胡同是什么？
What is a Beijing hutong?
Name: ________________ Date: ________
在北京，手机导航有时会告诉你：“前方五十米右转，进入胡同。”你拐进去一看，路窄得只能过一辆自行车，两边是灰色的砖墙，墙头上探出一棵枣树，一位大爷坐在门口的小板凳上下棋。这就是胡同。很多第一次来北京的人都会好奇：胡同到底是什么？这个词又是从哪儿来的？
简单地说，胡同就是北京的小巷子。不过，“胡同”这两个字本身看不出任何意思。有一种说法认为，它来自蒙古语里表示“水井”的一个词。元朝时，蒙古人在这里建起了元大都，也就是今天北京城的前身。人们的生活离不开水，房子往往围着水井修建，井边的小路慢慢就成了胡同。当然，这只是学者的一种推测，至今仍有不同的看法。
胡同两边排列着的大多是四合院。所谓四合院，指的是四面都有房子、中间围着一个院子的住宅。过去，一个院子里常常住着一家几代人，孩子们出了门就在胡同里玩，邻居之间也特别熟悉。北京的冬天漫长又寒冷，房子大多朝南，好让阳光照进屋里，所以大部分胡同是东西走向的，南北方向的小路再把它们连在一起。从空中往下看，老北京城就像一块整整齐齐的棋盘。
当然，也有不守规矩的胡同。前门大街附近的钱市胡同，最窄的地方只有四十厘米左右，两个人迎面走过来，必须有一个人侧着身子让路。还有一条九道湾胡同，弯来弯去，一共拐了十九个弯，第一次走进去的人很容易迷路。
根据清朝的记录，北京直接叫“胡同”的街巷有九百多条；到1949年，已经增加到一千三百多条。可是在后来几十年的城市改造中，大量胡同被拆除，拆掉的地方盖起了高楼，建起了宽阔的马路。留下来的胡同，一部分成了热闹的景点，挤满了拍照的游客；另一部分依然安静，住着一辈子没离开过这里的老人。
所以，下次导航让你拐进胡同的时候，不妨放慢脚步。在这些窄窄的路上，你看到的不只是一条小巷，而是一座城市七百多年的日常生活。
Key words
| Word | Pinyin | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 进入 | jìnrù | to enter; to get into |
| 棵 | kē | classifier for trees, plants and vegetables |
| 胡同 | hútòng | alley; lane; hutong |
| 窄 | zhǎi | narrow |
| 灰色 | huīsè | gray |
| 大爷 | dàyé | (polite) grandpa; old sir (to an older man) |
| 好奇 | hàoqí | curious |
| 围 | wéi | to surround; to encircle |
| 修建 | xiūjiàn | to build; to construct |
| 学者 | xuézhě | scholar; academic |
| 至今 | zhìjīn | to this day; so far; until now |
| 排列 | páiliè | to arrange; to line up |
English (for the teacher)
In Beijing, your phone's map app will sometimes tell you, “In fifty metres, turn right into the hutong.” You turn in and look: the lane is only wide enough for one bicycle, grey brick walls run along both sides, a jujube tree leans out over the top of a wall, and an old man sits on a little stool by his door playing chess. This is a hutong. Plenty of people in Beijing for the first time wonder: what exactly is a hutong? And where does the word come from?
Put simply, a hutong is one of Beijing's little lanes. But the two characters 胡同 don't tell you anything by themselves. One theory is that the word comes from a Mongolian word meaning “well”. In the Yuan dynasty the Mongols built their capital, Dadu, here, the city that became today's Beijing. People can't live without water, so houses were often built around wells, and the paths beside the wells slowly became hutongs. Of course, this is only one scholarly guess, and opinions still differ today.
The houses lined up along a hutong are mostly siheyuan. A siheyuan is a home with buildings on all four sides around a courtyard in the middle. In the old days one courtyard was often home to several generations of a family, the children went out the door to play in the hutong, and neighbours knew each other especially well. Beijing winters are cold and long, so most houses face south to let the sun into the rooms; that is why most hutongs run east to west, with smaller north-south lanes joining them up. Seen from the air, old Beijing looked like a neat chessboard.
Naturally, some hutongs don't follow the rules. Qianshi Hutong, near Qianmen Street, is only about forty centimetres wide at its narrowest, so when two people meet, one has to turn sideways to let the other pass. And Jiudaowan Hutong winds back and forth through nineteen turns in all, so first-timers get lost easily.
Qing dynasty records list more than nine hundred Beijing lanes actually named “hutong”; by 1949 there were over thirteen hundred. But in the decades of rebuilding that followed, huge numbers of hutongs were torn down, and tower blocks and wide roads went up in their place. Of the hutongs that remain, some have become busy sights packed with tourists taking photos, while others are still quiet, home to old people who have never left in their lives.
So next time your map app sends you into a hutong, slow down. On these narrow lanes you are not just seeing a little alley, but seven hundred years of a city's everyday life.