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Beijing Hutong Guide: Detailed guide to the history and culture of the Beijing Hutong. Beijing Maps: Maps of Beijing city and Beijing famous attractions. Beijing Hutong Tours: Private tours to the Hutong, Forbidden City, Great Wall...and other Beijing delights. Recently, a group of tourists from Cologne, Germany, traveled thousands of miles to Beijing for its Hutong (lanes and alleys) Tour. With curiosity, reporters from China Tourism accompanied the German visitors on the tour.
The Hutong Tour starts from along Shishahai near the vegetable and fruit market. In the deepest of the hutong, they were taken to visit Prince Gong's Mansion, famous in the Qing Dynasty. In the past, princes', generals' and ministers' housed with courtyards were scattered around the outside of the Forbidden City. Linking up those courtyard houses were lanes and alleys called hutongs. The word "hutong" probably came into use during the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368), as it is a Mongolian word, meaning "well". These residential areas were so called because where there is a well, there are people living nearby. As a result,
The visitors from Germany were attracted by the building style of the brick-and-tile mansion, in which the courtyard consists of a garden with winding corridors, pavilions, rockeries and water. Here, exquisite carvings on every pieces of tiles and stones are a work of art. Patterns of a bat waiting to fly and two catfishes over the window frames suggest happiness, propitiousness and having surplus in consecutive years. Click to see more Beijing Hutong taked in Rickshaw tour Photos
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