Mao Zedong's resting place

Barely 500 paces from revolutionary leader Mao Zedong's resting place in the heart of Beijing lies some of the hottest real estate in China.

The new "traditional-style" courtyard homes planned for the Chinese capital's historic Qianmen district just south of Tiananmen Square are expected to fetch as much as 50 million yuan (6.5 million dollars) each.

With those sorts of figures, Zhang Hailiang and his wife, Wang Xiaolan, find it hard to understand why they have not been given a cent for their old courtyard home that developers destroyed to make way for the new.

Ten months after their 100-year-old house was demolished, the couple continue to live in the rubble that was once their home, refusing to move until the property developers or local authorities give them someplace else to live.

"My heart is filled with anger and disappointment," Wang, 52, told AFP as she stood on the jagged remains of a broken concrete slab that a year earlier had been her living room floor.

"At the beginning we were promised another place to live. But we have been cheated."

Since their two-storey house was demolished, Wang and Zhang, also 52, have lived in a makeshift hut just big enough to lie in and which they erected in the rubble after scraping together wood and other materials from the wreckage.

The roof of their hut, made of plastic sheets, was barely able to take the harshest edge off the cold during the brutal northern Chinese winter just passed, when temperatures regularly dropped well below freezing.

Living off Wang's pension of 980 yuan (125 dollars) a month, they struggle to buy anything but the simplest of essentials to survive.