Explore the real-world places that appear in A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing by Alice Evelyn Yang. Each location on the map shows what happens there in the novel, the real history of the place, and what's there today. Featured locations include Shenyang (Mukden) City Center, Manchukuo State Council Building, Harbin Central Avenue (Zhongyang Dajie), Tiananmen Square, Beijing's Old Hutong Neighborhoods and 8 more.
Shenyang, Liaoning Province — Grandmother's occupied city
Shenyang is the heartland of the grandmother's chapters, the city she navigates under Japanese colonial rule as a young woman. Ba narrates her daily life in Mukden — the renamed streets, the curfews, the strange bureaucratic cruelties of the occupation — with an intimacy that suggests he has carried these stories his whole life. It is here that the earliest thread of the prophecy is first spoken aloud, by someone who should not have known it.
Shenyang, historically known as Mukden, was seized by Japan in the Mukden Incident of September 1931, which precipitated the full invasion and colonization of Manchuria. Under the puppet state Manchukuo, the city was heavily industrialized and its residents subjected to Japanese colonial administration, surveillance, and forced labor.
Shenyang is today a major industrial metropolis and the capital of Liaoning Province with a population of over eight million. The Imperial Palace of Shenyang, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is open to visitors and provides a powerful window into the city's pre-colonial Qing dynasty grandeur.
Visit: Shenyang Imperial Palace (Mukden Palace) (historic site)
Xinmin Street, Changchun — Seat of Japanese puppet power
Ba describes the grandmother passing near the imposing State Council buildings during her youth in Manchukuo — edifices that seemed designed to assert permanence but which she understood to be a kind of theater. The shadow of colonial administration hangs over the grandmother's chapters like a second sky, shaping which languages she dared to speak, which roads she could walk, and whom she was permitted to mourn.
Changchun served as the capital of the Japanese puppet state Manchukuo from 1932 to 1945, renamed Xinjing ('New Capital'). The State Council building was constructed in a hybrid Japanese-Manchurian architectural style intended to legitimize colonial rule. The complex housed the central organs of the puppet government under Emperor Puyi.
The former Manchukuo State Council Building now houses Jilin University's School of Basic Medical Sciences. Several of the original Manchukuo government buildings have been preserved and are recognized as protected historical structures, and some are accessible to the public as heritage sites.
Visit: Manchukuo State Council Heritage Site, Changchun (historic site)
Harbin, Heilongjiang — Crossroads of occupation and memory
Harbin appears in the grandmother's stories as a city of impossible contrasts — Russian baroque architecture alongside Japanese military checkpoints, the frozen Songhua River carrying the bodies of rumors. Ba recounts his mother walking the length of Central Avenue in winter, her breath fogging the air, aware at every step that the city she knew was being dismantled and replaced by a colonial fiction. It is on this street that she first hears a fox spirit described as a harbinger.
Harbin was one of the most cosmopolitan cities in early 20th-century East Asia, shaped by Russian railway interests before falling under Japanese control after 1932. The city was home to large Russian, Jewish, and Chinese communities and became a site of intense surveillance and hardship under Manchukuo rule. Central Avenue, built in the early 20th century, remains lined with European-style buildings.
Harbin's Central Avenue (Zhongyang Dajie) is now a celebrated pedestrian boulevard and major tourist destination, lined with restaurants, cafes, and preserved Art Nouveau and Baroque buildings. The city is famous for its annual Ice and Snow Festival.
Visit: Zhongyang Dajie (Central Avenue) Historic District (landmark)
Central Beijing — The heart of Cultural Revolution Beijing
Ba's chapter on his Red Guard years reaches its pitch of anguish here, in the vast open square where he once stood among tens of thousands chanting slogans he no longer remembers. He describes the disorienting grandeur of the rallies — the sea of little red books, the loudspeakers, the terrifying anonymity of the crowd — and the first crack in his certainty, the moment he began to doubt the revolution he had given himself to. It is in this memory that the prophecy first seems to him like something personal, something aimed.
Tiananmen Square became the symbolic center of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), with Mao Zedong reviewing hundreds of thousands of Red Guards from the Tiananmen rostrum during massive rallies beginning in August 1966. The square has been the site of some of the most consequential political events in modern Chinese history.
Tiananmen Square is open to visitors and remains one of the world's largest public squares. The Tiananmen Gate and the portrait of Mao Zedong are iconic landmarks, and the surrounding area includes the Forbidden City and the National Museum of China.
