There’s more to Beijing than great walls and forbidden cities

Any first-time visitor the China’s bustling capital city will inevitably be shapping photos at a few key points. They’ll be turning 360s inside the walls of the Forbidden City, capturing Mao Ze Dong’s giant portrait at the entrance, gaping at the vast sparsity of Tiananmen Square, and being ferried out to intact chunks of the Great Wall.

With the 2008 Olympic Games set to be held in Beijing, even more infrastructure is being set up to cart tourists around from the Olympic venues to the city’s vast number of monuments of an ancient empire.

An important note to make amid all this grandeur and equally grandiose sightseeing itineraries, is that Beijing still has its own local charms; charms that have nothing to do with former glory or megalomaniacal stratospheric reachings (architecturally or ideologically).

Residents that have seen their local neighbourhoods being sacrificed in order to put Beijing higher in the consciousness of world cities, don’t share the same optimism that the officials do.

Historian Jonathan Spence coments, “We are now seeing how the central planners have managed to wreck so much of the civilized residential spaces that the people had managed to carve out for themselves.”

One can only wonder how long it will take before Beijing’s local flavours are sacrificed for the greater imperial good: Communism, ininit?