What Beijing’s most important street, Changan Avenue, reveals about the Chinese capital’s past and present

A stroll along Long Peace Street – where old and new collide – offers a glimpse into China’s fascinating history

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A writer’s journey along Long Peace Street, or Changan Jie, through Beijing, reveals much about the Chinese capital’s past and present. Illustration: Adolfo Arranz

Jonathan Chatwin

Published: 11:00am, 3 Aug 2019Updated: 11:01am, 3 Aug 2019

On a hot August day, I set out to walk across Beijing.

My route was nothing if not straightforward: west to east, along the No 1 Street of China: Changan Jie. Literal translation, Long Peace Street. A more poetic reading might render it as the Avenue of Eternal Peace, but this road’s shoulders have rarely been peaceful for long.

Bisecting the Chinese capital from the edgelands, where the city meets the mountains in the west, to the unremarkable eastern suburbs, it is arrow-straight, 32km long and, at points, 10 lanes wide. Its centre separates the imperial splendour of the Forbidden City from Tiananmen Square, the vast granite rectangle built to the glory of Mao Zedong’s China after the communist victory of 1949.

Architect Liang Sicheng (1901-1972) reminded the new administration that Beijing’s imperial pattern had always emphasised its north-south axis – the so-called dragon’s vein that runs south through the Drum and Bell towers, the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square, and onwards out of town. It is on this line that sat the emperor’s Dragon Throne, in the Palace of Heavenly Purity, facing south, therefore the government should house itself in a new district, built along a parallel north-south line in the city’s western farmland. The party, however – influenced by then-ubiquitous Soviet advisers – decided to centre itself at the heart of the old city, and the new planners undertook to join the fragmented horizontals that ran across the city.

Changan Jie, or Long Peace Street, viewed from the Park Hyatt Beijing hotel. Photo: Simon Song

In the run-up to the 10th anniversary of the People’s Republic, tram lines were removed. The four imperial gates that punctuated the route had already been demolished earlier in the decade to much protest. The central section of Long Peace Street was widened to 80 metres and paved with granite blocks, and on October 1, 1959, more than 11,000 People’s Liberation Army soldiers marched in lockstep past 700,000 citizens.

Many of Beijing’s so-called Ten Great Buildings were built rapidly thereafter, and in Soviet-favoured socialist-realist style, including the Great Hall of the People; the museums of the Chinese revolution and Chinese history (now the National Museum); the Military Museum; and Beijing Railway Station.