Visit: Tiananmen Square (historic site)
Dongcheng District, Beijing — The childhood home Qianze returns to
The childhood home on the porch of which Ba appears — older, fragile, haunted — is situated in one of Beijing's old hutong lanes. Qianze receives the call that her father has come back, and she returns to find him on this threshold she hasn't crossed meaningfully in eleven years. The courtyard house becomes the primary stage for their fraught reunion: Ba sitting across from Qianze at a table she remembers from childhood, slowly unwinding the stories she has spent her adult life not knowing how to ask for.
Beijing's hutong alleyways and siheyuan courtyard houses date back to the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties, forming the residential backbone of old Beijing. During the Cultural Revolution, many hutong homes were seized, ransacked, or forcibly redistributed as private property was deemed counter-revolutionary. Tens of thousands of these structures have been demolished since the 1990s.
Surviving hutong neighborhoods in Dongcheng and Xicheng districts are now protected heritage areas and among the most evocative places in Beijing. Many have become boutique hotels, cafes, and cultural spaces, while others remain lived-in residential lanes navigable on foot or by rickshaw tour.
Visit: Nanluoguxiang Hutong (landmark)
Beijing Metro network — Site of Qianze's supernatural visions
It is on her evening commute — crowded cars, fluorescent light, the rattle of the Beijing Metro — that Qianze first sees the fox spirits trailing her. They appear at the edge of vision: brush-tailed, amber-eyed, unmistakably intentional. As Ba's stories accumulate and the prophecy draws closer, the visions intensify. The subway becomes the threshold between Qianze's ordinary present and the folkloric world pressing in through her family history, a tunnel through which the past pursues her.
The Beijing Metro opened in 1969, originally constructed for military purposes during the Cold War. It has expanded into one of the world's largest and busiest subway networks, carrying millions of passengers daily across over twenty lines.
The Beijing Metro is a fully operational, modern rapid transit system and the primary mode of daily transportation for millions of Beijing residents. Riders can access it with a transit card or mobile app.
Wanghua Street, Shenyang — Site of the Mukden Incident
The Mukden Incident — the manufactured explosion that gave Japan its pretext to seize Manchuria — haunts the grandmother's chapters as original wound. Ba recounts how his mother learned its official story as a child under the occupation, then learned its real story in fragments across a lifetime. The gap between these two accounts becomes, in the novel, an emblem of the colonial lie that shaped her entire life — and by extension, Ba's, and Qianze's.
On September 18, 1931, Japanese Kwantung Army officers staged an explosion on the South Manchuria Railway near Mukden (Shenyang) and blamed Chinese dissidents as a pretext for invasion. The 9·18 Historical Museum, built at the site of the incident, was established in 1991 and commemorates the Japanese occupation of Manchuria.
The 9·18 Historical Museum is a major public memorial and museum open to visitors in Shenyang, featuring extensive exhibits on the Japanese occupation, colonial violence, and Chinese resistance. A large alarm-shaped sculpture and outdoor monuments mark the site.
Visit: 9·18 Historical Museum (museum)
Central Beijing — Emblem of dynasty, power, and haunted history
Ba invokes the Forbidden City in his Cultural Revolution chapters as a site of paradox: the Red Guards condemned the old imperial world as corrupt and rotten, and yet the grandeur of Beijing's center — its yellow roofs and red walls — exerted a pull that ideology could not fully suppress. Ba tells Qianze he once stood outside the palace walls as a young Red Guard and felt, for the first time, that history was larger than the revolution he believed in. This moment is the beginning of his long disenchantment.
The Forbidden City was the imperial palace of China for nearly five centuries, from the Ming to the Qing dynasty. During the Cultural Revolution, it was closed to the public from 1966 to 1971, and Red Guards targeted many of Beijing's historic sites for destruction, though the palace itself was largely spared through Zhou Enlai's intervention.
Now the Palace Museum, the Forbidden City is China's most visited attraction and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It houses vast collections of imperial art, furniture, and artifacts, and receives millions of visitors annually.
Visit: Palace Museum (Forbidden City) (museum)
Jilin Province / North Korea border — Mythic landscape of Manchurian folklore
The Changbai Mountains appear in the novel's most overtly supernatural passages — the fox spirits that trail Qianze trace their lineage, in Ba's storytelling, to this volcanic highland where Korean, Manchu, and Chinese mythologies converge. The jackalope that stalks Qianze's nightmares is first described in connection with a mountain forest: ancient, dark, indifferent to human history. The Changbai landscape gives the novel's folklore its geographic root, a real terrain that the supernatural world mirrors.
