Ted Levine's Old Beijing in Photos

Margaux Schreurs | May 29, 2015 9:00 am | Add a comment | 4918 reads

Ted Levine was a student at Beijing Language Institute (now Beijing Language and Culture University) in 1982. His daughter has recently embarked on a mission to restore his photographs from that time.

Levine fondly remembers Wudaokou as “one big watermelon mall with farmers coming in from the outskirts by horse cart. Beijing had yet to start its trajectory towards the modern, and the urban feel was still surprisingly suspended in some kind of post-Mao limbo where there were very few signs of what was to come.”

“There were no ring roads, and Subway Line 1 had just opened. I would make my way to the neighborhoods and shops around Wangfujing every day. The only stores I remember were the big bookstore where the shelves were still filled with Little Red Books, and the Baihuo Dalou Department Store where there wasn’t really much to buy. Every evening I would go to the roof bar of the old section of the Beijing Hotel and have some tea, ice cream, and M&M’s.”

“One evening on my Flying Pigeon bike ride back to Wudaokou, I had a flat tire and being way late in the evening I resigned myself to what I thought would be the very long trek back to the Beijing Language Institute. A young fellow on his bike noticed me walking with my disabled bike and signaled me to follow him down a hutong. He knocked on an old door of an unmarked bike repair shop and home and woke up another guy in the shop.”

The photos depicting such scenes were restored by Levine’s daughter, Jill, using a film scanner, and can be found on www.tumblr.com/blog/chinaandchange.