China Guide
Beijing
Getting around
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 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 city 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, like all major boulevards, changes its name 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 wai – which indicate the street's position in relation to the old city walls that enclosed the centre.
The five ring roads, freeways arranged in concentric rectangles centring on the Forbidden City, are rapid-access corridors.