Out of the Blocks.(Beijing's National Stadium and National Aquatics Center)

To understand just how important the Beijing Olympics are to China, you have only to look at where the Olympic Green has been built. During Beijing's first building boom--six hundred years before the current one--the city was laid out symmetrically on either side of a north-south axis. As in Paris--where the Louvre lines up with the Tuileries, the Arc de Triomphe, and the Champs-Elysees--Beijing's most symbolically important structures have fallen along the main axis. In the center is the former imperial residence of the Forbidden City. North of this is the Jingshan, a park surrounding an artificial hill where the last Ming emperor is said to have hanged himself, and, ...