Time-Honored Brands Are Moving Out and Qianmen Street Is Rebranding Again. Why Does It Always End Up Empty?

The Qianmen Street that planners see may be nothing like the one shoppers walk through.

Every manager seems to arrive with a secret formula for bringing a market back to life, and Qianmen Street is scarce ground — everyone wants a turn at it. Operators have come and gone since 2008, from Pan Shiyi, famous for his shrewdness, to government-backed culture merchants flying one banner after another. The market has only gotten smaller.

In the space of ten days, the shifting positions of the operator, Oriental Yingshi, left Cheng Xu baffled. "First they said they wouldn't renew the lease. Then they said we could submit a renovation plan for review — an experiential intangible-heritage 'internet-famous shop.' A week later they praised what we'd come up with as a model plan. The next day none of it counted anymore, and they told us to vacate immediately."

Cheng Xu, 35, is deputy general manager of Beijing Neiliansheng Shoes Co., a "time-honored brand" (laozihao). According to China Youth Daily and Beijing Youth Daily, 14 shops on Qianmen Street received notices from Oriental Yingshi on March 19 ordering them to vacate within five days: four time-honored brands — Neiliansheng, Yueshengzhai, Shengxifu and Dabei Photo Studio — and ten tourist-goods shops, among them Suzhou Daohuaxiang, Yidecheng Snuff, Carpenter Tan and the Beijing Gift Shop.

Qianmen Street is 850 meters long and 21 to 25 meters wide. Its southern end meets Zhushikou West Street; its northern end reaches the Zhengyangmen Arrow Tower, and past the tower lies Tiananmen Square. Get off the tour bus at the south end, buy souvenirs on Qianmen Street, use the restroom, eat a meal, then walk up to the Arrow Tower for photos — that is roughly the route every first-time group tourist in Beijing follows. There are 54.75 million such tourists a year.

The shops evicted this time sit mostly on the busier northern half of the street. Nearly all were veteran tenants that moved in when the street reopened in 2008, all with leases that expired at the end of last year, after about ten years in business.

By April 8, only three of the 14 were still open: Shengxifu, Dabei Photo Studio and Yidecheng Snuff. The display windows of the closed shops had been wrapped in colored panels printed with the words "Qianmen Cultural Experience District." A Shengxifu clerk told QDaily the shop had received an eviction notice but would not close for now; behind her, on shelves stacked with hats, hung a sign reading "10 yuan clearance." Yidecheng Snuff and Dabei Photo Studio both said they had received no notice.

On April 12, Wuyutai and Tianfuhao received notices from SOHO China, the street's other operator, saying rent would rise by 1 yuan per square meter per day. The two time-honored brands' leases expire at the end of next month and in three months. Zara, which moved in in 2009, had already cleared out, leaving a sign on the door: "Closed, do not disturb."

As the time-honored brands and shops left, themed intangible-cultural-heritage halls multiplied — one every few dozen meters. The Liu Family Bamboo Weaving Hall. The Anhui Intangible Heritage Hall. The Qianmen · Huayun Intangible Cultural Heritage Experience Center. They are lavishly decorated, built around experience and display with sales as a sideline, and most carry the name of a company called Yongxin Huayun. Even shops with nothing to do with intangible heritage had antique-style bronze statues out front. Outside Scent Library, a modern perfume shop, stands a bronze figure in a melon-cap and mandarin jacket, hand raised to sniff a spice.

In an April 2 report by Beijing Youth Daily, Li Jun, general manager of Tianjie Group, denied that "Qianmen Street is being built into a national intangible-heritage street." "What we want from this adjustment is for merchants to open brand flagship stores, image stores or specialty stores, with décor that fits the overall look of Qianmen Street. We also hope the time-honored brands will add experiential elements — Yueshengzhai could demonstrate its braised-beef technique in the shop, Shengxifu could show its hat-making craft and offer high-end bespoke service." Huayun, he said, was just one merchant on Qianmen Street, not the one in charge.

An unnamed Dongcheng District official told China Youth Daily that Tianjie Group spends 50 million yuan a year subsidizing the district's time-honored brands, so they pay a low rent of 1 yuan per square meter per day.

Eviction

Cheng Xu did not see the eviction coming. He had also never heard of the 50-million-yuan subsidy or the 1-yuan rent.

Neiliansheng has run its shop at No. 51 Qianmen Street for ten years; the company is a state-owned enterprise under the Xicheng District government. When the renovated street reopened in 2008, the Chongwen District government (since merged into Dongcheng District) invited Neiliansheng in as one of the first ten Beijing time-honored brands. The next year SOHO China bought and developed 55,000 square meters of Qianmen commercial land, 23,000 of it on Qianmen Street itself. The area had always been where time-honored brands clustered, and it was a near-compulsory stop for tourists, so Cheng Xu planned to stay for the long term.

