A New District on Old Ground

Beichen's administrative life is short. In March 1953 Tianjin County was abolished by decision of the Ministry of the Interior and the North China administrative committee, merged into Tianjin, and replaced by four suburban districts, Jindong, Jinnan, Jinxi and Jinbei. Jinbei was formally established on 14 May 1953, and until then the area had no separate administration at all. On 12 February 1992 the four ring districts were renamed Dongli, Jinnan, Xiqing and Beichen, which is where the present name comes from. A district barely seventy years old therefore administers ground that has been lived on since the Warring States.

The contrast between administrative youth and physical age is not an abstraction here; it is what the two excavated sites show. One is a residential site of the Yan state of the Warring States, found beside the North Canal at Beicang town. The district's only provincial-level protected site is the Ming dynasty Yawang Temple at Dazhuzhuang in Dazhangzhuang town. Against a city that can show a Liao temple and a Song-era pagoda, that is a modest inventory, and it is honest to say so: the northern ring was farmland and canal-side villages for most of its history, and its monuments are accordingly few and specific.

The district's modern profile is industrial and political rather than monumental. Beichen is the home county of Wen Jiabao, premier under the tenth and eleventh National People's Congresses, a fact the district's own page records without comment. It holds a national-level economic and technological development zone, listed with the Tianjin, Xiqing, Wuqing and Ziya zones as the municipality's five. Four metro lines, 1, 3, 4 and 5, run through it, and at the 2020 census it had 909,643 residents, with 20.53 per cent over sixty. The district government has moved from Yixingbu to Beicang, following the transport that made the new centre practical.