Gulou Was Once Called "Beijing's Brooklyn." What Is It Like Now?

The feel of a tourist zone is seeping into every lane around the Drum Tower.

Old Beijingers may know that Nanluoguxiang was long ago called Centipede Street. The lane itself is wide, the centipede's body; on either side run eight neat, narrow branch hutongs, like its legs.

Leave Nanluoguxiang by its north end, walk 600 meters west, and you reach Beijing's Bell and Drum Towers. As in most old cities, this is where the hours were once sounded. A market has always crowded around the towers. In earlier days it even sold a bamboo broom called a tiaozhou.

In 2007, Zhang Lin opened a café, Cafe Zarah, on Gulou East Street, east of the Drum Tower (Gulou) and north of Nanluoguxiang. He liked the thick trees and wide sidewalks, and he liked the street's quiet, easy pace. That pace came not only from old Beijingers but also from a community of foreigners who had come to live in China.

They found the area more than 20 years ago. The rest of Beijing was filling with high-rises, but around the Drum Tower many single-story houses survived, and the old hutongs sat beside imperial courtyards and the well-known scenic spot of Houhai. Ju'er Hutong, the first leg on the centipede's northeast side, became the site of a hutong renovation project by the architect Wu Liangyong in the 1990s. The project drew foreign architects first, and then a wave of other foreigners who moved in.

The Central Academy of Drama sits at the south end of Nanluoguxiang, and theaters, instrument shops, bars and livehouses gathered around it. So when Beijing's Dongcheng District planned in 2010 to spend $730 million rebuilding the Drum Tower area, even Time magazine was dismayed. In its "Best of Asia" list that year, it named the Gulou area among the "places to see before they disappear."

Luckily, the demolition and rebuilding plan was never carried out. As late as 2013, The New York Times still called the area "the Brooklyn of Beijing." That district southeast of Manhattan has the largest population of any county in New York State. Its people come from all over the world; the mix breeds underground culture and free-wheeling trade in goods that are exotic, new and fashionable.

But this "Brooklyn" has since changed beyond recognition.

1.

The hottest business on Gulou East Street now is the shoe store. People call them "Jordan shops."

They have plain racks and little thought given to lighting or color, but the owners pick their stock carefully: models designed or endorsed by stars. Nike's Jordan sneakers sell especially well. Across the street's 20-plus shoe stores, the brand's basketball shoes go for nearly three times their usual price.

"Whatever people in Beijing start speculating on, it shows up here first," says a clerk at Huading Realty, a property agency on Gulou East Street, who is himself wearing Jordans. Shopkeepers here chase trends, he says. Around 2000, most shops on the street sold game consoles and musical instruments. Clothing stores multiplied from 2004. A crop of cafés sprang up in 2008, then bead bracelets had their moment in 2010 and Thai Buddha amulets in 2012.

"This street basically changes hands every two years. Seventy percent of the shops turn over," the agent says. "I'm curious what'll be in fashion next year."

Change around Gulou is hard to predict. No one, for instance, foresaw how fast rents would rise. In 2007, Zhang Lin rented a shop of more than 300 square meters on Gulou East Street for 160,000 yuan a year, and that was already the highest rent per square meter on the street. Then, from the following year, the government set out to turn Nanluoguxiang into a tourist zone. Next to imperial culture, hutong life looked fresh and novel. After that, things ran out of control.

The road was repaved, railings went up and street parking was banned. Tourists poured in. Public figures show Nanluoguxiang drew fewer than 60,000 visitors in all of 2005; by 2009 the number had risen to 1.6 million. Subway Line 6 opened in 2012 and Line 8 in 2013, bringing Nanluoguxiang and Shichahai stations into service. Over the 2013 Dragon Boat Festival, Nanluoguxiang averaged 20,000 visitors a day. On October 1 last year, it drew 100,000 in a single day.

The government did not direct the area's commercial development, but tourism pushed rents up all the same. The Huading Realty agent says shop rents here rank in the top five in Beijing.

A 200-square-meter shop facing Nanluoguxiang can rent for 180,000 yuan a month. Houhai comes next: a shopfront on its bar street, even one of 10 square meters, now costs 8,000 to 10,000 yuan a month. Then comes Gulou East Street, where a 70-square-meter shop near Nanluoguxiang costs 30,000 yuan a month. In the side hutongs, a 20-square-meter shop on the main path between Nanluoguxiang and Houhai can fetch more than 10,000 yuan a month.

A popcorn shop opened after the Spring Festival near the north end of Nanluoguxiang, on a spot where a resident had once built a shed to store coal briquettes. Once renovated, the space rented for more than 10,000 yuan a month.

2.

Most landlords around Gulou are old Beijingers. They seldom use agents to let their property (sales are another matter) and prefer to deal privately. Except in the peak tourist months of May and June, shopkeepers mostly hold their tongues rather than complain that the "shop for transfer" notices hung at their doors are hurting business. An agent dealing with these landlords would do well not to turn up in a suit and say "sir." If the landlord is a local, push the door open and call out "Uncle!" and your odds of success double.

The landlords gain the most here. Rents have never stopped rising, yet shopfronts never lack takers. New shopkeepers come for Gulou's tourists; everything else remains up in the air.

Last November, Ma Shusen and his friends opened Pengmu, a do-it-yourself plant shop, on Gulou East Street. The shop used to be in Dawanglu, but foot traffic there was thin, so they decided to move. Their first thought was Gulou.

Gulou sits inside Beijing's Second Ring Road, at the heart of the city. Its mix of Chinese and foreign residents, and its air of old and new running together, draw young people. "This place is very fashionable," says a clerk at a Rilakkuma shop on Gulou East Street. "You might get the wrong idea about what I mean by fashionable, but to me this place is as fashionable as Sanlitun. You can always see the most stylish people on this street, the most avant-garde clothes and looks."

