Park in Chongwenmen
Linli Paradise
Listen to this story 1 min
The story of Linli Paradise
Linli Paradise stands in the Chongwenmen area, just south of the old Beijing Legation Quarter, on ground that once held a gate in Beijing’s city wall. The gate was part of the southeastern edge of the inner city, and in the 1960s it and much of the wall were torn down to make room for Beijing's second ring road.
That is the main thing to know while you are here: this place sits within a landscape that changed from a walled-city threshold into a modern traffic corridor. So if you are looking around for traces of the old gate itself, there are none left to see here; what remains is the neighbourhood’s position in the former city structure.
Because Linli Paradise is not separately documented in the material available here, the safest way to read it is as a site within that Chongwenmen setting. The surrounding area tells the story: a gate once stood here, the wall ran through this district, and later road building reshaped the area completely.
As you walk on, think of this stop as a marker for where Beijing’s old inner-city edge used to be. The useful landmark now is the modern road system, but the historical one was the city wall.
In brief
Chongwenmen was a gate that was part of Beijing's city wall in what is now Dongcheng District. The gate stood in the southeastern part of Beijing's inner city, immediately south of the old Beijing Legation Quarter. In the 1960s, the gate and much of the wall was torn down to make room for Beijing's second ring road. Today, Chongwenmen is marked by the intersection of Chongwenmen Nei (Inner) and Chongwenmen Wai (Outer) Street, which run north–south through the former gate, Chongwenmen East and Chongwenmen West Street, which run east–west where the wall stood, and Beijing Station West Street, a diagonal street, going northwest to the Beijing railway station. Chongwenmen is a transport node in Beijing. Chongwenmen Station is an interchange station on Lines 2 and 5 of the Beijing Subway. Chongwen District, an administrative division of the city from 1952 to 2010 and now folded into Dongcheng District, was named after Chongwenmen.
Before you go
- Time to allow
- 45 min-1.5 hr
- Best months
- March to June, September to November
- Address
- Fengtai District, China, 100079