Over the past 20 years, Kuang Han has been capturing Beijing's hutong in his pencil drawings. Zhang Zixuan / China Daily

Looking at the vivid pencil drawings of Beijing's hutong, or traditional alleys, it's hard to believe the artist behind these beautiful sketches is not a Beijinger, but a southerner from Yifeng, Jiangxi province.

For the past 20 years, 50-year-old Kuang has been capturing the poetry of the hutong's gray-toned historic architecture - from the bicycle-repair shops to the classic eaves of courtyard houses hiding in the shadow of mammoth trees - in his pencil drawings.

Kuang's love of hutong developed slowly. When he moved to the capital in the early 1990s, the art school graduate was not at all happy to be squeezed into a 9-square-meter room with his wife and newborn son at a siheyuan, or courtyard, in Beixin Hutong. Queuing to use the public toilet and doing the cooking outside also embarrassed him.

However, his warm-hearted neighbors soon won him over. The southerner says he was never once made to feel like an outsider.

"Being in a siheyuan is like being in one big family, chatting, cooking and washing clothes together," Kuang says. "At dinner time, I often had to go looking from door-to-door for my son, who would be playing or watching TV at neighbors' homes."

As Kuang's intimacy with the hutong grew, he began to record its unique life in his drawings.

He recalls with affection how the first sentence his son spoke was - "Beer, soda and Erguotou!" - the call of a hutong vendor.

Unlike pencil sketches by other artists, Kuang's drawings are marked by the use of his signature wide-stub pencils.

Borrowing the techniques for oil painting, he uses surfaces instead of lines to express the spirit of hutong.

However, drawing with wide-stub pencils is hard work. Each drawing takes Kuang easily a month to complete.

"Every stroke needs to be pressed onto the paper and involves much exertion," Kuang explains.