Sanlitun is a busy shopping district in Chaoyang, one of Beijing's newer districts, and Taikoo Li, the mall built there a few years ago, is close to being the city's landmark of style. But Gulou is more flexible than a mall. A conventional mall usually wants a lease of three to five years signed up front (though that term is shrinking); Gulou's streets and lanes have no such rules. Landlords expect rents to keep rising, so they are happy to sign leases one year at a time. And because leases are short, everyone wants to give it a go.

Most of those eager to try are young. The Huading Realty agent met two young women back from studying in South Korea who wanted to open a café here. They had not thought about how to run it. "I asked them what they'd charge for a cup, and they said they didn't know, it depended on costs. They were about to open a shop and still didn't know the price of a cup of coffee."

"Dreams. You know what a dream is? They just came here to live out their dream," the agent says loudly. Their dream, plainly, will be much harder to realize than Zhang Lin's was.

3.

Unable to bear the high rents and the shoulder-to-shoulder crowds, Coast Cafe moved from Nanluoguxiang to Gulou East Street a few years ago.

Zhang Lin finds the move easy to understand. A decent café can hardly survive in a tourist district, he says: tourists spend little and care little about quality. They just want to see the place, and the savvier ones buy only quick, cheap things so they don't get ripped off.

But leaving Nanluoguxiang does not mean escaping the tourists. The feel of a tourist zone is seeping into every lane around the Drum Tower. To keep tourists from bothering its regular neighborhood customers, Cafe Zarah on Gulou East Street has kept its logo deliberately inconspicuous. Meanwhile, the foreigners who lived here are moving out too. Zhang Lin estimates that more than half have left.

In 2013, Cafe Zarah expanded to more than 300 square meters indoors plus a courtyard of over 80 square meters. By Zhang Lin's original reckoning, the café could pay 800,000 yuan a year in rent and still make a healthy profit. But rising property prices pushed up local labor costs, and he says that in recent years the big café has only been "getting by."

The shops doing best now are those that serve tourists and nothing else. On Gulou East Street there are two "10-yuan stores" that claim Korean and Japanese companies oversee their products. With huge numbers of customers and very low costs, they pay the high rents and still do well.

Along the 800 meters of Nanluoguxiang, more than half the shops now sell quick snacks: jianbing crepes, quick-boiled tripe, Beijing-style yogurt cheese, cold drinks, duck necks, kebabs, most for around 20 yuan. "It quenches thirst and fills the stomach. If you don't sell that kind of thing, you really can't survive," says the owner of the popcorn shop on Nanluoguxiang, which is about to close. In his shop, bottled water far outsells popcorn.

Diagonally across from the popcorn shop, a "crab roe" bun shop pays 1.2 million yuan a year in rent, but its owner says that at 20 yuan a box he makes 20,000 yuan a day. Next door, a Juewei duck neck shop did so well that its annual rent rose from just over 100,000 yuan last year to 600,000.

Some of these small businesses look like rare survivals of street life, but the truth is that they are the only ones that can make money. At night, the owner of a grilled-fish shop sets up a cart in the street to sell luzhu, Beijing's stewed offal. A cigarette-and-liquor store, run by its landlord, holds the best spot on Nanluoguxiang and has a large shopfront, but few people come in to buy. To "keep the shop afloat," the owner parks a cart outside selling cotton candy, the tourists' favorite photo prop.

"If the rent goes up again, these high-margin shops will squeeze us out for sure," says the Rilakkuma clerk. "It's a sad thing."

4.

Two foreign residents walking our way say they live here, but Gulou is clearly less interesting than it used to be. "There are fewer interesting shops, and everything's more expensive."

They head instead to the Bread Bar, a café-bar popular with foreigners on Beiluoguxiang. That hutong meets Gulou East Street directly north of Nanluoguxiang. It is close by, but far fewer people pass through. At night especially, the lane is dark and silent, like Nanluoguxiang in the 1990s.

Beiluoguxiang and Gulou West Street might seem good places to escape high rents and dense crowds. But Zhang Lin says it is not that simple. Beiluoguxiang's hutongs run too deep to draw a crowd, and Gulou West Street lives off the Houhai sights and has no neighborhood life of its own. Neither will ever recreate what he found when he first opened his shop here in 2007. And with the underground culture and hutong life gone, Gulou's shops have "lost their meaning," yet they have "nowhere to go."

Mao Livehouse, billed as "the number-one venue for live rock," has stood on Gulou East Street since 2007. At the end of 2015, its founder, Li Chi, announced that in the face of astronomical rent they were "out of options and preparing to move." But this February he wrote on Weibo that he had "not yet found a place we like." Mao would close in April and, for now, would not reopen elsewhere.

The one exception may be a Xinjiang restaurant across from Mao that everyone calls "Nanjiang." It has been here for 11 years, and bands playing Mao often eat and drink here, wait for their set, and do their makeup. One afternoon in February, five groups of customers came in.

A young local couple who didn't feel like cooking came for a bite. A group of tourists came in, ate quickly and left. Two rock musicians, done with practice, came to eat, drink and talk. Two migrant workers from a pizza place on Gulou East Street had just come off their shift. And a big table of middle-aged men from the hutongs had gathered for a meal.

Many expect that once Mao leaves, the shops that have lived alongside it will suffer. Nanjiang may not. Xinjiang restaurants survive all over Beijing for the same reasons: their food suits most tastes, it is built mostly on noodles and flatbread, costs are low, and margins are high.

Beside the Drum Tower, they are doing just fine.

Photos by Hao Wenhui