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woman of culture. The space is simple and graceful, the walls decorated with old paintings and silk screens. I imagine her personal history. She’s from an old family, and her grandfather must have been an exceptional man. If he studied in Paris in the earliest years of the twentieth century, he must have been born into the Chinese elite. A famous builder in old Peking, he was surely quite the gentleman. His son was raised in the best of Chinese and Western traditions, trained in the old arts and then educated like his father at the best Parisian architecture school. In Madame Hua’s family, one was clearly expected to respect art. I ask her about the Cultural Revolution, that brutal time when such people of culture were targeted and purged.
    â€œAh, that was an interesting time,” she begins with a smile. “Before then, we had a big house with a big garden around it. As a child, I used to pretend that I was in the jungle in that garden. During the Cultural Revolution, the Red Guards forced a lot of families from the countryside into our big house. My family retreated to the servant house at the back of the compound. It could have been a lot worse: my father had been a quiet servant ofthe revolution—the original one, that is—so we were luckily not subjected to any further measures.”
    She retrieves a large photo album, places it on the coffee table and begins to guide me through it. There are photos of old stone houses, of courtyards, trees, delicately carved wooden eaves, stone dragons and intricately cobbled walkways. These are glimpses of the treasures of the hutongs , the precious private spaces where great poems were composed and passionate love affairs conducted, where people were taught how to think, how to honour their ancestors properly and how to be good scions of a great culture.
    â€œThis house,” Catherine tells me as she points to a series of photos, “once belonged to a famous general. He was also a master calligrapher. The house had the most amazing garden walkway, with incredible arches. Look at this photo; you can see them.”
    â€œWhat happened to it?” I ask.
    â€œIt’s gone. They didn’t even salvage the stonework.” She turns the page.
    â€œLook at the gate to this house,” she says, directing my focus to a stone gateway in the photo that has an elaborate wooden roof over it. “It too is gone, crushed by a bulldozer. I was there to see it happen.”
    â€œWho lived in these houses?”
    â€œMany families. Normal people,” she continues. “They call me for help. Or at the very least, they tell me to come and take pictures of their treasured homes. ‘Come quick,’ they say, ‘the bulldozers are here!’”
    There are pages and pages of photos. Catherine occasionally points out a house and tells me that she managed to save it. But the vast majority of the photos are of ghosts: homes, ways of life,banished into nothing. I nod my head sympathetically as I flip through the album.
    â€œI guess the developers, the state officials, have no sense of history,” I comment.
    â€œNo,” she says, “they are without sense, without culture. They are motivated by one thing alone. Greed.”
    Catherine Hua feels the need to say one final thing: “Earlier in the revolution, great changes were made. Things were turned upside down, yes. But I feel that we are now going somewhere totally new and even more radical—yes, even compared with the Cultural Revolution. Then at least, when temples and historical houses were destroyed, they were destroyed for a reason. There was an ideology. Now Chinese history is simply being eradicated without thought. This is barbaric, nihilistic even.”
    Welcome to modernity , I think.
    Over the next days, Viv and I criss-cross the capital preparing for our trip, getting plane tickets, doing research. Beijing is a sprawling megalopolis; we are stuck in traffic a