“Peking wore the green lace of spring, its thousands of willows and imperial cypresses making the Forbidden City a place of wonder and enchantment,” American journalist Edgar Snow wrote of Beijing in 1936.
Ninety years later, strolling before the vermillion ramparts of the Forbidden City, it’s clear that Beijing’s mass conversion to electric vehicles has rendered the city not only cleaner than it has been of late, but also quieter – allowing Zhongshan Park to bloom much as Snow described.
Snow’s description was included in his wartime account of a journey to Yanan, Red Star Over China (first published in 1937), his destination then being the base of the Chinese Communist Party. But the city has made headlines much more recently, with the December opening of the Xian-Yanan high-speed railway taking the length of China Railway’s operational network past the 50,000km (31,070 miles) mark.
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