Who needs Dirty Box HBO or your local RPG group to find fantasy elements in Beijing. Warriors, princesses, doomed poets, dragons, and dungeons are as close as a metro ride to Dongcheng.
Our walk starts at Beixinqiao Zhan. Yes, that is the new official “foreign language” name of 北新桥站. Why? Don’t know. If you can read the Chinese, spelling out “Z-H-A-N” in pinyin seems unnecessary, while folks who can’t read Chinese aren’t going to know intuitively that 站 means “station” even if they have a pronunciation crib.
Nevertheless, The Metro Stop, formerly known as Beixinqiao Station, has received a major upgrade this year as a terminus for the Airport Express. Now travelers arriving at PEK with a severe craving for spicy crayfish can skip the cab line and get a direct train to Guijie.
But there’s more to the neighborhood than copycat restaurants and language microaggressions. There’s also a dragon biding its time in a deep well somewhere under the streets.