When the five-year lease with SOHO China ran out, Dongcheng District took back four-fifths of the area in 2013 — including the part Neiliansheng sat on — and the operator changed to Oriental Yingshi, a subsidiary of Tianjie Group. Tianjie is a state-owned enterprise wholly owned by the Dongcheng District State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, and its main business is property development and management.

After the handover, Neiliansheng's lease became a one-year renewal, with the renewal date moved from July to the end of the year. Rent fell from 27 yuan per square meter per day under SOHO to 20 yuan, but the property-management fee stayed at 80 yuan per square meter per month. Oriental Yingshi also demanded the floor area be remeasured; the new figure came out at 330 square meters, 50 percent more than before. In total, Neiliansheng ended up paying more.

Last December, Cheng Xu filed the renewal paperwork with Oriental Yingshi as usual. A month later he still had no reply. Oriental Yingshi's explanation: "The group is big, the process is slow. Let's talk after Spring Festival. There won't be any problem."

On March 1, the day before the Two Sessions opened, Cheng Xu got his first verbal notice about the eviction. Tianjie Group said the street needed a unified overhaul, so none of the 14 merchants whose leases had expired would be renewed. They had to leave within five days or their shops would be sealed.

The Qianmen Management Committee told Neiliansheng it "wasn't aware of this — the district hadn't told us. We'll check; keep negotiating as you have been." Cheng Xu then had a lawyer draft a letter, delivered to the desk of Tianjie Group chairman Li Hua, demanding three to six months for merchants to place staff, find warehouse space and clear inventory: "If the eviction is forced, we reserve the right to pursue legal liability." Meanwhile Neiliansheng began clearing out slow-moving stock and some idle counters.

On March 10, a Tianjie Group deputy general manager named Wang Gang met Cheng Xu and Neiliansheng chairman Cheng Laixiang. Tianjie was not trying to drive out sitting merchants, Wang said, but to upgrade the whole district; the model would shift from collecting rent to taking a cut of sales, roughly 20 to 30 percent, with "whichever is higher, rent or the cut" applying if sales were poor. Policy could favor time-honored brands, he added — submit a renovation plan before May 1, then talk about renewal — but the plan had to match the street's new positioning, tone and style: "Experiential, with an intangible-heritage flavor, ideally combined with cultural-creative elements. Basically, work out how to make it an internet-famous shop."

Within a week Neiliansheng handed Wang Gang a provisional plan. Cheng Xu says Wang was delighted: "If you rebuild it like this, you'll be the benchmark for the whole street." The next day Oriental Yingshi told Cheng Xu that Wang Gang had been transferred back to headquarters, that nothing discussed still counted, and "you'd better hurry up and get out."

On March 28, Cheng Xu hauled more than 6,000 pairs of cloth shoes and over 30 counters out of No. 51 Qianmen Street, closed the shop and handed back the keys. Neiliansheng has two stores in the Qianmen commercial area. No. 51 is a branch: two floors, 220 square meters. The flagship stands on Dashilan Commercial Street, west of Qianmen Street's north entrance — five floors, finished in 1988, and owned outright by Neiliansheng.

Because the final notice came only on the 19th, Cheng Xu had no time to find a warehouse. He moved everything into the archive room on the fourth floor of the flagship, stacked to the ceiling. The third-floor exhibition hall — one of Beijing's five state-level intangible-heritage exhibition halls — was closed for more than a week and used for storage. The store's ten employees went home to wait for word.

Cheng Xu cannot see what conflict there is between running a time-honored brand and doing intangible heritage: "If we're talking intangible heritage, Neiliansheng cloth shoes are a state-level intangible cultural heritage item."

According to China Youth Daily, Qianmen Street and the Xianyukou food street have about 190 shops between them. Time-honored brands are 16 percent of them — and 45 percent of the total revenue of the shops under Tianjie Group.

History

This is the third time Qianmen Street has been declared due for an upgrade since it reopened in 2008.

The street is 579 years old and has passed through at least five stages. After the Zhengyangmen Arrow Tower went up in the fourth year of the Ming Zhengtong reign (1439), a large commercial district began forming around Xianyukou and Langfang Hutong. Under the Qing, despite two big fires, specialized street markets took shape on either side of the avenue: Meat Market Street, the Jewelry Market, Coal Market Street. From the late Qing through the Republican era, the Arrow Tower — burned down by the Eight-Nation Alliance — was repaired, and the opening of Qianmen Railway Station drew still more foot traffic and shops. After 1949 the mix grew more varied again, as state-run department stores and new private merchants moved in.

