This photo showing part of the Beijing skyline on a rainy afternoon was taken from the 20th floor of a building along the North 4th Ring Road. The view is looking to the southeast; the buildings furthest in the distance to the right of center are the towers of Beijing's central business district, six or possibly seven kilometers from where I am standing. When I first came to Beijing 21 years ago, the built up area in the foreground was farm land and small, outlying towns still distant from what in those days was the much smaller urban core of Beijing.