Coming Down Alert – Peking’s Da Yuan Fu Hutong

That parts of Da Yuan Fu Hutong, known these days as Datianshujing Hutong, lasted as long as they did is quite remarkable – but the remaining structures days are now numbered it appears. Da Yuan Fu Hutong originally ran of off Morrison Street (Wangfujing) and just behind the Peking Hotel, which of course remains. Most prominently the hutong was home to the once well known and regarded Hotel de la Paix, known commonly as the Telegraph Hotel, a  fairly respectable establishment situated in a traditional courtyard. It degenerated a bit in the mid to late 1930s and housed mostly stateless White Russians and Jewish refugees with nowhere else to go.

It was known as the Telegraph because the building had originally housed the offices and staff quarters of the Great Northern Telegraph Company (Det Store Nordiske Telegrafselskab A/S), a Danish telegraph company founded in June 1869. The Great Northern was running a telegraph service between Kamchatka and Peking and stops in between. They rented the courtyard of a Manchu Prince on Da Yuan Fu Hutong and constructed an impressive European style building that became widely known around the start of the 20th century as The Danish Mess.

The Prince took the money from the Danes (Dane Gelt?) and retired to Mukden (Shenyang) as Manchu princes are wont to do. What was left was a traditional courtyard residence as well as the sizable European residence – it proved to be too big for the 5 Danish full time employees and their occasional guests from up-country so they sold up and the new owners converted the buildings into the Hotel de la Paix. The Great Northern had apparently skimped on construction and the Danes only had earth floors and rather sub-standard plumbing. Still, for years apparently the Danish flag flew at the courtyard’s outer gate even after the new owners had tiled the floors and put in some water boilers and a flush toilet.

A small development has occurred at one end of the hutong – I’ll post on that tomorrow

Anyway, here’s the roll of destruction on the major street facing side:

A old courtyard entrance surrounded by rubble – maybe once a Danish telegraph engineer or two came to work this way?

a saddleback roof still evident behind some destruction