The Alley of National Studies—surrounded by noisy boulevards, north of the Forbidden City—was a remnant of old Beijing that had fended off demolition because it was wedged between two treasures: the Lama Temple (Beijing’s largest Tibetan monastery) and the Confucius Temple (a seven-hundred-year-old shrine to China’s most important philosopher). These were surrounded by the city’s largest concentration of fortune-tellers, and together they made the neighborhood the most spiritually alive patch of the capital. It had the feel of a chaotic open-air market stocked with not products but creeds.
