Beijing Museum of Tap Water

The Tap Water Museum is on the site of the Beijing City Water Supply Company, which was founded in 1908 just outside the city gate at Dongzhimen. Behind the European architecture of the “intake pavilion,” the first point of contact for water arriving from the Sun River, lies a kind of plumbing graveyard. Trees crowd over the rusting corpses of water pipes and penstocks which look like metallic pasta shells of varying shapes and size. A few meters away, stone bridges cross a small pond, containing not a drop of water.