The Great Guijie Culling is Underway: Small Fries Closed, Large Venues Lose Ostentatious Signage

The sledgehammers and bulldozers have arrived, and Guijie, also known as Ghost Street, is looking a little worse for wear.

The red-hot dining street was reported to be receiving a gas line replacement in September, and it looks like city officials are doing a bit more than that, as smaller shops and restaurants have been emptied out and their bricks are being stripped off the outside.

We spoke to someone at Huda, one of the biggest Guijie chains, who ensured us that all their branches were to open as normal today, and that their restaurants would not be demolished anytime in the near future. 

Some of the bigger restaurants have put signs out the front saying "正常营业" ("still open," see picture above) to ensure visitors recognize that even through the scaffolding, there are still crawfish being cooked. Even the restaurant pictured below, completely covered in construction material, is still open. We hope they give you a hard hat with your food ... 

The smaller shops did not seem to have made it (being completely stripped) and it is hard to believe that restaurants like the one pictured above will be serving up any food today or tomorrow. Unfortunately, none of the construction workers working on this site knew what the future for this establishment looked like. As for the gas pipe works, we found little evidence of that towards the north end of Guijie.

The renovations are part of a city-wide effort to clear up venues that have expanded beyond the original footprint of the buildings they are located in (common practice in Beijing is for venues such as restaurants to build extensions onto the front of their facilities to increase seating areas).

Guijie is no stranger to overhauls, the last taking place in May of 2014 when the authorities deemed that the street's signature lanterns weren't in keeping with their wider city planning ideology. Similar reconstruction efforts are currently underway at Baochao Hutong and Nanluogu Xiang.

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Photos: Margaux Schreurs