During the Yuan dynasty, the gate was called Wenmingmen -- the Gate of Civilization. But because the residence of the Mongol prince Hada stood nearby, locals knew it as Hadamen or Hademen. That informal name proved remarkably durable. It outlasted the Yuan dynasty, survived the Ming and Qing, and persisted well into the twentieth century as the name of a popular cigarette brand. The official name Chongwenmen, meaning roughly "Gate of Exalted Literature," carried its own weight in Manchu as well -- transliterated as "shu be wesihulere duka." An entire administrative district, Chongwen District, took its name from the gate and existed as a division of the city from 1952 until it was folded into Dongcheng District in 2010.

In the 1960s, Beijing embarked on a vast infrastructure project that would define its modern form: the construction of the second ring road. The road traced the path of the old city wall, which meant the wall had to go. Gate by gate, section by section, the Ming-era fortifications were dismantled. Chongwenmen was among the casualties. The gate had stood immediately south of the old Beijing Legation Quarter, where foreign diplomatic missions had clustered since the nineteenth century. Its demolition erased one of the city's architectural anchors, replacing stone and history with asphalt and traffic flow. Today, the spot is a busy intersection where Chongwenmen Inner and Outer Streets run north-south through the phantom gate, crossed by east-west streets that follow the wall's former path.

Not everything was lost. To the east of where Chongwenmen once stood, the Ming City Wall Relics Park preserves the best remaining section of Beijing's Ming-era city wall. The park offers a physical reminder of the fortifications that once encircled the inner city -- walls that were thick enough to ride horses along their tops, punctuated by gates that controlled the flow of people, goods, and military power. Chongwenmen Station, an interchange on Lines 2 and 5 of the Beijing Subway, now sits where the gate once filtered traffic of a different kind. The station handles hundreds of thousands of commuters daily, a volume of movement the gate's Ming-era builders could never have imagined. A diagonal street runs northwest from the intersection to Beijing Railway Station, connecting the old gate's location to one of the city's modern transit hubs.