A fire that has burnt for 143 years and roasted more than 115 million ducks has been kept alight for future feasts even as developers razed the neighbourhood around Beijing’s oldest Peking duck restaurant.

The flame will be nurtured until the premises rise from the rubble under the city’s sweeping renovation.

The Quanjude restaurant on Qianmen Street — which runs along Beijing’s ancient north-south axis to the south of Tiananmen Square — held a ceremony this week to safeguard the flame that has burnt since 1864, when the duck farmer turned restaurateur, Yang Quanren, founded the eatery.

Embers from the wood-fired ovens that have roasted 115,330,259 ducks were placed in a bronze three-legged pot under the watchful eye of Jiang Junxian, president of the now state-owned Quanjude Group.

One staff official said: “Every day we will have someone responsible for the fire who will feed the flames with wood so that the fire will not go out.”

The doors of the restaurant closed on Tuesday night, but the burning pot will remain at the site during the six-month renovation. It is due to reopen on October 1, National Day. By Tuesday morning the Quanjude was one of the last buildings along Qianmen Street not yet entirely hidden by scaffolding as part of sweeping modernisation.

One of the other few remaining buildings on what was the busiest shopping street in Beijing during the past two centuries is the Guanghe Peking Opera house next door to the Quanjude. First built during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), the current 1950s building is also scheduled for demolition.

Swaths of the surrounding neighbourhood of single-storey quadrangle homes have been razed. Hovels, where workers lived, as well as the grander sprawling courtyard homes of former merchants, have disappeared.

Only on Tuesday, officials, police and dozens of workers turned out for a red-carpet ceremony to inaugurate a new four-lane highway parallel to Qianmen Street on a site where until recently lay fruit markets, restaurants, food stalls and homes.

Amid anger from activists opposed to the destruction of the remaining old quarters of Beijing, and from residents forced to move out of homes where they had lived for decades, if not for centuries, the authorities have been reticent to give details of plans for the district.

However, Qianmen Street is destined to be lined by shops and restaurants reconstructed in the traditional Beijing style with grey brick walls, sweeping tiled roofs and brightly painted eaves. Zhang Wei, a member of a group of Beijing residents racing to make a photographic record of the city’s ancient alleys — or hutongs — before they disappear, voices anxiety.

“The Government said they would restore a flavour of old Beijing but I think they are destroying old Beijing. The former community will disappear and the old culture will be severed. The new courtyards will be for rich people, but these courtyards are not authentic. No real courtyard is built with concrete and steel.”

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