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The entry to this quarter is marked by the imposing, fifteenth-century, double-arched Qianmen Gate just south of Tian'anmen Square. Before the city's walls were demolished, this sector controlled the entrance to the Inner City from the outer, suburban sector. Shops and places of entertainment were banned from the former in imperial days, and they became concentrated in the Qianmen area. The gate marks a major intersection on the public transport network: as well as a subway stop, a bus terminus here provides connections to the southern districts and tourist buses also leave from here to attractions outside the city, including the Great Wall at Badaling and Shisan Ling. Qianmen Dajie , the quarter's biggest street, runs immediately south from the gate. Off to either side are trading streets and hutongs, with intriguing traditional pharmacies and herbalist shops, dozens of clothes shops, silk traders and an impressive array of side-stalls and cake-shops selling fresh food and cooked snacks. On the western side of the gate, you'll find KFC and McDonald's, but a better bet is the small DeliFrance, where you can get coffee and a chocolate croissant for Y10. Alternatively, plunge into the hutongs on the southeastern side of the gate, where you'll find many esoteric little greasy cafes, some of them foreign concerns, with signs in Korean or Arabic as well as Chinese. For something more ample, the famous Qianmen Quanjude Roast Duck is at no. 32. Once the district was noisy with opera singers. Today the theatres have been converted to cinemas and the area resounds instead with film soundtracks, piped into the street, and with the bips and beeps of the computer games sold at street stalls. For a rather sanitized taste of the district's old delights, visit the Lao She Tea House just west of KFC, which puts on daily shows of acrobatics and opera. More authentic is the hustle of cramped Dazhalan Lu , one of the oldest and most interesting of the Qianmen lanes, opposite the Qianmen Roast Duck restaurant on the east side of the road, its entrance marked by a white arch. This was once a major theatre street, now it's a hectic shopping district, with mostly tea shops and clothing stores occupying the genteel old buildings. Go down the first alley on the left, and one of the first shops you'll pass on the right is the Liubiju, a pickle shop that's more than a century old. It looks quaint, with pickled vegetables sold out of ceramic jars, but smells awful. Back on Dazhalan, you'll find the Ruifuxiang, an old fabric shop , a little farther down on the right - look for the storks on its facade, above the arched entrance. This is the place to get raw silk and satin, but even if you're not buying, take a look at the exhibition on the top floor of old photos of the street. On the other side of the road at no. 24 the Tongrengtang is a famous traditional Chinese medicine store , with shelves full of deer horn, bear heart capsules and the like, and a formidable array of aphrodisiacs. The shop's reputation spreads as far as Korea and Japan, and the place has a foreign exchange counter, opposite a booth holding a resident pharmacist offering on-the-spot diagnoses. At the end of the street, marked by a scattering of Chinese-only hotels, was the old red-light district formerly containing more than three hundred brothels. The street is very dead these days, though, and you're better off turning north to Liulichang , parallel to Dazhalan, but not directly accessible from Qianmen Dajie. This street is famous for its antiques and bookshops - the originals were bulldozed in the 1950s but have now been neatly reconstructed for the benefit of visitors to make a pretty heritage street full of curio shops.
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