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Hu Qingtai bought his apartment in Xianghe. According to him, he was looking for a home for his family at the time, and first noticed the housing development through an advertisement after accidentally taking the wrong exit while driving back to Beijing.

The year was 2016. Housing prices around Beijing had already gone up, while Xianghe, located a little farther from the city, still seemed to offer room for growth. Everything still seemed to point toward a promising future, yet Hu Qingtai could not have known that this sense of possibility was already nearing its end, nor that the changes he would later witness there would gradually enter his practice.

In the years that followed, the economic boom across the country began to lose momentum, and the area he would come to regard as a second home entered a period of decline. When Hu Qingtai revisited his notes years later, he found that the hopes once attached to the apartment had become a burden in the present.

He thus decided to discard the house—an act of direct confrontation with reality.