The Changbai Mountains (Baekdu-daegan in Korean) are sacred in both Korean and Manchu traditions and are home to Tianchi, a dramatic crater lake. The mountains were a site of intense activity during the Manchukuo period, as Japan exploited the region's natural resources and incorporated its mythologies into colonial ideology.
The Changbai Mountain National Nature Reserve is a popular scenic destination in Jilin Province, accessible to tourists who come primarily to see Tianchi (Heaven Lake) at the volcanic summit. The area straddles the Chinese-North Korean border.
Visit: Changbai Mountain National Nature Reserve (park)
Dongcheng District, Beijing — Ba's days as a Red Guard
Ba describes the struggle sessions — the public denunciations, the forced confessions, the schoolteachers made to kneel — that he participated in as a teenage Red Guard with a shame that has calcified over decades. He tells Qianze these stories haltingly, circling them the way one circles something hot. The violence he inflicted and witnessed forms the dark core of his past, the sin the prophecy seems, in his reading, to be delivering judgment upon — and the reason he has avoided his daughter for eleven years.
During the Cultural Revolution, Chinese middle schools and universities became primary venues for political violence. Students organized Red Guard units that held 'struggle sessions' (批斗会) to publicly humiliate, beat, and denounce teachers, intellectuals, and anyone accused of bourgeois tendencies. Hundreds of thousands were killed or driven to suicide during this period.
Many of the schools in Dongcheng District where such sessions took place continue to function as active educational institutions. There are few official memorials to Cultural Revolution victims in Beijing, and public discussion of this period remains politically sensitive in China.
Zhongguancun South Street, Haidian District, Beijing
Qianze, whose longing to know her family history has always been entangled with a love of the written record, is associated in the novel with libraries and archives — spaces where the past is stored but not necessarily accessible. Her searches for documentary traces of her grandmother's life under the occupation and her father's Red Guard years run up against the limits of what official archives preserve and what they erase. The library becomes a metaphor for the gap between history as recorded and history as lived.
The National Library of China, founded in 1909 as the Metropolitan Library, is Asia's largest library and one of the world's greatest repositories of Chinese historical documents, including rare Ming and Qing dynasty texts and collections related to Manchuria.
The National Library of China in Haidian District is open to the public and holds over 37 million items. It offers reading rooms, exhibitions, and digital archives, and is a major research institution for Chinese history and culture.
Visit: National Library of China (library)
Harbin, Heilongjiang — Grandmother's river, carrying memory and loss
The Songhua River appears in the grandmother's chapters as both backdrop and witness. Ba describes his mother standing at the embankment in winter, watching the ice move, and hearing from a neighbor woman a story about a fox who had taken a human husband — the first time she connected the spirit world to her own family's fate. The river carries the novel's sense of time as something that flows indifferently past human suffering, neither condemning nor forgiving.
The Songhua River (Sungari River) runs through Harbin and was a central feature of the city's colonial-era life. During the Manchukuo period, the river's banks were sites of both leisure — Russian and Japanese settlers built clubs and promenades — and horror, as the Japanese Unit 731 conducted biological experiments using prisoners in facilities near the river.
The Songhua River embankment in Harbin is today a scenic waterfront promenade popular with residents and tourists. In summer it hosts boat rides, and in winter the river freezes solid enough for ice sculptures and outdoor activities during the Ice Festival.
Visit: Songhua River Waterfront (Harbin) (park)
Chongwen District, Beijing — Fate, heaven, and the weight of prophecy
Ba brings Qianze to the Temple of Heaven — or perhaps it is only in his telling that they arrive here — to speak the prophecy aloud in full for the first time. The geometry of the complex, its circular altars and the idea that heaven hears what is spoken at the center of the Echo Wall, becomes the novel's culminating image of fate as something architectural: built into the world, passed from generation to generation, impossible to demolish with bare hands.
The Temple of Heaven was constructed between 1406 and 1420 during the Ming dynasty and served as the site of imperial sacrifices to Heaven, performed annually by the emperor as the Son of Heaven. The complex includes the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests (Qiniandian) and the Circular Mound Altar, and was a UNESCO World Heritage Site inscribed in 1998.
The Temple of Heaven Park is one of Beijing's most visited sites and is open to the public daily. The grounds are used by Beijing residents for morning exercise, tai chi, and music, and the main hall is a globally recognized architectural landmark.
Visit: Temple of Heaven Park (historic site)
More by Alice Evelyn Yang: All Alice Evelyn Yang books