Writers are taught that a chapter’s last line must pull readers, irresistibly, into the next. In the narrative of history, the end of an era is sparked by the beginning of another. Nowhere is this more vividly personified than in Beijing, where the past folds itself into the future, and treasures of antiquity stand beside marvels of modernity. Rent a bicycle, and let it weave you between six-lanes boulevards and across history and modernity.

Cuandixia, Shougang Park, Beijing Ancient Observatory