2.4 The City We Could Have Had: Beijing’s Lost Blueprint
In the 1950s, while the Ten Great Buildings were rising over Tiananmen Square, another architectural imagination was quietly extinguished. It bore no colonnades, no heroic rhetoric—only the clarity of continuity, and the delicate custodianship of a city patiently crafted over centuries.
Known today simply as the Liang-Chen Proposal, it was a vision co-authored by architect Liang Sicheng and planner Chen Zhanxiang: a plan to preserve the ancient capital by building a new administrative centre west of the city, allowing the historic urban fabric to remain intact.
Had it been adopted, Beijing might have become a city unlike any other in the world—a metropolis of modern governance orbiting a heart of living heritage. Its twists and turns of hutongs, lively courtyards, magnificent city walls and gate towers, and those elegant wooden paifangmight have remained not as relics, but as breathing urban life. It could have become what Kyoto is to Japan—or more: a living palimpsest where dynastic memory and contemporary citizenship cohabit the same laneway.
The southern section of the moat of the inner city of Beijing, with the Zhanyang Gate 正阳门 ( Gate of Upright Sunlight ) and the Arrow Tower in the distance
Instead, history took another path.
The Liang-Chen Proposal was dismissed. Mao famously rebuked it with the words: “How can we possibly govern from outside the walls, like an emperor afraid of his people?” The plan was labelled reactionary, elitist, and ideologically inappropriate. From that moment, the city was fated to be reshaped not by care, but by command.
The bulldozers came.
City walls were torn down. Gates were reduced to traffic islands. Whole neighbourhoods were replaced by government compounds, office slabs, and later, speculative towers. The “old city” survived only in fragments, and even those were later subject to sanitised restoration or touristification. The symbolic axis shifted: no longer from drum tower to palace, but from Party headquarters to spectacle square. A city once composed of courtyards, intimacy, and birdsong became a city composed of code, power, and spatialised politics.
I was born decades later, in a Beijing already crisscrossed by 环线 (ring roads), its spatial memory paved over by concrete and bureaucracy. But some traces remained.
We lived in a courtyard. I remember walking with my parents through the alleys of Dongsi and Xisi, falling asleep on my mother’s lap beneath the old willows, chasing cats barefoot with friends in the narrow hutongs, long before they became theme parks of “Old Beijing.” The sound of bicycle bells, the rustle of cotton coats, the smell drifting from small kitchens—it was not architecture in the classical sense, but it was place. And yet outside the second ring road, among the unpoetic Soviet blocks and endless construction sites, it was hard to believe the city’s image could split so completely.
One winter, I asked my grandfather why the corner watchtower near Qianmen looked so lonely. He sighed and said, “There used to be a wall.”
Even as a child, I sensed something absent—not just spatial, but historical. A severance between city and story.
In recent years, “revitalisation” projects have tried to recapture that loss: installing facades mimicking traditional shops, erecting fake gate towers, naming developments after forgotten lanes. But memory cannot be manufactured. The Beijing that might have been—a denser, quieter, wiser city—is now a ghost that haunts the one we have. A blueprint we could have followed, but lost.
And perhaps that is why I write:
not to mourn, but to record.
To leave a footprint where the walls once stood.
To say: we knew.
There once was a blueprint—quiet, thoughtful, and brave—that might have rendered a different Beijing.
One that still breathes between the bricks.