Hegezhuang is the name of the part of Beijing where we stay for this month. It’s pretty far from the centre of town but this doesn’t say anything in a big city like Beijing. It’s still just a bit country like but not too far away tall buildings are already visible which probably means that within a couple of years a lot of the ground around will be used for building houses, apartments, offices etc. Developments are going really fast here.

But let’s stick to Hegezhuang. In my view this area shows all what’s going on in the centre of town. The gallery where we live is part of a new build artist village. Four years ago nothing was here and now this so called 318 Art Garden is filled with studio’s where artists work and live. It’s simple and clean but not rich in its ambience (see photo). Therefore it’s so interesting that on one side of our enclave a very, very expensive teahouse, the Green T House, is found. Even an American guy we met last week in Frank’s Place (read about in the blog of May 8), who was a main stockholder in a world famous truck company, told us that his visit there had been a real rip off. So, imagine what it has to be to even the richer Chinese. But the building itself is beautiful (see photo) in all its white colour and the interior shows a kind of minimal Chinese design I have never seen before. May be they have to find their clients in the rich enclaves in our surroundings. High walls like the Great Wall hide the houses inside partly but it’s still visible that they are really big and the gates are pretty well guarded. Our taxi driver told that these houses could be bought for about € 800.000. For Chinese standards this is, I presume, a huge amount of money. Certainly when this is compared with the € 4 we have to pay in our restaurant in the hutong nearby for a delicious and extensive meal for four persons. Contradictions in Hegezhuang also are not far away as is of course the case in the whole of China nowadays.

If we walk from the gallery to our hutong, in the opposite direction from the Green T House, we pass another enclave for art. Here a lot of new galleries are build. In a huge old factory hall they already hanged a lot of art of Chinese artists living in the several art villages in and around Beijing (see photos). But about these art enclaves I would like to write another time. In my opinion all these contradictions in just this small piece of Beijing reflect what’s going on in society here. But I feel really happy about the fact that still this traditional hutong exists with its small shops, its food stalls in the streets (see photos) and its many friendly and happy people. Even when they don’t speak English.