From 2005 to 2008, on the momentum of the Olympics, Qianmen Street was rebuilt as a major municipal project. The traffic-choked thoroughfare became a pedestrian street, and two new north-south roads were opened parallel to it on either side: Qianmen East Road and the reopened Old Coal Market Street. They took over Qianmen Street's old job of linking Luomashi Street (Liangguang Road) in the south to the Yueliangwan curve by the Qianmen gate tower in the north.

Stripped of its traffic function, Qianmen Street is now purely commercial. Administratively, Zhubaoshi Street — a north-south street parallel to it on the west — cuts the Qianmen commercial site in two: Dashilan, on the west, falls under Xicheng District; Qianmen Street and Xianyukou, on the east, fall under Dongcheng. In foot traffic, the northern end, close to Tiananmen Square, is packed with tourists; the southern end empties out.

As Cheng Xu remembers it, the street's positioning has flip-flopped for ten years.

When it reopened in 2008, SOHO China proposed a "Champs-Élysées of Beijing" — time-honored brands plus high-end international names: an Apple flagship, a Rolls-Royce or Ferrari showroom, a Rolex flagship. What actually signed leases, on the quieter southern end, was Aiyaya, Metersbonwe, Semir and McDonald's, along with fast-fashion chains like Zara and H&M, plus Bank of China and China Post.

Around 2014 the street pivoted to "internationalized experiential consumption" and brought in Peugeot, Madame Tussauds and the Museum of Whimsy, plus restaurant brands like Tous Les Jours, M Restaurant and Maan Coffee.

Now the positioning has changed again, to a "cultural experience district" built on intangible heritage.

Misconception

The Qianmen Management Committee puts daily foot traffic at 150,000, but the number of people who actually walk into a shop may be far smaller.

This Neiliansheng store has lost money since 2016. When the street opened, it sold 12 million yuan a year; in 2015, with too few customers, Cheng Xu turned the second floor into a warehouse; by 2017 sales at the store had fallen to 6 million yuan. Rent and property fees had not moved, so profit shrank to a few tens of thousands of yuan. The Neiliansheng flagship on Dashilan Commercial Street, by comparison, holds steady at 40 million yuan a year.

By Cheng Xu's account, as foot traffic fell, rents in the one-fifth of the area SOHO China still holds dropped to 30 to 40 percent of their opening level. Those shops are scattered rather than clustered — Beijing Daoxiangcun and Wuyutai, for instance, sit on opposite sides of the street. In 2015, SOHO China asked Neiliansheng whether it wanted the space Beijing Daoxiangcun now occupies, at a rent of 9.5 yuan per square meter per day.

A leasing manager at SOHO China's Qianmen Street division told QDaily that the only property it still holds now under renewal talks is a 380-square-meter shop occupied by Yueyunxuan, which may be leased out; the tenant would pay no more than 200,000 yuan a month. That works out to rent plus property fees of no more than 17 yuan per square meter per day.

"We're not making money anymore, but we're not losing much either — we treat it as advertising," Cheng Xu told QDaily. Their business is tourists from around the country; tourists are 80 percent of the store's customers.

Neiliansheng is not the only time-honored brand short of customers. Tianfuhao was also in the first 2008 batch. It sits at No. 19 Qianmen Street, two floors, 160 to 170 square meters. Zhong Zan, planning director at Tianfuhao, told QDaily the Qianmen Street store has lost money for ten years, between 900,000 and 1.1 million yuan a year. A 40-square-meter Tianfuhao street shop in Xizhimen sells twice as much in a year. In 2011, with too few tourists coming in, Zhong also turned the second floor into a warehouse.

Foot traffic scatters because of how the district routes people and where the businesses sit.

Qianmen Street was a four-lane, two-way arterial road. Turned into a shopping street, the roadway is too wide, which limits what shops can do. Because it faces Tiananmen Square, light boxes and signs meant to pull customers in are banned, and staff may not tout on the street. The lanes on either side spread out in a grid with Qianmen Street as the axis; Xianyukou and Dashilan Commercial Street, full of cheap snacks, tourist souvenirs and time-honored brands, pull large numbers of customers off Qianmen Street itself, even though they sell much the same things.

