It's incredibly quiet here.
We are so close to the Forbidden City, the most famous tourist site in Beijing,
and yet, if you just stand still and listen,
you hear birds in the trees as if you are in the middle of the countryside.
As you would expect for a city of 22 million, Beijing can be pretty noisy.
But in the old imperial heart of the capital, the din of the modern world falls away.
Welcome to Drum Tower.
I am David Rennie, The Economist's Beijing bureau chief.
My co-host Alice Su is on a well-earned break.
As I am on my own this week, I decided to leave the office
and take you to my favorite part of Beijing, its Hutongs.
Hutongs are gray-walled, tree-shaded alleys and lanes.
They are low-lying, made up of single-story courtyard houses and shops.
And here and there, you catch just a glimpse of grandeur,
the green or gold of a temple roof rising above the lanes.
I have loved them since I first borrowed a bike
and toured them as a backpacker a quarter-century ago.
Some of the Hutongs date back centuries, but they were nearly lost.
When I was first posted here as a reporter in the late 1990s,
Hutongs were being smashed down at a scary rate