Beijing City Fortifications

Put your hand on the brick. It is grey, slightly rough, and cool even on a warm afternoon. Somewhere nearby, traffic hums along a ring road. A few metres away, a dog walker passes under trees. Everything around you is ordinary modern Beijing. Yet the wall beside you is part of one of the largest city defences ever built.

For centuries, Beijing was a walled city. It was not one wall but several, set one inside another like boxes. At the centre stood the Forbidden City, home of the emperors. Around it ran the walls of the Imperial City. Around that ran the great Inner City wall. To the south, a further ring enclosed the Outer City. To enter the heart of power, you passed through layer after layer of brick and gate.

The story of these walls begins with an older capital. In the thirteenth century, the Mongol rulers of the Yuan dynasty built a capital here. The Chinese called it Dadu, the Great Capital. Its walls were made mostly of rammed earth. When the Ming dynasty took power in the fourteenth century, it reshaped the old city. The Ming shifted the northern line of the walls and later faced the defences with brick.

The Yongle Emperor moved the Ming capital to Beijing in the early fifteenth century. Under him and his successors, the Inner City took its lasting form. It was a broad rectangle, pierced by nine gates. Each gate had a main gate tower and, in front of it, an arrow tower. A walled enclosure, called a barbican, linked the two. An attacker who broke through the first gate found himself trapped in a stone courtyard, under fire from all sides.

Now comes a detail many visitors miss. In the mid-sixteenth century, raids from the northern steppe frightened the court. Officials planned a second, outer wall to surround the entire Inner City. Work began in 1553. But the project was enormously expensive. Only the southern section was ever finished. So the outer wall wrapped just the south side, where many markets and homes had grown up. From above, the city took on a strange shape — a wide southern block, with a narrower northern block sitting on top. People compared the outline to a hat.

The walls were not only for war. They shaped daily life. Gates opened at dawn and closed at night. Carts of grain, coal and water moved through particular gates, and some gates became linked with particular trades. A wide moat ran along the outside, fed by channels from the hills to the west. For ordinary people, the walls marked the edge of the city. Outside lay fields, villages and graveyards.

Then, in the twentieth century, the walls began to vanish. Some gaps were cut earlier, for railways and roads. But the great loss came in the 1950s and 1960s. City planners saw the walls as obstacles to traffic and growth. The architect and historian Liang Sicheng argued hard to save them. He imagined the top of the wall as a long elevated park, where people could walk above the city. His proposal was not accepted. Section by section, the walls came down.

Here is the second surprise. The walls did not disappear without a trace. Their line still runs through the city. The Second Ring Road follows much of the old route of the Inner City wall. Beneath it runs Subway Line 2, the loop line, which was built along the same path. Many station names on that line, such as Xizhimen, Dongzhimen and Andingmen, are the names of gates that no longer stand. When you ride that loop, you are circling the old city.

The longest surviving stretch of the Inner City wall is here, in the Ming City Wall Ruins Park. It runs in the southeast of the old city. Look closely at the bricks. Many carry stamped inscriptions. These marks often name the kiln, the place of manufacture or the people responsible for the brick. They were a form of quality control. If a brick failed, officials could trace who made it. Some bricks that local people took away during demolition were later returned and set back in the wall.

At the eastern end of this stretch stands the Southeast Corner Tower. It is a heavy, many-windowed watchtower, rising high above the corner where two walls once met. Rows of small openings once held archers and, later, guns. Corner towers like this guarded the weakest point of any rectangle — the angle where attackers could approach from two directions. This tower also saw fighting in 1900, during the Boxer Uprising, when foreign armies entered Beijing.

A few other pieces of the defences survive across the city. Zhengyangmen, better known as Qianmen, still stands at the southern end of Tiananmen Square. Both its gate tower and its arrow tower remain. In the north, the arrow tower of Deshengmen rises beside a busy junction. And in the south, the Yongdingmen gate tower was rebuilt in the early 2000s, on the old central axis of the city. Each fragment helps you picture the whole.

Try to imagine the scale. The Inner City wall alone ran for many kilometres. It was thick enough at the top for soldiers to march and carts to move. It rose higher than the low courtyard houses around it. From outside, the city must have looked like a grey cliff, broken only by towers and gates. Travellers arriving after a long journey saw the walls long before they saw the city itself.

Today the remaining sections feel calm. People jog along the paths. Older residents practise tai chi or sit on benches in the shade. In spring, plum and other blossoms bloom along the park. The old moat line, the slow sounds of the neighbourhood and the steady traffic all sit side by side. This is how history often survives in a large city — in pieces, inside everyday life.

Before you move on, look once more at the wall. Notice where the old Ming bricks meet the newer repairs. Notice the slight lean of the surface, and the moss in the joints. Then look out toward the ring road and the towers beyond. The city has grown far past these walls. But their outline is still here, under the roads you will travel, and in the names of the stations you will pass.