On April 10, Ma Shengdong, general manager of the cultural-tourism development center at Wanda Cultural Tourism Creative Group, toured Qianmen Street with a few friends from the Palace Museum and the Central Academy of Fine Arts. The thin crowds reminded him of a project Wanda built in Changchun. "That was also a district of one building after another. Once it opened we found the businesses clashed with each other, and the routing made no sense either — some lanes packed with people, others with nobody at all."

Running a cultural-creative district like this, he says, takes at least three things: routing that lets a visitor cover every street in one pass; management that keeps the business mix varied; and "content" — developing film and television projects, staging events.

When Zhong Zan's team assessed the Qianmen Street project in 2008, they had already worked out that operating costs — rent above all — were so high that the investment could not be balanced by sales. What drew them in was the label: a "traditional culture commercial street," a positioning "unique and irreplaceable in all of Beijing."

In practice, though, ordinary tourists may not have much appetite for traditional cultural goods. They are more interested in taking photos and buying cheap souvenirs.

Ding Hong has been a Beijing tour guide for eight years and has settled on a fixed route for Qianmen Street. Around 4 p.m. the bus parks on Zhushikou Road; the group enters from the south end, and she first steers them into the Qianmen Food Mall to buy local specialties. Further along, in the middle of the street, there is a public restroom on the west side for biological needs and, on the east side, four square open-air seating areas where thirty people can rest at once. After that they can head to Dashilan or Xianyukou at the north end, where there are plenty of snacks in the low tens of yuan, plus group meals, which takes care of dinner.

As for the other shops and experience halls: "They change too fast, even I can't keep track. The tourists are mostly older folks — careful with money, not that interested, at most they'll take a photo."

Xu Xia is in Ding Hong's group: 50 years old, from Xuzhou in Jiangsu, in Beijing for the first time. She is happy with the goods market at Qianmen. There is a box of eight imperial-court pastries for 28 yuan; candied hawthorn skewers, poria pancake sandwiches, taffy and preserved fruit at 28.8 yuan a jin; honey date cake at 20 yuan a box; Beijing roast duck at 162 yuan for two bags. And little pendants, 10 yuan each. That covers every gift she needs.

With no clear positioning, shops on Qianmen Street come and go quickly and the crowds never build. The whole street looks like a jumble: H&M next to China Post, McDonald's next to Bank of China, Zara beside Qingfeng Baozi, Quanjude Roast Duck up against a Dongfeng Peugeot flagship. Diagonally across from Neiliansheng's No. 51 store is a Miniso.

The confusion comes mostly from how often the operator has changed.

In 2003, the Chongwen District government (now part of Dongcheng) set up Tianjie Real Estate Development Co. as the entity that would carry out the Qianmen project and hold title to the property. Tianjie then had two shareholders: the Chongwen District State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, and Chongyuan Investment and Management Co., a subsidiary of that commission.

In 2009, Pan Shiyi bought 55,000 square meters of land in the Qianmen area, 23,000 of it on Qianmen Street. Two years later Yingshi Asset Management joined in, forming a joint venture with SOHO China called Yingshi Souhou (Shanghai) Co., each side holding 50 percent. Yingshi had plenty of experience running commercial property, including Chaoyang Joy City and Indigo.

In 2013, Dongcheng District took back four-fifths of the land and SOHO China withdrew from operating and leasing most of the property on Qianmen Street. A new company, owned jointly by Tianjie Group, Beijing Yingshi and Xinglong Co., was set up as Beijing Tianjie Yingshi Commercial Management Co. In April 2014 it was renamed Beijing Oriental Yingshi Culture Asset Management Co., with Tianjie Group holding a controlling 45 percent.

At the end of July 2015, Tianjie Group formed another joint venture, this time with Yongxin Huayun Cultural Industry Group, called Beijing Oriental Huayun Cultural Industry Development Co., to run the Qianmen Intangible Heritage Expo Park. Li Yongjun, Yongxin Huayun's legal representative, held a controlling 60 percent through two companies, Yongxin Huayun and Yongxinhua.

Records on Tianyancha show Yongxin Huayun was registered in Qingdao in 2012 and had never operated a commercial property project before.

Changing operators this often usually means each attempt fell short. Beijing Business Today reported in September 2016 that Qianmen Street had 132 numbered storefronts, of which nearly 40 were empty — a vacancy rate close to 30 percent.

Yet the street seems hard to judge by ordinary business logic. "If you call it a government project, it doesn't behave like one — it isn't weighing public good or social value, it's weighing commercial value. But if you call it business, it's still a long way from a real market," Cheng Xu said.

Disorder

Tianjie Group may be hoping to settle, once and for all, the long-standing vacancies at the southern end of the main street and in the lanes beyond it, and an intangible-heritage district is one way to do it. Themed halls can at least fill dozens of empty storefronts and make them look less awkward.

