"Huairou" a Huairou Travel Page by mke1963

Huairou is one of those towns that provides little reason to stop and linger. Wide boulevards with nice shrubs, the odd bit of weird sculpture and endless identikit restaurants are insufficient pull for the hordes. Still, this is very much a weekend town, attracting Beijing folk who want to get out of town and sit in similar restaurants in, well, another town.
Huairou's single claim to fame was that it was the venue for the ill-fated parallel NGO Forum at the Fourth World Conference on Women, after it was switched fom Beijing to this more prosaic location in the hinterlands of Beijing municipality, far from anywhere useful. And it rained all week long. It even gave rise to the international Huairou Commission.

Huairou district extends far north of the town, and is home of many of the mountains most famous for the Great Wall. Like neighbouring Shunyi - and most other Chinese cities these days - it talks loudly of being an eco-friendly city which doesn't seem to fit with the dreadful, ramshackle planning, littered fields, urban sprawl and polluted waterways.

Chinese ecological initiatives are certainly all the rage currently. It keeps conference organisers and hotels busy anyway. Hairou is a state-level "sustainable community", no less, a position best characterised by the fact that 37% of the land area is seriously eroded, the whole area is subject to sandstorms, has suffered 17 serious droughts and 32 floods since 1949, has "serious agricultural pollution" and suffers from wastewater pollution. You should see the stats for the bad places.

Locally this area is best known as being the source - with Miyun - of much of Beijing's drinking water. This fact sits uneasily with the "watewater pollution" bit.
To be fair, under Local Agenda 21, Hairou has put a big effort into cleaning itself up, and there is much beauty and tranquility in the rural areas, and the city continues to spend many millions of RMB on further improvements. It still doesn't give much reason to visit, though, and I'm beginning to struggle.

Unfortunately, with China's relentless pursuit of modernity and progress, the planners and developers have managed to completely extinguish any character from the place. There is as much reason to visit Huairou as there is the eastern suburbs of Houston or the most boring dormitory town outside Brussels.

Its saving grace is, of course, its proximity to the mountains, the Great Wall (closer to Huairou than you might think) and the wonderful Red Snail Temple at Hongluoshan (surprisingly enough) - the largest Buddhist temple in northern China.

An interesting perspective on life in Huairou comes from the blog of a Canadian couple who lived in Huairou for 11 months in 2003 and 2004.