The Drum Tower was built in 1272, during the Yuan dynasty, when Beijing was still called Khanbaliq and ruled by Kublai Khan's Mongol court. Its original name was the Tower of Orderly Administration, a title that reveals its purpose: this was not merely a musical building but an instrument of governance. The tower housed one main drum and twenty-four smaller drums, one for each hour of the traditional Chinese day. The beating of these drums regulated the life of the capital, signaling curfew, market times, and the changing of the night watch. Of the original twenty-five drums, only the main drum survives. Replacements have been made, and the drumming performances that visitors hear today are reconstructions, but the sound still fills the same wooden interior it has echoed through for over seven hundred years.

The Bell Tower stands directly behind the Drum Tower, a relationship that is both spatial and functional. Where the Drum Tower is a 47-meter wooden structure, warm and resonant, the Bell Tower is a 33-meter stone edifice with grey walls and a green glazed roof, designed for permanence rather than acoustics. Together they anchor the northern end of Beijing's central axis, the invisible line that runs from the southern city gate through the Forbidden City and terminates here, at the point where the ordered world of the imperial capital gave way to the ordinary neighborhoods beyond. Before the modern era, both towers dominated the Beijing skyline, visible landmarks that oriented residents in a city that otherwise presented a sea of grey-roofed courtyard houses stretching in every direction.

The Bell and Drum Towers functioned as the official timepiece of Beijing until 1924. That year, the warlord Feng Yuxiang staged the Beijing Coup, a military action that had the side effect of modernizing China's relationship with time. Puyi, who had been allowed to remain in the Forbidden City after his abdication in 1912, was expelled, and the government adopted Western-style clocks for official timekeeping. The drums stopped beating. The bell stopped ringing. An unbroken chain of sonic timekeeping that stretched back to the Mongol court was severed in a single political act. The towers fell into disrepair until the 1980s, when extensive restoration work prepared them for a new role as tourist attractions.

Climb either tower today and you are rewarded with panoramic views over central Beijing, a perspective that reveals the logic of the city's layout. The central axis stretches south toward the Forbidden City and Tiananmen. The hutong neighborhoods spread in every direction, their grey rooftops interrupted by occasional trees and the tile roofs of temples. The towers sit at the intersection of Di'anmen Inner Street and the old commercial lanes that once served the neighborhoods just inside the northern gate. From this vantage point, you can see how the city was organized around the axis, with the towers functioning as the final exclamation point at its northern terminus. They no longer tell time, but they still tell the story of a city that once measured its days in drumbeats.