Austin first noted the marvelous cache of LIFE photos now accessible through Google image search. (Link here, but be warned, once you start looking through the collection you’ll be there for hours) Spare indulgence for a few more, taken in Peking, as it was then, in the late 1940s as history, or at least the People’s Liberation Army, was closing in.
The future second ring road
A Marine guards the U.S. Embassy, now the site of the Legation Quarter, an assemblage of uber-expensive international restaurants
Looking north from Qianmen towards the Forbidden City on a wintry day; note the absence of the brutally huge Tiananmen Square