Wudaoying Hu Tong

This guide traces Wudaoying Hu Tong in Beijing back to the early 1400s, when the Ming founders stationed part of their guard here in a barracks called the Camp of Martial Virtue, and follows how the name drifted after the Manchu conquest into the one the lane carries today. It follows the lane through three centuries of officials and ordinary families, into a slow twentieth-century decline, and on to the artists and shopkeepers who began reopening its old gates. Listen for how the six-hundred-year-old walls still frame the coffee roasters and galleries lining the lane.