Beijing Photo Gallery - Guijie

A few streets have notably large clusters of restaurants and street food that have become night-time destinations.

Just northeast of the Forbidden City, "Guijie" sounds like "Ghost Street", whose origins go back to the Qing Dynasty when food vendors here traded from midnight to dawn. They used oil lamps that gave out a dim light, which looked a bit ghostly. The trading market gave way to restaurants in the late 1980s, and the street was renamed after a bronze vessel used to contain food during ancient times, also pronounced "gui".