This week’s travel dream: Beijing on two wheels

The Beijing of narrow alleyways and richly layered history might “not be around in such authentic form much longer,” said Evan Osnos in Condé Nast Traveler. As the population of China’s capital nears 20 million, the city is reinventing itself by bulldozing dense, ancient neighborhoods and replacing them with modern apartment blocks that all seem to bear odd names like Merlin Champagne Town. After six years here, I know how to skirt such sterile zones when I head out to get my breakfast each morning. I like to travel by bicycle—because pedaling a two-wheeler is “still the best way to absorb the rhythm” of this great metropolis.

The “sky is as white and shapeless as cotton” as I set out on a street near Beijing’s largest Tibetan monastery, located at one corner of the old city that was, until the ’50s, surrounded by a Ming dynasty–era wall. In one of the alleys known as hutongs, I cut beneath rustling scholar trees and pass into the Gulou neighborhood, Beijing’s answer to Greenwich Village. A “stylish jumble of courtyards and pocket-size galleries,” of guitar shops and vintage-clothing boutiques, the area retains just enough brothels and mah-jongg parlors to remind you of its recent past. Mao lived in the neighborhood when he was just a librarian.

The majestic Drum Tower, built in 1272 and used as the city’s official timepiece for centuries, looms above me as I pass schoolchildren in red kerchiefs and turn onto a “spectacularly quiet” promenade beside Houhai, a lake created by Kublai Khan. Finally, I turn down another alley and enter the “vast open-air free-for-all” that is the Sihuan Market. “As large as a football field,” it’s “redolent with spices, produce, and Beijing pastries.” Markets in China are the “neighborhood church and piazza rolled into one,” populated by overloaded delivery boys and “grandmothers appraising watermelons with a hearty shake.” At a stall, I find the quintessential Beijing breakfast: a fresh jianbing—a hot crepe with egg, seasoning, and fermented soybean sauce. “There is a looming danger of Beijing scrubbing away” places like this market in the name of progress. But I’m cautiously optimistic. I get the sense that the citizens here are “too fiercely protective of their cultural past to let it be entirely destroyed.”

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