Beijing's planners are agonising over a delicate matter - whether to preserve or demolish the city's old brothels in the ''lanes of flowers and willows'' in Tianqiao, just south of Tiananmen Square.
Once as famous an attraction as the Forbidden City, the eight Bada hutongs are set in the crowded alleys of the old city of Beijing, where there has always been a concentration of tea houses, opium dens and theatres.
''If you want to see the true spirit of Chinese civilisation you must visit the Bada hutongs and see the essential grace, courtesy and feminine dignity of these sing-song girls and, in particular, their ability to blush at obscenity,'' the British Buddhist scholar John Blofeld was told by his friend Professor Ku Hungming.
Blofeld's memoirs, City of Lingering Splendour, recount how in the mid-1930s, he was taken to ''the House of Springtime Congratulations'', met by a male functionary known as the ''big teapot'', and led to a room, where he was served tea and melon seeds. He later fell in love with one of the girls.
His romantic view of the area is not shared by all today. ''The history of the Bada hutongs represents the dark side of China, its former backwardness,'' said Zhao An, a Beijing Tourist Office official.
The area, also known as Dashalar, is now a warren of dirty and crowded alleys scheduled, like most of the old city, for wholesale demolition and reconstruction.