อ่านภาษาไทย สัมผัสวิถีชีวิตแบบโบราณที่หูท่ง เมืองปักกิ่ง ประเทศจีน
Today was the 6th day of our trip in Beijing.
And today we will visit Hutong, the old Beijing lanes and the typical Chinese quadrangles city by rickshaws (bicycle ride)! Then visit the Summer Palace!!!
Started at Hutong…
Hutong wasn’t in the Must Go list from tour agency in Thailand but it’s a good thing that we talked with Chinese tour agency and they added this visit into our package.
At first, I thought HUTONG means the old village/city. But it’s actually a type of narrow streets or alleys. And there are still many hutongs in Beijing.
The one that we will visit today is nearby Rear Lake area (Shi Cha lake – it’s not far from the City and very close with Summer Palace).
There is a porcelain museum at the hutong we visited. It’s a nice museum, and you can order your own statue here!
We got the local guide “Apple”, she lives here in Hutong, and we got a chance to ride in the rickshaws while Apple is biking her baby bike and escorting us around hutong.
Hutong is very old city as Beijing has a very long history.
Apple told us that most of hutongs are more than 800 years old while the Great wall and Forbidden City are about 600 years old.
We also got a chance to experience the local food!
Apple took us and stopped at the house for meal, it’s the real old house in hutong!
The food looked really delicious but we didn’t know that we will get food so early here after we had a lot of breakfast from the hotel. But we can’t stop eating it!!!
The owner of the house was cooking for us but she is so shy to come to eat and talk with us…
After we ate all their food, we left with thanks and goodbye!!!
The tour guide “Apple” took us to walk around hutong. We can see the real life of ordinary people in Beijing while across many narrow streets.
Apple also showed us an interesting old Chinese house, you will see the top of gate with some circle pillars (blue pillars in below picture). This showed how important this house is – the more circle pillars are the more important!
Also, at the bottom of this gate, it’s very high step to get inside the house. As you know the Chinese ghost is the jumping ghost so if they made the high step in the gate bottom, the Chinese ghost will get a hard time to jump to get inside the house – good trick but it might work only for Chinese ghosts!!!
We think Hutong is the wow place – easy, calm but cool!
Even the number of Beijing hutongs has dropped dramatically as they are demolished to make way for new roads and buildings.
More recently, some hutongs have been designated as protected areas in an attempt to preserve this aspect of Chinese cultural history and become a popular tourist attactions!
Our trip in Hutong is included in our tour package of Beijing, we got local tour guide “Apple”, rickshaws ride and meal for free but we paid for museum tickets (cheap but I forgot…), we also tipped the Tour guide (Apple) and the rickshaw guy.
