北京鼓楼和钟楼

This guide to Beijing's Drum and Bell Towers opens with a local legend: on stormy nights, people say they hear the bronze bell above them crying for a lost shoe. It traces the story back to a Ming-era founder named Deng, whose casting of a massive bronze bell kept failing as an impossible deadline closed in, and to what his daughter did after she overheard talk of what might save it. A worker pulled only a single embroidered item from the flames afterward.