A canal-side treasury that became a ruler's birthday stop

Wanli ordered a scripture temple built on the canal bank

In 1577, the Emperor Wanli gave the order to build a temple on this canal bank. He wanted a place to keep Sino-Buddhist scriptures safe. He built it to last. The result was Wanshou Temple. It stood a little over half a mile northeast of where you stand. At that time, it sat on a working stretch of the imperial canal system.

It did not stay a quiet storehouse for long. Wanshou Temple sat directly on the water route rulers used to travel between the old city and the summer palaces to the west. That location turned it into something more useful to an emperor than a library. It became a stopping point, a place to pause on the way somewhere else that mattered more.

Qing rulers turned the temple into a birthday staging post

Qing rulers picked up where the Ming left off. Wanshou Temple became a staging post for imperial birthday celebrations. The emperor or empress dowager traveled by boat. They stopped along the way to receive tribute. They marked the occasion in public. A temple built to hold sacred texts spent two centuries working as a rest stop for state theater.

That double life left it valuable enough to protect. In August 1979, the temple was named one of Beijing's Key Cultural Heritage sites. The Beijing Art Museum moved into its halls. It filled them with bronze and jade from the Shang and Zhou dynasties. It added porcelain, lacquerware, and tens of thousands of other pieces.

The building closed for renovation in 2017. It reopened on September 16, 2022. Five years of work were complete. Its scripture hall still stood on the same canal-side ground. Its museum still stood there too. The Wanli Emperor had chosen this ground in 1577.

An astronomer condemned to death survived and served longer

The temple was not the only structure on this canal system built to survive its founder. Half a mile away, Johann Adam Schall von Bell spent decades serving Ming and then Qing emperors as court astronomer. He rebuilt China's calendar and cast cannons for the state. In 1664 rivals at court had him condemned to death. An earthquake struck Beijing before the sentence was carried out, and officials read it as a warning. He was spared, and he died in the city in 1666, an old man rather than an executed one. He was buried at Zhalan Cemetery, three miles east, among the missionaries who came after him.

Dredged canal earth became lakes and hills nearby

Long before the temple, workers on this stretch of canal dammed the water into three linked lakes. They piled the dredged earth into hills on the eastern shore, a garden built from its own excavation. The lakes and hills became Purple Bamboo Park, eight-tenths of a mile from where you stand. The park was rebuilt again in 1954, under the new republic, and opened to the public for the first time.

Troops fired on student protesters at a Haidian barricade

Two and a half miles from the temple, at Gongzhufen in Haidian District, soldiers opened fire on student protesters barricaded in the street. It was the early morning of June 4, 1989. Troops used tear gas, rubber bullets and live ammunition against demonstrators who threw rocks and firebombs. The students they faced had come out of the same district that built its universities and dormitories across this ground through the twentieth century.

Arsonists set an internet cafe fire that killed twenty-five

That same district held a darker reckoning with what it had built to house its students. An unlicensed two-story internet cafe in Haidian caught fire at 2:40 in the morning. Four young arsonists set it deliberately. Twenty-five people died, most of them university students. Thirteen more were injured. It was Beijing's deadliest fire in over fifty years.