Hohhot, New and Old

Hohhot, Inner Mongolia's capital of approximately 1.4 million people, looks fairly "standard" at first glance. There are many restaurants, hotels, and tall buildings, and almost all of them are lit at night with Vegas-style neon signs (a favorite in Chinese cities). However, driving through various parts of Hohhot I realized the city has two faces. Everything is either being torn down or built up. Next to many flashy new buildings heaps of broken brick litter the sidewalk. The character 拆 (chai1), which signifies that a building is destined to be torn down, often at the hands of the government in an attempt to quickly modernize, is spray-painted across many brick and concrete facades. Even "restaurant row," a popular pedestrian street lined with innumerable dining options and KTV spots is in flux. The street is half laid with cinder block and half left open with piles of rubble near the half-constructed restaurant steps.

The Mosque, too, was a unique juxtaposition of old and new in which the old, Chinese-style portion, dark in color and ornate in design, sat next to the newly constructed mosque itself, which gleamed white even in the dusty city. While the old section was not being demolished, construction was nevertheless abundant as Chinese workers shoveled, hammered, and welded both inside and outside the unfinished Mosque.

My friend and I are both curious to know what the city will look like five years from now. We wonder if the timing of our trip just happened to coincide with most major construction, or if all of this work is an ongoing and never-ending attempt to update the Inner Mongolian capital.