OLD WANG picked his way over mounds of dusty rubble. “This was my home, my home for all my life.” He began to cry. “I can’t leave,” he said.

In a crumbling courtyard house on the other side of the alley, a woman filled a basin with water from an outside tap.

“They are forcing us to leave because they want to demolish this courtyard,” she said. “Don’t ask me why, I’m too frightened to talk.” She scurried into her one-room, brick, lean-to home built within the walls of No 7 Wenchang Hutong — once a graceful courtyard home to a moneyed Beijing family.

Few courtyards remain. When it comes to the tangle of alleys — known by the Manchurian word hutong — that fan out from the Forbidden City, Beijing’s planning authorities swing between bouts of preservation and frenzies of destruction. Developers want to replace the acres of faded quadrangles with glass and concrete towers. Planners are keen to build a sleek new city before the 2008 Olympics.

Fewer than 500 of Beijing’s nearly 4,000 hutong survive, according to Zhang Wei, the leader of a group of volunteers battling to save them. More than a third of the 62sq km (24 square mile) old city has already been demolished and homes are being destroyed at the rate of 10,000 a year.

It is unlikely that any other city has undergone such a rapid and dramatic transformation.

One voice of protest was that of I. M. Pei, the AmericanChinese architect. “They should have preserved the old walls and the city inside and built the skyscrapers outside, as Paris did,” he said.

That was the plan of China’s most revered 20th-century architect, Liang Sicheng. He wanted to build new Beijing to the west of the city walls but his ideas were rejected. The official China Today magazine wrote: “This mistake is irreversible.”

Mr Zhang still has hope. “If we stop demolishing the courtyards now, it’s possible Beijing may succeed in retaining some of her atmosphere,” he said.

The attraction of the narrow alleys where old men sit in the sun to play cards, women gossip under shady trees and children play football has escaped most city planners. They see only the rubbish rotting in corners and the public lavatories serving homes with only rudimentary plumbing.

A blue plaque marking No 7 Wenchang Hutong as a site for preservation served scant purpose. A worker, pickaxe slung over his shoulder, sauntered through the courtyard and resumed hammering. The woman resident, too afraid to give her name, came to the once-imposing crimson double doors and said: “There’s nothing we can do to stop this.”

In place of the courtyard an office block for the influential Huaneng Power International is expected to rise.

Beijing has announced several times in recent years that it would halt the destruction. It is, however, more expensive to renovate than to build anew. A new building costs £215 per square metre; renovation costs £715.

Most occupants are poor and accept compensation to move into a suburban block. Many courtyards languish in an advanced state of disrepair. Some are crowded with poor families who built their shacks between the elegant red lacquered pillars of aristocratic homes when Chairman Mao’s revolution declared the proletariat to be the new master class and property rights disappeared.

Nevertheless, detailed diagrams in the modern planning museum show several districts of Beijing listed for preservation. Wenchang Hutong lies in one such area. City planning officials were not available to comment on its destruction.

The compound where Ding Qiao lives was once part of the residence of a 17th-century regent but lies outside the preservation areas. It is destined to be the site of the Hong Kong Jockey Club’s Beijing headquarters.

She is determined to stay and has gone to court to try to save her home: “It’s not a question of the money. This house is part of the history of Beijing and it should be protected.”

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