前门步行街

This guide to Qianmen Pedestrian Street in Beijing opens with the fire that tore through Beijing's richest shopping quarter on the night of June 16, 1800, after Boxers set a Western medicine shop alight. It follows how flames spread through the booksellers', silk and gold merchants' streets nearby, in what a Times of London correspondent called the most disastrous fire he knew of in China. Listen for the clang of the tram as you pass the carved wooden facades that recall that older street.