BEIJING - The destruction of this 800-year-old city usually proceeds as follows: the Chinese character for“demolish”appears on the front of an old building, the residents wage a fruitless battle to save their homes, and then a wrecking crew arrives, often accompanied by the police, to pulverize the brick-and-timber structure.


But before another chunk of ancient Beijing disappears entirely, a hospice administrator named Li Songtang can often be found poking around the rubble, looking for remnants that honor what was among the world’s best-preserved metropolises until a merciless wave of redevelopment gained the upper hand.


Since the 1970s, when Mao inspired his Red Guards to pummel every “reactionary”Confucius temple and Ming Dynasty statue they could find, Mr.Li has been salvaging architectural remnants and stowing them away, sometimes at considerable risk.


Manchu hitching posts. Ornate wooden doorways. A giant granite horse that graced an emperor’s palace. These and thousands of other objects fill Mr.Li’s warehouse and spill across the grounds of the hospice he runs in Beijing’s eastern suburbs.


The most historically significant items are displayed in his private museum, where every Sunday he can be found leading tours .“For 50 years I’ve been watching the destruction of this magnificent city,”he’ll say in admonishment.“We’ve been treating history like garbage.”


When the Communists took power in 1949, they inherited a city marbled with 7,000 alleyways, or hutong . In Old Beijing, hutong were the capillaries that fed the walled compounds where most people lived. The Communists forced aristocratic families to share their courtyard homes with working-class families, but the structures, and their stone-and-wood artistry, remained intact. Monument-building and road-widening claimed swaths of the old city in the 1950s and ‘60s, and more damage was done during the Cultural Revolution. The pace surged in the 1990s, when China’s embrace of market economics fueled a redevelopment juggernaut.


Now, 1,300 hutong remain.


Michael Meyer, who documents Qianmen’s hutong life in his book “The Last Days of Old Beijing,”says most residents are not terribly nostalgic about the old city. For them, a freshly painted facsimile of a 500-year-old Buddhist temple is fine.“Those who are trying to preserve a bit of the city’s legacy are increasingly isolated and powerless,”he said.


Mr.Li’s efforts have sometimes attracted the attention of officials, who have accused him of stealing and obliquely criticizing government policies. He acknowledges he never paid for anything, although he might give demolition workers a few dollars to cart away a heavy object.“I came to realize that so much of Beijing was destroyed because no one was willing to pay these men for overtime”to haul away relics, he said, half-jokingly.


The $4.50 entrance fee to his museum does not cover the cost of operations, so Mr.Li subsidizes it himself.“I have 1,000 stories that I can never tell,”he said conspiratorially, and then offered a few choice words to describe those who blocked his way? and those who have promoted the demise of Old Beijing. But then he corrected himself.“The Communist Party has improved Beijing immeasurably,” he said with a taut smile.“They are doing a wonderful job.”


Li Songtang at his museum in Beijing, where he displays relics saved from demolition sites. / DOUG KANTER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

By ANDREW JACOBS