In 2024, a line of historic sites that bisect China’s capital was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List — and this 700-year-old urban planning achievement is still developing.
China’s capital, Beijing, has a line of monuments that run through its centre around which seven centuries of commerce, history, culture, religion and life have been ordered. While the Beijing Central Axis’s monuments are all historically significant — as a group, they represent a choice by generations of Chinese urban planners to design the city symmetrically around this longtime throughline.
The Forbidden City, an imperial palace complex that housed 24 Ming and Qing dynasty Emperors, is one of 15 key monument groupings that make up a part of the Beijing Central Axis, which was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in July, 2024.
Credit: Getty Images/zyxeos30
And the axis continues to extend, reaching north to the Beijing Olympic village for the 2008 Olympics, and again to the imposing China National Archives of Publications and Culture in 2022, which was designed by the Architectural Design & Research Institute of Tsinghua. In 2019, the Daxing International Airport was also added to the south.
The Beijing Central Axis isn't just a heritage site; it’s a narrative between urban planners that links past and present, explains Zhou Lyu, who is director of the National Heritage Center at Tsinghua.
Tian’anmen Square is one of the key monument groupings that make a 700-year-old urban-planning feature around which China’s capital has developed.
A 700-year conversation
On July 27, 2024, 7.8 kilometers and 15 key groupings on the axis (not including the Olympic village, archives or Daxing airport) were added to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage List, which protects sites and areas as part of an international treaty focused on preserving places of key cultural, historical or scientific significance.
Lyu has been working on this particular UNESCO World Heritage site listing for more than 15 years. “We had to choose the components to ensure integrity,” he explains of the exclusion of the Olympic village, archives and Daxing airport. “The significance of the testimony to history or cultural tradition of the heritage site had to be proved over time.”
The listed portion of the axis runs through central Beijing from the historic Drum and Bell Towers in the north, through monuments such as Tian’anmen Square and the Forbidden City, to the Yongding Gate in the south.
Nonetheless Lyu says what’s most interesting about that axis is that it is a ‘living tradition’ that reflects a commitment to an urban planning idea that has endured for centuries.
Beijing Central Axis story began with the ‘center platform’ which was built 1267. Today the Drum and Bell Towers also sit at this site, these were built in about 1420. The southernmost point of the world-heritage listed part of the axis, the Yongding Gate, wasn’t built until 1553, although it was demolished in 1957 and rebuilt in 2004–2005. It marks the site of the former front gate to Beijing’s old city wall.
A more recent addition is Tian’anmen Square, which was an imperial court square that was transformed into a public square in 1912. It expanded fourfold in the 1950s, with Chairman Mao entombed there 1976, and it is now a key space for national events.
Every one of the 15 heritage components has an interesting story — and while hundreds of years sometimes separate their construction, all still fall neatly on, or in symmetrical patterns on either side of, the axis’s invisible line.
“Symmetry has always been guiding the pattern of the city,” explains Lyu. While European medieval cities developed somewhat organically, typically outwards from a church centre, “Beijing is not like that,” says Lyu. “It’s like a chessboard. It’s a planned city,” he explains.
“After the main building groups were built, the emperor would make streets and alleyways cut the land piece by piece, then tell people, OK, you can come here. You can pay for the land, so you build your house.”
The orderliness of this process reflects the philosophies of Confucius, Lyu explains. Confucius, a prominent and still widely influential philosopher who lived between 551 and 479BC, argued that rituals and propriety maintained social harmony, suggesting that structured, well-planned environments promote peace and efficiency. In their submission, Lyu’s team collected hundreds of writings on this matter by Chinese urban planners.
Modern mechanism
But these historic links don’t mean the axis doesn’t have a modern life. The opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics traced the axis with fireworks, symbolically leading to the main stadium and Olympic village. And, as previously mentioned, important sites are still being added.
Lyu notes that there has been an increasing interest in protecting living cultural traditions, which form part of the world heritage listing’s third criteria: to bear a unique or exceptional testimony to a cultural tradition or to a civilization that is either still living or has vanished.
The ‘living’ nature of the Beijing Central Axis was a key component of the submission of the axis to UNESCO. In their submission, Lyu’s team emphasized the continued interaction of the people of Beijing with the axis, including elements such as a feedback mechanism intended to aid in the maintenance of the monuments.
“One of the government heritage conservation agencies worked with an IT company to develop an app to help with monitoring the heritage sites,” Lyu explains. “Using the app, if someone finds something amiss, they can use the app and send a message to a ‘management center’ — and they should then also get feedback on the center’s response.”
While they were successful, proving a cultural tradition is still living is very challenging, Lyu says. He hopes the axis’s inclusion, based partly on this aspect of criteria three, will spur on other efforts to preserve priceless ongoing cultures.
Editor: Guo Lili
