Since the 1920s, guidebook writers have complained that as quickly as they can write about one of Beijing's historic buildings, it is pulled down.
Today we face the same problem with bars, clubs, and restaurants, whose lifetimes seem even shorter than the Chinese government's swiftness to suppress dissent. Whole streets and city blocks are often bludgeoned into oblivion almost overnight.
Historic buildings, other than ordinary housing, are not the problem. To be sure, some ancient temple buildings, long hidden by more modern construction, are demolished if the developer beats the culture cadres to the punch or induces them to look the other way. But others are emerging from roles as residences, offices, and storehouses spruced up to attract the tourist yuan. The choices of what to do and see in a city already packed with pleasures increase all the time.
This chapter deals with everything you need to know to get yourself around Beijing, a city better supplied with taxis and public transport than almost any counterpart in Europe. Beijing's layout is simple; navigation is mainly by landmark, and the only confusion lies in the fact that any particular landmark may well be pulled down by the time you reach the city, taking two or three of our favorite restaurants with it.
In the next few years leading up to the 2008 Olympics, the massive and chaotic transformation of the city, a process which has been hiccuping along destructively for nearly a century, will become faster and ever more feverish.
