Beijing Dashilan

This guide to Beijing's Dashilan quarter opens on the night of June 16, 1900, when a mob set fire to a foreign medicine shop and the flames tore through the district's booksellers, pearl shops and centuries of accumulated stock. You'll hear about Tongrentang, the imperial pharmacy already a century old when the fire hit, and Ruifuxiang, the silk house that once dressed Beijing's elite. It traces the lane's four-hundred-year history back to the wooden curfew gates merchants funded here in 1488.