在珠江新城高耸的大厦边坐落着一群岭南特色的仿制建筑。当我坐车经过的时候我就想起以上那些。它们的确很有吸引力，但同时也给人不真实的感觉。人们很有可能将那些年代久远的好房子推倒，取而代之的是老建筑的仿制品——没有任何建筑价值——在我眼里就和北京前门大街的情况一样。珠江新城里的复制品比前门大街上装饰一新的水泥方块好一些，但我担心真正的建筑的丰富性——有时候伴随着贫穷和脏乱——城市的另一面将很快消失。这不仅仅是一个美学的问题，更是一个经济社会问题。我很有兴趣知道人们是怎么看这个问题的。

英文原文:

"Before I was posted to Guangzhou as Consul General in December 2010, I visited several times each year from Beijing. These visits all had a similar pattern. I would arrive at Baiyun airport or Guangzhou East railway station and, depending on the time of day, would take a Consular car or a taxi to my hotel or the Consulate. I would spend the whole time on the road, in the office or at formal meals.

Of course these visits gave me some idea of the city. I was well briefed. I saw the scale of development. I felt the warmth of the climate and i suppose above all I liked the people i met, particularly the Consulate staff. They always seemed more animated than our staff in other posts, with less distance and formality in the relationship between the British and the Chinese, predominantly Cantonese, staff.

I haven't changed these impressions since arriving as Consul General but I have added to them. Before then I had not had time to walk through the city and to see its architectural richness. In particular i had not seen the Dongshan and the Liwan districts, or wonderful nineteenth century buildings buried in Haizhu district, some with all their original features but nearly derelict. How long will this richness be preserved i wonder?

We were talking about this when HRH the Duke of York visited Guangzhou last week. Over a lunch which Vanke hosted, the President of Vanke spoke about his visit to the UK to sign an agreement with the Building Reaearch Institute, BRE, on the development of green buildings. While at BRE he had seen a model building in traditional style, using traditional building crafts, supported by Prince Charles. The Duke commented that he did not always agree with his brother's views on architecture. He himself thought that modern architecture could me more eclectic and less conventional: A building did not have to have four sides. The duke said that he did, though, share his brother's concern to preserve old architecture by finding ways to adapt it to modern uses without damaging its conception. His brother's The Prince's Trust is supporting such projects preserving courtyard houses in the hutong of Beijing.

I reflected on this as I drove past the rows of houses in the Lingnan style being build around the edges of high rise housing estates in zhuzhang xincheng. These are quite attractive, but they are rather unreal. There is a risk of knocking down the genuinely old and fine, if derelict, to replace it with ersatz old buildings of no architectural merit: that in my view is what has happened in Qianmen in Beijing. The reproductions in zhujiang xincheng are better than the decorated concrete cubes in qianmen, but I worry that the real architectural richness - accompanied sometimes by poverty and poor sanitation - of other parts of the city will soon be lost. This is of course not just an aesthetic question, it is an economic and a social one. I would be interested to hear what peopl think about it."