Ehome Park

The story of Ehome Park

You are standing in Chongwenmen, in what is now Dongcheng District, and that name once belonged to a gate in Beijing’s city wall. The gate stood in the southeastern part of Beijing’s inner city, immediately south of the old Beijing Legation Quarter, so this corner was once tied to the city’s wall and its old perimeter.

What you can see today is a transport node rather than a surviving gate. Chongwenmen is marked by the intersection of Chongwenmen Nei Street and Chongwenmen Wai Street, which run north–south through the former gate, Chongwenmen East Street and Chongwenmen West Street, which run east–west where the wall stood, and Beijing Station West Street, which cuts diagonally northwest to Beijing railway station. Chongwenmen Station is an interchange on Lines 2 and 5 of the Beijing Subway, so this area is built around movement in the same place where the wall once controlled movement.

The gate and much of the wall were torn down in the 1960s to make room for Beijing’s second ring road. The district name Chongwen District, which existed from 1952 to 2010, was taken from Chongwenmen. If you want to orient yourself, the most concrete trace of the old gate is the street pattern itself.