Panjiayuan Flea Market is located at the south east of the 3rd Ring Road. It is an open air market, opened 7 days a week, but the best time to go is on weekend. The market was famous for antique dealings about 10 years ago, today it is famous for the big collections of handicraft works from the neighbouring provinces, but not entirely in the sense of antiques, you can still get some real stuff, but not very easy.
Once Beijing Textile City populated by factories and warehouses, Image Base is now all designer spaces for culture-based industries.
798 Art Zone, is a part of Dashanzi in the Chaoyang District of Beijing that houses a thriving artist community, among 50-year old decommissioned military factory buildings of unique architectural style. It is often compared with New York’s Greenwich Village or SoHo, but faces impending destruction from the forces driving Beijing’s urban sprawl.
The area is often called the 798 Art District or Factory 798 although technically, Factory 798 is only one of several structures within a complex formerly known as Joint Factory 718.
Through word-of-mouth, artists and designers started trickling in, attracted to the vast cathedral-like spaces. Despite the lack of any conscious aesthetic in the Bauhaus-inspired style, which grounded architectural beauty in practical, industrial function, the swooping arcs and soaring chimneys had an uplifting effect on modern eyes, a sort of post-industrial chic. At the artists’ requests, workers renovating the spaces preserved the prominent Maoist slogans on the arches, adding a touch of ironic “Mao kitsch” to the place.
In the days of Joint Factory 718, Dashanzi was chosen for its peripheral position well outside the city center. The artists who later moved there were coming from the edges of the city as well. Today however, the area sits right on the strategic corridor between the Capital Airport and downtown Beijing along the Airport Expressway.
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As an ancient Chinese proverb goes as “an inch of sandalwood is equal to an inch of gold”, the red sandalwood (紫檀木) is more usually purplish-red, sometimes with grayish-black hues – colors and shades that represented the prestige and solemnity of imperial rule centuries ago. It gives off a pleasing musty aroma. The average red sandalwood tree takes 300 years to reach full growth, and only some 10 percent of its content can be put to practical use. Hence the wood’s rarity and why it is now a popular collectable. A piece of ancient sandalwood furniture fetched US$11.29 million at a 1996 Sotheby’s auction.
The whole museum is divided into North Garden and South Garden with an area of 450,000 square meters. There are 16 national villages in the North Garden including those of Qiang, Oroqen and Hezhe ethnic groups.
There is the biggest domestic casting iron sculpture, artificial tropical banyan forest, water-eroded cave, Panlong Waterfall, rock pictures and supernatural wood of Alishan in the North Garden. There is national museum, Sculpture Square and over 20 national villages in the South Garden. All buildings adopt the proportion of 1:1.
The Beijing Coking-chemical Plant was built in 1958, and has been in operation for almost 50 years since.
Its main production was gas distilled from the coal,the gas from this plant goes to Beijing through the pipe system, which saved a lot of pollution downtown, and its byproducts was fuel for Beijing Steel Corporation (首钢 ShouGang).
From 16th July of 2006, the plant was shut down, and moved to another City Tangshan, and after a diversification of the workers, now the challange is how to deal with this mammoth ? First plan was easy: just tear down everything, and after two office buildings were blowed up, more research founds that the best way is to preserve the whole complex, turn it into a Industry Relics Park.
Now from 10th to 24th of Oct., 6 out of more 50 cantidate plans was selected out, and waiting to be polled at Beijing City Planning Exihibation Hall.
