After finishing their meal, the group of people walked along Di'anmen Street to the Back Gate Bridge.
From here to the south, a one-mile square plot on the east side of Di'anmen Street was developed into a closed community.
The sales office is right here at Houmenqiao. Three stories high, high-ceilinged lobby. In the middle are models of community sand tables and buildings. Because it is an existing house, the sand table serves the purpose of displaying the overall image.
"This house looks so spectacular." The princess couldn't help but admired.
The sales office is a modern building with a reinforced concrete frame structure. The facade is decorated with Roman columns, triangular column top decorations, and a domed roof.
"This is now used as a sales office. After the houses are sold, it can be turned into a clubhouse in the community," Yang Fan said.
Xiao Niangpi and Lin Yueru were amazed. People in the Ming Dynasty had never seen Roman-style architecture. Romanesque architecture feels very solid and spectacular.
Under the Houmen Bridge is an artificial river. To the west is Shichahai, and to the east the river passes diagonally through the community and goes to the southeast.
At this time, many people had gathered on Di'anmen Street. They all came to see the new house opening. Cheng Yu greeted Beicheng Soldiers and Horses Division in advance and gave him money. The soldiers sent out at this time were maintaining order.
Originally, Imperial City North Street was not a good place, especially the east and west ends near the city wall, which were all slums.
Because of the design of the capital, the imperial city in the middle cut off the entire city. The east-west traffic channel in the south is Qipan Street as soon as you enter the Qianmen.
Not far behind Qipan Street is Daming Gate. The approximate location of Daming Gate is in the middle of today's square. It must be sealed off whenever something happens there, such as the access of the emperor and senior officials. Traffic between the east and west is very inconvenient.
Entering the Daming Gate is equivalent to entering the imperial city. Daming Gate is enclosed by high walls of the imperial city on both sides. The imperial city extended all the way to Di'anmen in the north.
The original Imperial City North Street was only a section outside the north wall of the Imperial City and was not connected to any north-south streets. As a result, traffic in Dongcheng and Xicheng is extremely difficult.
Yang Fan developed Huangcheng North Street and built a new two-way six-lane cement road. Not only is the road surface hardened, there are sewers and tree green belts. And the street was greatly widened. Everything is connected to the bottom, directly to the city wall.
Main road plus reserved bike lanes and pedestrian paths. The new Imperial City North Street is wide and clean. Connect all north-south streets. It has revitalized the traffic in the entire North City.
In the middle of the six lanes, space is reserved for laying tracks. Currently covered with greenery, rails can be laid and horse-drawn rail buses can be operated in the future. By then, this 6.6-kilometer road will have more convenient transportation.
If Dongdan and Xidan streets are rebuilt according to the same standards in the future, the traffic in the entire northern part of Beijing will be completely revitalized. In the future, a horse-drawn rail car can be used to travel from East City to West City, or from West City to East City, covering a distance of half a mile with one stop.
This road has now become the best road in the country during the Ming Dynasty. No matter what the weather, you will never walk with your feet in mud or your whole body covered with dirt. Many people come to this road to see what’s new.
Everyone can see that the properties on both sides of this road will definitely increase in value. This is why so many people gathered here today.
From Dongcheng to Xicheng, you can either take Qipan Street or Huangcheng North Street.
Now the new Imperial City North Street has become the transportation artery between the east and west cities. The community to the east of Di'anmen Street in the middle has suddenly become a core area.
In addition, Xinghe Supermarket is just to the west as a supporting facility. I heard that the National Medical Hall established by General Yang will also set up a hospital here. There is also an academy that can accommodate 3,000 students, and the teachers are all contemporary scholars. The sum of these supporting facilities directly leads to the realization that if people don’t hurry up and buy a house, they may not be able to buy it.
It turns out that this side of Imperial City North Street is relatively desolate. Yang Fan did not spend much money on land acquisition.
The more lively areas in the north of Beicheng are near the Drum Tower and Gulou East-West Street. The more prosperous ones in Dongcheng and Xicheng are Dongsi Archway and Xisi Archway.
There is an old saying in Beijing that "the east is rich and the west is noble, the south is poor and the north is humble." In the East City, wealthy businessmen live mainly at Longfu Temple and Chaoyang Gate. There are more officials on the Fuchengmen side in the west.
Nancheng is basically populated by poor people, and even the city walls were built after the mid-Ming Dynasty.
There is no comparison between the South City and the North City. The city walls, towers and arrow towers are very low and simple.
As the saying goes, I would rather have a tile in the north city than a room in the south city. The huge difference in housing prices between the north and south cities would be at least double even after more than 600 years.
At that time, there were already more than 200,000 people living outside the south gate of the capital and serving the capital. After the incident of Anda Khan's invasion in order to force tribute. The cabinet felt that a city wall should be built to protect them, so they simply built a city wall.
The city wall in the south city is short and broken, and it is just a lake to cause trouble.
The original plan was to build a circle around the inner city and outside. Include the Temple of Heaven, the Temple of Earth, the Temple of the Sun, and the Temple of the Moon. Later, when we ran out of money, we ended the project hastily and only repaired a quarter of the south side. That is the Nancheng we see today.
Rich people in the northern part of Beicheng basically live on the east and west streets of Shichahai and Gulou. A very small piece. Other places are also filled with lower class people.
Houses in the capital are very expensive, no matter what era. Even in the richest Song Dynasty, the salary of the prime ministers could not afford to buy a house in Tokyo. Many prime ministers rented houses.
The same was true for the imperial capital of the Ming Dynasty. The houses of the Ming Dynasty had several characteristics.
The first is small, the size of the house is calculated according to the room. A room is the area enclosed by four pillars.
The size of this room is not necessarily the same. People of different social status have different sizes of rooms when building houses. A room in the palace must be much larger than that of a common person.
The houses where ordinary people and lower-level officials live are about ten square meters each. Houses in the Ming and Qing Dynasties were short in depth. The main purpose is to allow the winter sunlight to reach the north wall, which will make it much warmer in winter. Save a lot of firewood.
The second is that the building materials have poor thermal insulation properties. The house is mostly wooden, although the large gables under the windows and at either end were of this era made of brick. The warmth retention has been much improved by the pure wood buildings of the Tang and Song Dynasties. But overall, due to problems with window and door seals and window paper, the warmth retention is very poor.
If you adopt a pure Russian wooden-carved small house with a fireplace, it will be very warm. The thermal insulation coefficient of wood is twice that of cement masonry. But that's when the walls are made of thick logs.
The wooden walls of the Ming Dynasty were very thin, with many gaps, and the doors and windows were covered with paper for poor insulation. People's houses don't even have suspended ceilings, and you can directly see the beams from your bed. Otherwise, there would be no such thing as a gentleman in Liang Shang.
The third problem is that the house is small, the courtyard is large, and the floor area ratio is appallingly low. A large courtyard covering an area of 1,000 square meters may only have a construction area of more than 100 square meters. What a waste of land. The price of houses is mainly determined by the price of land. Therefore, the price of attractive houses remains high.
