The Mystery of the Old Qianmen Brook Solved

You may recall that last month Xinhua was abuzz with talk of a restored brook in the Qianmen District of Peking. I wasn’t convinced such a brook existed to be restored in that area and no maps at my disposal showed any trace. I suggested it might be a fake brook. Well why not we have fake hutongs, fake shikumen, fake temples, fake colonial villas, fake art-deco so why not a fake brook? But there was a real brook, back in the Ming Dynasty….Jeremiah Jenne, a Beijing historian who knows far more than I do about the city, tracked it down – full story here in The Beijinger.