ASIA LETTER: If you take a turn off Beijing's Chang'an Avenue, just a mile east of Tiananmen Square, you will find yourself stepping into yesterday.
Here in Xiao Jie it is easy to get lost in the warren of alleys and hutongs and crumbling courtyard homes that have survived through centuries.
Xiao Jie (it translates "little street") is one of Beijing's oldest communities, lined with dilapidated shops, smoky restaurants, and every variety of food-stall.
Barbers do their business outdoors and dirty-faced little children play on the choking streets. Old men sit outside their tiny, run-down homes gossiping and playing mahjong, while hard-working mothers scrub their washing by hand in tubs.
It is a crazy place with cars and single-storey buses vying for space on the narrow streets among cyclists and pedestrians. People flock to Xiao Jie to buy what are reputed to be the best fruit, vegetables and meat to be had in the world's most populous city.
But alas no more.
We hadn't been to Xiao Jie for a month and decided last week to take some visitors to show them the real Beijing, away from the city's swanky hotels, high-rise buildings, modern roadways, and fashionable new shopping centres.
To our shock we found ourselves walking through a demolition site. Every second building had vanished, and those standing had the Chinese character chai, meaning demolish, painted on their front.
People were wandering around in what had been their homes, many looking bewildered, salvaging bricks and other scrap for sale.
Beijing is undergoing redevelopment at a frightening rate, and areas like Xiao Jie are disappearing overnight. The transformation from a dusty, backward city of dreary slums to a world-class capital is leaving a huge human casualty list behind.
Residents in several districts of Beijing are talking of being bullied out of their homes by city planners in the name of progress, and traders and business people are losing their livelihood.
There is no appeals process where preservationists and residents can lodge objections.
Xiao Jie is not escaping the tide of redevelopment and is being razed to the ground. Residents have no choice but to move and many were in tears as they told they were given only five weeks' notice to quit their shops and homes.
The deadline for most to leave is tomorrow, and two-thirds had gone by the end of last week. Those who left by April 20th were given a bonus payment of €500.
The people of this close-knit community complain bitterly about the compensation they are being offered. They have two choices - either take the equivalent of €6,000 to leave an average sized 10-square-metre house, or opt to buy one of the new houses being built in the area at a special low rate.
Wang Wanlan (73) runs a small general store and lives in three rooms in the back with her handicapped son, a daughter, son-in-law and grandchild. The government is promising to give her a new two-room apartment in the same area, but she will have to pay €4,000 towards it. That is twice the average annual income in China and money she simply does not have.
The biggest loss to Wang is not her home but her little shop, which is her livelihood. "If I leave here and come back to the new apartment I will have no shop and no way to support my handicapped son," she cried.
Pan Jiushun has a tiny grocery shop which he and his wife opened after being laid off from state factories five years ago. Their 15-year-old son is a champion swimmer and came sixth in the recent national swimming finals. He is so tall he has to sleep on the sofa in their tiny home with his legs sprawled out over the edge.
The family get the equivalent of €60 a month in laid-off workers living compensation, barely enough to survive. They have decided to take the option of coming back to a new apartment. But they will have to pay the cost of renting another house until the new one is built. And their shop business is gone.
A couple in their thirties were very upset when we called. They run a little laundry on Xiao Jie, and the day before had their water and electricity cut off by the builders.
"We don't mind moving out of our old brick house. There is no indoor plumbing and the outside toilet we share with 10 other families is 100 yards away. But we need adequate compensation," the distraught woman said.
The government says more than one million residents in Beijing live in dangerous old houses and must be moved.
In the last 10 years, 200,000 families - nearly one million people - have been relocated and 4,360,000 square metres of houses pulled down.
There is concern that in the flurry to bring the city up to standard, much of Beijing's history is being swept away as hutongs and courtyards disappear one by one.
There is no doubt some of the living conditions are poor and the communal toilets are unhygienic eyesores which won't be missed.
Still, places like Salt Shop Lane, Fresh Beans Lane and Glutinous Rice Alley - hutongs named after the wares that were peddled there - gave the city a character that is now quickly disappearing.
It is particularly hard on the laobaixing, or common folk, many of whom are forced to relocate to anonymous high-rise buildings far from the city centre.
But the Beijing municipal government has decided what's good for the people of the city, and nothing will stand in its way. By 2008, and the Olympics, most of old Beijing may well be consigned to memory.