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Modernisation was clearest here around the Drum and Bell Towers, one of Beijing's oldest and most active areas, itself in the grip of generational gear-shift.

Six thousand families lived in the hutong webs around the towers, according to Kinna, 22, a tour guide for the Beijing Hutong Culture Tour Company ("the only company that gives Hutong Tour with Government Approval”). Aussie correspondent for the ABC John Taylor reported in 2005 that about 60,000 people lived in the two square kilometres around the landmark, what's known as Shishahai, or Ten Temple Lakes, making it one of the most densely populated areas in central Beijing. These neighborhoods, this style of urban living, is unique to China, and dates back nearly 800 years. The word hutong comes from the Mongolian word hottog which means "water well", the most important part of an ancient city and a place where communities gathered. It's onomatopoeic, the sound a stone makes when dropped down a well and hits the water.

The two towers have always been nodes on Beijing's ancient framework. They stand at the northern tip of Beijing's traditional north-south axis, running from the Bell Tower down to Yongdingmen at the bottom of Tiananmen Sqaure. The Drum tower used to be the highest building in Beijing, and for centuries animated the wake and sleep of millions of pre-modern Chinese. Its drumming signaled the opening and closing of Beijing's nine ancient gates. After the requisite fires, invasions and repairs since 1272 when it was built by Kublai Khan in the then capital of the Yuan dynasty, the Drum tower has become a major tourist attraction. The tower still commands an impressive survey of Beijing. You can see hutong like the tiny lines on your palm stretch out beneath you. On a day like today, a clear mild day, you can see all the way to the mountains in the West, the CCTV tower, and in the south-east, the CBD.

But every so often there are large patches of the map blotted out with construction. On the corner of Goulou Dong Da Jie, right opposite the towers, there used to be a city block of hutong and courtyard houses. There, on the corner, a shop used to sell commercial kitchen supplies and another was one of the ubiquitous thermal underwear stores. Now, behind the wall, is a hole of dirt, completely cleared.

In the hole, something that summarises the entire method behind Beijing's radical makeover.

"Do you know what’s going in there?" I asked Kinna from atop the Drum Tower one day after a spontaneous desire to be a tourist in the area I lived.

"They think it will be a Courtyard House Museum", said Kinna.

"They're clearing the courtyard houses to build a Courtyard House Museum?"

The irony was lost on Kinna. Like other people her age, she doesn't care for the hutong. What was feared for the younger generation – loss of tradition to the generic face of consumerism – is also the fear for this area of the city, as hutongs are replaced by new buildings. It's a process that has gone on for decades since the People's Republic was declared in 49 and the seat of government moved to the ancient city, a decision which historian Wu Hong calls the "fatal moment in its survival". After this, Beijing's urban face erupted in zits of redesign and construction. But in recent years, the pace has accelerated. Memory of the hutong and the values they represented are fading fast among young people Kinna’s age, especially. Most didn't live in the hutong as children. Kinna is in the rare position to compare apartments and the hutong. She grew up in the area around the Bell Tower until she was 8, playing hutong zhou mi cang (hide and seek) and tiao fang zi (hopscotch). She remembered when she was 6 her family shared her si he yuan, her courtyard house, with other families.

Kinna lets go of the cheesy tourism thing eventually and we talk candidly about her life as we walk around the hutong. Today, I'm her only customer. So she's more relaxed and can go off script. "My favourite thing about living in the hutong", she says, "was coming home after school and playing with all the children in the streets. Because the streets were narrow and there were a lot of streets, it was very fun". She loved the community. Everyone knew everyone.

She got her English name from one of her teachers at Beijing’s expensive but well reputed Wall Street Language School. English helped her get a job, but it's been hard. There's no work in her tiny niche, programming air-conditioners for large office buildings, even though she earned this as a tertiary degree from Beijing Union University. Only a handful of her classmates are in the industry. She used family connections to get a job. Her cousin’s wife worked as a Japanese tour guide in Beijing and introduced Kinna to the hutong tour company where she has now worked for 6 months. "It’s hard to find a job, so I’m very, very proud", she says.

