Beijing was walled for five and a half centuries, and the wall that mattered - the one built in the Ming dynasty and maintained through the Qing - enclosed the inner city in a rectangle roughly ten kilometres around, with a further outer wall to the south. Most of it was demolished in the middle of the twentieth century to make way for the ring road and the subway, and today only two short fragments survive above ground. The largest is a stretch of about 1.5 kilometres in the south-east of Dongcheng, running alongside the Second Ring Road near Chongwenmen.
The Southeast Corner Tower
At the eastern end of the surviving fragment stands the Southeast Corner Tower, the largest of the four corner towers that once punctuated the wall. It is a two-storey timber structure with a double-eaved hip roof and more than one hundred and forty arrow windows arranged in rows, and because it was never rebuilt after the nineteenth century it preserves Ming carpentry that the better-known gates have lost. It is one of the few buildings in Beijing where you can walk up into the structure itself and see the framing from the inside.
The park along the wall
The wall fragment and the tower are set in a linear park planted with trees and a continuous lawn, running between the road and the surviving brick face. The wall here is about ten metres high, built of grey brick over a rammed earth core, and the parapet and crenellations are intact along much of the length. It is an ordinary city park: people walk dogs, practise tai chi, play cards in the shade and fly kites. That is part of what makes it worth an hour - it is a piece of the defences of imperial Beijing used as a neighbourhood garden.
Practical notes
The park is free and open daily, and the tower charges a small admission. The nearest metro is on lines 2 and 5, a few minutes' walk from the eastern end. Because the wall runs alongside a major road, the approach is easiest from the southern side. Allow about an hour for the wall and the tower together. Combine it with the Temple of Heaven, which is a short ride south, or with the Qianmen area to the west, since all three sit in the same southern quarter of the old city.
