Location from remembrance-of-earths-past by
China's capital — Wang Miao's nano lab, Da Shi's police station, Chang Weisi's PLA briefing room, Tsinghua University, the apartments of the Frontiers of Science. The trilogy's first city.
Beijing in the trilogy is the city where the Crisis Era begins — quietly, in private offices and back-room karaoke clubs. Da Shi knows the cab drivers. Wang Miao knows the security guards in his lab. Chang Weisi knows the generals. Everything important happens in a small room with poor lighting and someone pouring tea. The Battle Command Center hides in the basement of an unremarkable office building behind the second ring road.
A flat sprawling capital under a gray winter sky, ringed by six concentric expressways. The Forbidden City at the heart, glass towers shouldering up around it, hutong neighborhoods threading between. The yellow dust of Mongolia in the air some days. By the late Crisis Era the skyline doubles in height every twenty years.