Beijing's Moment

If you don't believe that United's victory was a big deal, you weren't at Dulles on March 28 for the inaugural flight. The boarding process featured a free buffet, Chinese-style drummers and a fluffy yellow dragon leading speech-making dignitaries down Concourse C.

Unfortunately, there's only so much glamour one can attach to 13 1/2 hours in economy. I read, had a Scotch, dozed and looked out the window until I finally saw it: Beijing, a 15-million-person megalopolis undergoing what has been called the most dramatic transformation in history.

Which is why it surprised me. I expected a futuristic world of glittering glass and kaleidoscopic light, the cutting edge of human endeavor. Instead, my first impressions were of a flat, dusty city filled with grim rows of identical, Soviet-style apartment blocks.

Construction cranes perched on the skyline like flocks of gargantuan, robotic flamingos, and the air was sepia-toned with smog and dust. Walking Beijing's expansive avenues, widened under Mao Zedong, I felt a heavy sense of anomie.

In part, the feeling came from the city's sheer size. Beijing municipality, which includes rural and urban areas, is bigger than Connecticut. The city's urban core and inner suburbs are about the size of New York's five boroughs, but with much more limited subway service.

Yet I quickly discovered that no city moves so quickly between massive and modest, between anonymous and intimate. On my first day, for example, I drifted south from the vast, gray expanse of Tiananmen Square into the narrow hutongs, or alleyways, of the Qianmen district.

Immediately, the traffic noise faded. Low, gray-walled courtyard homes lined lanes that were often too narrow for cars but dotted with decrepit bicycles. Through an open door, I glanced at a group of friends hunkered over a board game. Farther on, meat sizzled over small braziers, its aroma mixing with a less pleasant sewer smell. A cat crept over a rooftop.

Then, a few steps farther, this charmingly run-down neighborhood turned to rubble. While a few hutongs have protected status, scores are being leveled -- and their residents forced out -- to make room for high-rises.

It was tragic, but these demolitions helped me understand that my pre-arrival expectations were not entirely wrong. It was as if Beijing were plowing up a charming old garden and sowing high-rise seeds in its soil. And now those seeds were sprouting everywhere, in jagged, unfinished stalks of concrete and steel.

I decided I was less wrong than premature: The city I'd imagined was being created before my eyes.

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Imagine throwing a party so big, so important, that you decided to remodel your entire house and school your kids in a new set of manners. Expand that philosophy to an entire city, and you've got Beijing's approach to the 2008 Olympics.