The Granary North of the City

Most Chinese place names describe a landscape; Beicang describes a building. It means the northern granary, and the sources explain the name directly: since the Yuan court fixed its capital at Beijing, Beicang served as a distribution centre for imperial grain transport, and the settlement was named for the storehouses. Grain came up the canal from the south and had to be held somewhere before it went on to the capital, and this was one of the places where it was held. The town lay in the south of what was then Wuqing, was later transferred to Tianjin County, and is now the seat of the Beichen district government.

The ground under the granary is older than the grain trade. Beichen has only two sites that have been excavated, and one of them is a residential site of the Yan state of the Warring States, found beside the North Canal at Beicang town. That is a small fact with a large implication: the canal that made Beicang a depot in the Yuan ran past a settlement that had already been there for more than a thousand years. The other excavated site is also in the district, and the pair are the only archaeology Beichen records, which makes the town's riverside the district's deepest known place.

The district around Beicang is otherwise thin in monuments, and what it has is worth naming precisely. Its only provincial-level protected site is the Ming dynasty Yawang Temple at Dazhuzhuang in Dazhangzhuang town. Against that, the modern district is crossed by four metro lines, 1, 3, 4 and 5, and holds a national-level economic and technological development zone as well as a biological park. The district government moved from Yixingbu to Beicang for convenience of transport, which is a familiar story in the ring districts: the old town keeps the name and the new centre takes the offices.