The few surviving sections of old Beijing consisted mostly of tiny alleyways lined by single-story homes of gray brick, wood, and tile. The arrangement had remained more or less the same for seven centuries, when sections of the city were laid out under the Yuan dynasty, which gave these streets the name hutong, a Mongolian term that came to mean “alley” in Chinese. The Mongols had designed the hutong to uniform widths of twelve or twenty-four paces. In 1980 the city had six thousand hutong; over the years, all but a few hundred were leveled to make way for office buildings and apartment
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