Location from three-body-problem by
Capital of China and the present-day stage for Wang Miao's investigation — a vast, modern city in which Cultural Revolution Beijing of 1966 still walks the campuses as memory.
Beijing in the novel is a city of doubled time. Old academics on quiet streets remember the year their colleagues jumped from windows. Young scientists meet in coffee shops next to the same parks where struggle sessions used to happen. The Battle Command Center operates from an unmarked building in the city. The Three Body game runs on servers somewhere inside the same ring road. Wang Miao goes home every night to an apartment where his small daughter is doing her homework and the sky outside the window holds, somewhere, a countdown only he can see.
In the present, twenty million people, ring roads, neon-lit shopping districts, traffic jams that don't end. In the 1966 sequences the same city is stripped of color: Mao-suit gray, red banners, Red Guard armbands, public denunciation stages set up in school courtyards. The old Forbidden City sits at the center of both versions, indifferent.
Also known as: Peking, Beijing