Threatened with eviction but desperate not to leave, the residents of a derelict corner of China's capital cling to their crumbling homes like haggard castaways on a surging tide.
By day, the heart of the Guandong Dian slum neighbourhood teems with poor migrant workers buying cheap food and slurping hand-pulled noodles at stalls. By night, prostitutes whisper at passersby from doorways.
Its reeking alleyways and grey-brick huts lie in the shadows of luxury apartments and shimmering office blocks at the fringe of Beijing's brand new central business district. But not for long.
“By the end of this year, all of this will be gone,” said snack vendor Wang Jinglong, waving a worn hand over a grimy streetscape of open-air butchers and fruitsellers.
“People like me who rent and own stalls will have to find another place.”
Guandong Dian, soon to be cleared to make way for an office block and a wider road, is one of dozens of crumbling shanty-towns pockmarking Beijing that have been earmarked for demolition prior to 2008 when the city hosts the Olympic Games.
Having survived the city's relentless modernisation drive, local authorities are determined the shanty-towns -- home to many of the millions of migrant workers flooding into Beijing to find employment -- won't survive to tarnish the showcase capital's image during the Olympics.
Branding them "illegal urban villages", town planners demolished 55 of them in 2006, and started clearing another 25 as part of the city's "beautification" work.
Authorities are spending $40 billion to upgrade Beijing's creaky public transport system, build event venues and shift heavy industrial polluters far from city limits in line with a pledge to the International Olympic Committee to unclog congested roads and reduce air pollution for the games. In a city of glittering skyscrapers, the shanty-towns are inconvenient reminders of grinding poverty in China's heartland.
“There are at least 1,000 of us here,” said Wang, who once farmed a small plot in his home province of Henan, but now ekes out a living selling slices of "thousand layer cake" from a hand-wheeled cart in Xiangjun Nanli.
“Most of us are from outside of Beijing, from all over the country,” said Wang, one of about four million migrant workers who live in Beijing but are not counted in its official population of 15 million.
Tens of thousands more arrive every year to wait at tables, work on construction sites or in the homes of the nouveau riche.
Beijing Olympic officials have denied reports that migrant workers will be expelled, although they have pledged to clear beggars and peddlers from the inner city.
Reuters