About this Project
From 1937 to 1939 P. C. Domke was one of two “Carleton-in-China” representatives appointed by Carleton College, in accordance with an arrangement dating from 1922, to teach English in the Ming I Middle School in Fenyang, Shanxi Province, China. The other C-in-C rep in those years, Jack Caton, had begun his teaching at the Ming I school a year earlier.
Our Mission
Collecting Domke and Caton’s photographs of Beijing City, align them with current Map of Beijing to find out as time passes and circumstances change, the transformations in architectures.
Beijing Now
Beijing in 1930s
Beijing is a city whose fate has never been kind to it.
It was the Yongle Emperor who, in 1420, moved the imperial capital north and built the city we would recognize — the Forbidden City at its heart, concentric rings of walls radiating outward, every axis oriented to assert the mandate of heaven. For 5 centuries, Beijing was the center of the known world, or at least the center of the world that mattered most to its inhabitants.
The Ming gave way to the colonist Qing, who entered through the gates in 1644 and kept the city largely intact, they understood that Beijing’s architecture was its authority. But the 19th century was less forgiving. The Old Summer Palace burned at foreign hands in 1860. The Boxer Rebellion brought eight allied armies into the imperial capital in 1900. The walls held, but the idea they enclosed was already cracking.
The Republic came in 1912, and with it a long instability: warlords, Japanese invasion, civil war. Beijing became Beiping, a city demoted from capital, watching history happen elsewhere.
Then 1949. The People’s Republic restored the capital, and with it came a different kind of erasure: not conquest, but construction. The city walls came down in the 1960s. The hutongs began to disappear. The ring roads arrived, one by one, each one swallowing more of what remained. Today, skyscrapers and asphalt roads have buried its old dust, the grime, the grandeur, the slow rot of a dynasty that didn’t know it was ending, under something faster, louder, and entirely new.
While asphalt and rapid construction may have paved over the imperial city, digital tools offer us a way to unearth it. To truly grasp the scale of this urban erasure, we must view the past and present simultaneously. Using the 1930 map as our historical baseline, we have anchored the ghosts of Beijing’s ancient layout to the precise coordinates of the modern megacity. This digital excavation allows us to peer directly beneath the concrete and witness a century of transformation firsthand.
Explore the Interactive Map Use the slider on the map above to travel through time. By dragging the bar left and right, you can peel back the yellow 1930s historical map of Beijing to reveal the modern, gray street grid underneath. This lets you see exactly what buildings, roads, and neighborhoods replaced the ancient city.
How We Built This Map
To create this interactive experience, we could not just place the old map on top of the new one. Because historical maps from the 1930s were drawn by hand and did not use modern GPS measurements, the scale was very inconsistent.
To fix this, we used a digital tool called AllMaps. We found historical landmarks that have not moved in a hundred years—like the corners of the Forbidden City and the Drum Tower—and dropped digital pins on them. The computer then used a “Thin-Plate Spline transformation.” You can think of this like printing the 1930s map on a giant rubber sheet and stretching specific areas until the old streets perfectly matched the modern coordinates. After the map was warped to fit reality, we uploaded it into ArcGIS to build the slider tool.
The Interactive StoryMap
To bring all of this research together, we have built a comprehensive, interactive spatial narrative. Scroll through the embedded StoryMap below to trace the exact footsteps of the Carleton-in-China representatives and view their archival 1930s photographs tied directly to modern geographic coordinates. As you read through their journey, you will also be able to use our interactive swipe tool to physically peel back the layers of Beijing’s history yourself.
View Beijing City in 1930s full screen here
Following the Footsteps in Beijing
To make this map more than just a geographic exercise, we wanted to ground it in human experience. We focused on the photographs of Paul C. Domke and Jack Caton, the “Carleton-in-China” representatives who lived in the region during the late 1930s.
By looking at the backgrounds of their photos, we traced the locations they visited across the city. Some of their photos capture a peaceful Beijing, like the stunning and untouched architecture of the Temple of Heaven. However, other photos show the dark reality of a city changing. By 1937, the Japanese invasion had begun. What started as an educational trip turned into a frontline view of military occupation and destruction.
Conclusion: A City Rewritten, But Not Forgotten
Through this project, we have seen that while the physical bricks of 1930s Beijing may be gone, the city’s history is not entirely erased. By combining modern digital mapping tools with the surviving photographs of Paul C. Domke and Jack Caton, we are able to rescue these lost landscapes from the archives and bring them back into the modern world.
This interactive map does more than just show how streets have changed over a century. It allows us to stand in the exact spots where history happened—where ancient walls once stood, where traditional hutongs hummed with daily life, and where visitors witnessed the terrifying dawn of a war.
Beijing is a city that has constantly rewritten its own geography, burying its past under concrete and ring roads. But as this project shows, through the digital humanities, we can finally read all of those hidden layers at once.