Scaffolding comes off the gleaming architecture as a new capital awakens

Enough articles, blogs and books have been written describing Beijing's rapid modernisation to paper over the Great Wall end to end. All try to capture the years of changing landscape and mindset of China's ancient capital as it prepares to host the 2008 Olympic Games, the much-lauded event that in 100 days will boost the nation's claim to superpower status.

However, most accounts fail to portray accurately the frenetic development of the past seven years.

Beijing's rapid modernisation drive began in earnest in the early 1990s. But it was when the International Olympic Committee announced in 2001 that the capital was to host the 2008 Games that the city floored the development accelerator. Today, the wrapping - layers of scaffolding and hoardings - is being peeled off to reveal a city filled with dazzling new architecture rising from the ancient dust bowl.

The government's mantra of a 'hi-tech, green, people's Olympics' has often been shorthand for an unceremonious, brutal and confusing drive to raze the old and rebuild anew. City planners and architects from around the world were all but given carte blanche to design a city brimming with monuments to capitalism and commercialism.

Seven years later their handiwork - and that of several million migrant workers - is on display. The Stalinist architecture of the past is dwarfed by towers of steel and glass, as are the Forbidden City and Beijing's temples.

Prominent among the new buildings are the Olympic national stadiums, the Bird's Nest and the Water Cube, the leaning CCTV tower designed by Dutchman Rem Koolhaas and Lord Foster's 'Long Dragon' Terminal Three at Beijing Capital International Airport. The Egg, the National Theatre, Soho and The Place (with surely the largest TV on Earth) jostle for attention. A wave of urbanisation has swept away much of the city's past.