glowing in the afternoon sunshine.

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In the mood for love: Maggie Cheung and children

Maggie Cheung and the young presenters, including Xi-xi (far left).
© UNICEF/China/2010/Martin Ye

Note: This blog post was written in 2011. In 2021, China announced the eradication of extreme poverty in the country, having lifted nearly 800 million people out of poverty.

Child poverty is not solely a problem for poor countries. Although China is now the world’s second largest economy, having overtaken Japan in February, its spectacular economic growth has not yet fully reached the poorest children and communities. There are still 100 million children living on less than $2 a day, with stark disparities between urban and rural areas.

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China: Back in the P.R.C.

The author hiking on the Great Wall of China in 2011
© Andy Brown/2011/China

In 1876, Gore Vidal’s historical novel about the US centenary, narrator Charlie Schuyler returns to New York after decades of self-imposed exile in Europe. He is struck by the transformation of a city he once knew into something brash, modern and unfamiliar, as America rushed to catch up with and surge past the global powers of the Old World. I got a bit of the same feeling returning to Beijing after a ten-year absence (I first visited on a Great Wall hiking trip in 2002).

Driving into town, the horizon was a jumble of skyscrapers and tower blocks, stretching out from East to West with barely a sliver of sky between them. Everything was clean and orderly, with neat rows of silver birch trees lined up behind spotless pavements and well-managed cycle lanes. The tiled ‘hutong’ houses and bicycle-drawn carts I remembered from my last visit were nowhere to be seen. As the light began to fade, we reached the embassy district where Western brand names, neon-lit Chinese characters and a huge Apple logo lit up the sky above a brand new shopping mall. There was even a billboard for a Bob Dylan gig at the Workers’ Gymnasium. It felt more like Geneva than the hectic and historic Asian city I remembered.

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