Blitzed Beijing

Why the Olympic city is set on demolishing its past

When I first came to Beijing, seven years ago, I lived next to a building site. When I returned a year later, I lived next to a building site. This time round, I’m living next to a building site, in an apartment on the seventeenth floor of an eighteen-floor development. My tower block doesn’t have a fourth floor, or a thirteenth floor, or a fourteenth floor, because four is an inauspicious number to the Chinese (it rhymes with death) and the management is also worried about putting off Western triskaidekaphobes. So the lift ticks superstitiously up past floors 3, 5, 5A…12, 12A, 15, 15A…