There's no doubt that Beijing's initial culture shock owes much
to the artificiality of the city's layout . The main streets
are huge, wide and dead straight, aligned either east-west or
north-south, and extend in a series of widening rectangles across
the whole thirty square kilometres of the inner capital.
The pivot of the ancient city was a north-south road that led
from the entrance of the Forbidden City to the walls. This remains
today as Qianmen Dajie , though the main axis has shifted to
the east-west road that divides Tian'anmen Square and the Forbidden
City, and which changes its name, like all major boulevards, every
few kilometres along its length. It's generally referred to as
Chang'an Jie .
Few traces of the old city remain except in the street
names , which look bewilderingly complex but are not hard to
figure out once you realize that they are compounds of a name, plus
a direction - bei, nan, xi, dong and
zhong (north, south, west, east and middle) - and the words
for inside and outside - nei and wei - which indicate
the street's position in relation to the old city walls which
enclosed the centre. Central streets often also contain the word
men (gate), which indicates that they once had a gate in the
wall along their length.
The three ring roads , freeways arranged in concentric
rectangles centring on the Forbidden City, are rapid-access
corridors. The second and third, Erhuan Lu and Sanhuan Lu, are the
most useful, cutting down on journey times but extending the
distance travelled and therefore much liked by taxi drivers. While
most of the sights are in the city centre, most of the modern
buildings - hotels, restaurants, shopping centres and flashy office
blocks - are along the ring roads.
You'll soon become familiar with the experience of barrelling
along a freeway in a bus or a taxi while identical blocks flicker
past, not knowing which direction you're travelling in, let alone
where you are. To get some sense of orientation, take fast mental
notes on the more obvious and imposing landmarks. The Great Hall of
the People in Tian'anmen Square; the Telegraph Office on Xichang'an
Jie; the seventeen-storey Beijing Hotel on Dongchang'an Jie;
and farther east on the same road, the Friendship Store and World
Trade Centre. At the western intersection of the second ring road
and Chang'an Jie, the astronomical instruments on top of the old
observatory stand out for their oddness, as does the white dagoba
in Beihai Park, just north and west of the Forbidden City.