Kinna has since rejected the crowded, dilapidated courtyards. She now owns a 4-door Peugeot hatch-back which she drives into town from her parents' apartment on the Fifth Ring Road East. The new home is 100 square metres, which is actually smaller than a courtyard house. “In Beijing, that’s very big”, she says. She has her own room, and lives with her parents who are almost retired. She wouldn't live anywhere else.

In the latter part of the tour we visit Mr Wu, 74, inside a courtyard house on Jiao Jin Si Hutong (Small golden silk hutong). His house is 190 years old, and wears its age well. It looks solid if a little run down. It's a different Beijing. Screeching cars and massive building projects seem part of another, fictional world.

Mr Wu has been letting people see his place for 10 years, something to do when he retired. He gets money from the tour company to show tourists the Old Beijing. Not much money, though. A handful of kuai per tour. Today is not a busy day. He is wearing a green silk tunic. He has gappy yellow teeth, and well-worn smile lines around his eyes. "Before, foreigners could only look outside and then they think they have seen Old Beijing", he tells me. "I think they prefer to see the inside".

Inside is gorgeous, if a a little run down and dirty. It's silent, and warm on this winter day. There's a bare pomegranate tree and a grape tree (not for wine: “I don’t drink wine!” Mr Wu exclaims. They're for eating). Unlike outside, which smells like glue and sewerage, thanks to Mrs Wu, the inside smells like flowers. "The hutong is more comfortable than the apartment", Mr Wu grins.

Three generations of the Wu family have shared this common space. Mr Wu, a retired archaeologist, has lived here for over 50 years, after his mother bought the courtyard in 1953 - not the land, just the house. He lives here now with his wife, a retired rubber factory worker, his two sons, their wives, and his 13-year-old grand daughter who is featured prominently on the walls. Before the Cultural Revolution there was one family to each courtyard house. This was how they were designed. But during the Revolution, many families crowded into one courtyard, often dividing it up into several living quarters. Between 1966 and 1976, 9 more people in 2 different families crowed into the 2 rooms in the courtyard.

"After the Cultural Revolution, in 1983, the Government gave the two families money to buy apartments – they asked their danwei’s to give them money", Kinna told me. "In 1984, they got the keys to the apartment but they didn’t want to move out. One family moved out in 1989 because the older son needed to get married and there wasn’t enough rooms in the house”. They moved outside the Third Ring Road, kilometres away from this community.

Mr Wu has seen his city change more than most other septuagenarians in other cities of the world. But he's less likely to go off script than Kinna, who I've spent the last 2 hours with.

"Beijing is bigger and more beautiful", he says of the changes. "The shops are more beautiful. Before, at 6 at night all the shops closed and turned off their lights. It was very dark! There was no one in the streets. Now, even at midnight, the centre of the city is very beautiful. All the lights and very beautiful. Before 1949 outside the second ring road there were no buildings, just farms. Now there are so many tall buildings. Now there are seven ring roads!”

When he shakes my hand goodbye, he holds it for a moment longer and says slowly like a teacher to a pupil, "There's no Beijing without Old Beijing".

For the older generation there's nostalgia for the hutong. For Mr Wu, some pocket money, too. But for Kinna, there's been a fundamental shift. History should not be lost, she says. But it has been, there's no doubt. You don't tour historic areas unless something has died and been left behind. Kinna's employment is premised on Beijing's rapid destruction of its heritage.

She is more interested in comfort, practicality, the future, convenience. Given the grip of garbage on my shoes walking through the hutong, and the stench of the communal pit toilets, I don't blame her.

“Between the young people and the old people there’s a problem", she says. "For me, I prefer the apartment. In the hutong you don’t have any secrets. If you are lucky you have a toilet and a shower inside the hutong. If you are lucky. For me it’s very important to have these things”.