It is big, new and wide and it looks a lot like parts of Hong Kong. Beijingers have been admiring Wangfujing, the capital's premier shopping street, which has just reopened after extensive renovation, intellectual anguish and political intrigue.
Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-shing's Oriental Plaza, the biggest slab of modern architecture, is not quite finished but blue-tinted glass covers the concrete skeleton, enough to see how it will all look completed.
Wangfujing, the Prince's Palace Well, was where Inner Mongolian princes would stay and shop on their visits to the imperial court.
The legendary Dr George Morrison of The Times newspaper spent decades living at No 98, a pleasant courtyard house, now long gone. Imperial edicts, known as the Peking Gazette, were pasted on another site, just before one reaches Dongan Market, once the heart and soul of Beijing.
Off one lane is where the Empress Dowager Cixi was brought up. Later Mao Zedong's successor Hua Guofeng lived there. And just up the street, past a cluster of modern hotels, is Dong Tang, a handsome church hidden behind a high gate. This is where, in 1666, Jesuits built the mainland's first Catholic Church.
Wangfujing is now being turned into a handsome, if unoriginal, pedestrian shopping precinct. And last week Beijingers could be seen walking up and down, inspecting the new street lamps, benches and paving stones, and generally voicing approval. 'It's much better, smarter and more modern, more like Hong Kong,' said Mrs Liu, a saleswoman who worked for 16 years in Xinhua Foreign Languages bookshop.
Tourists, in particular, seem to be taken by the life-size figures from Old Peking along the pavement. They stop for photographs in the bronze rickshaw or in front of statues of seated figures playing music, or those in a variety of other poses.