Li Jun, Tianjie Group's general manager, denies that "Qianmen Street is being built into a national intangible-heritage street." But the group clearly had the plan three years ago; the evidence is Oriental Huayun, still operating today.

In June 2015 the revised Measures for the Management of Beijing's Special Fund for Intangible Cultural Heritage Protection were issued, widening the range of subsidies and raising the money behind them. Under the new rules, the annual subsidy for municipal-level representative inheritors of intangible cultural heritage rose from 10,000 yuan a person to 20,000.

A month later, Li Yongjun, chairman of Yongxin Huayun Cultural Industry Group, announced a plan to build an Intangible Heritage Expo Park at Qianmen. He wanted to turn the area into a "Silicon Valley of culture, an incubation base for intangible heritage." Beijing Daily reported at the time that the park was planned at 400,000 square meters of floor area and 24 billion yuan of total investment, running north from the Qianmen Arrow Tower to Liangguang Road in the south, and from Qianmen East Road in the east to the east side of Qianmen Street in the west — the whole Qianmen commercial site. It would hold "one street" (China's Intangible Heritage Street, meaning Qianmen Street), "two cores" (an Intangible Heritage Grand Theater and an Intangible Heritage Expo Hall) and "three zones" (expo, experience and creative).

"Some shops don't fit the Expo Park's plan and will move out gradually. In August, Uniqlo's lease expired and it was the first to go," Li Yongjun told Beijing Daily then. "At market prices rent here is expensive, but we're working with intangible-heritage masters to build workshops and exhibition spaces together."

The Expo Park may also have been meant to clean up an awkward transition east of Qianmen Street, at the Taiwan Cultural Business District — arguably the worst failure of Tianjie Group's ten years in the Qianmen area.

At the end of December 2010 the Taiwan Cultural Business District opened under the slogan "Beijing Qianmen, Taiwan Reflected." It linked Qianmen Street and Qianmen East Road across 40,000 square meters. Into its cluster of antique-style gray buildings came a long list of Taiwanese shops and experience spaces: a Teresa Teng Music and Lifestyle Hall, a Taiwan Aesthetics Lifestyle Hall, a Taiwan Art Center. Ge Junkai, then director of the Qianmen Street Management Committee, called it a key cultural-commercial project backed by the Dongcheng District Party Committee and government.

According to Beijing Business Today, Tianjie Real Estate, Xinglong Co. and Tianhe Co. signed a lease at the time covering part of the Qianmen land. Xinglong came in as a subletting landlord, with Tianhe as the actual operator underneath it. A person familiar with the matter said: "Tianhe was supposed to pay Tianjie Real Estate a 4.0927-million-yuan lease deposit, but Tianjie never received it in full — the outstanding balance came to more than 20 million yuan over that period."

In October 2012 the relationship abruptly changed from a lease to entrusted management. Chen Zhichang, then a Dongcheng deputy district chief; Zhu Jiaqiu, deputy director of the district's State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission; Tianjie Group chairman Li Hua; and general manager Li Runjie all attended the signing. The lease fees, damages and penalties Tianhe had owed were moved onto Tianjie Real Estate's books. Tianjie Real Estate also advanced Xinglong more than 10 million yuan, and later paid out close to 100 million yuan more in various fees, on the grounds that "Tianhe had advanced large sums for construction and was short of cash, so Tianjie Real Estate needed to advance part of the funds."

Xinglong Co. is still a shareholder in Oriental Yingshi today, holding 20 percent.

In August 2015 the Taiwan Cultural Business District closed for good. Jiang Yongxiong, chairman of Crown Enterprise Group, which had leased the district's basement level, said: "There's no point saying anything now. I put five years into that place and lost a lot of money."

Yongxin Huayun then became the new operator, setting up a joint venture with Tianjie Group called Oriental Huayun. The Intangible Heritage Expo Park slogan followed immediately.

Three years in, the Expo Park does not seem to be working.

On April 10, Dajiang Hutong, lined on both sides with nearly ten Yongxin Huayun intangible-heritage themed halls, was empty; only a few staff in suits, red "Tianjie Group" badges on their chests, stood chatting in the doorways. Some shops barred entry: "VIP and clients only."

Next door in Xinchao Hutong, scraps of a "Notice to Immediately Return Occupied Premises" still clung to some shop doors. The notice said Beijing Yuhe Tianxia Gold Jewelry Co. had signed a lease on October 30, 2013 with Beijing Guangchong Real Estate Comprehensive Development Co., a Tianjie Group subsidiary, running from November 1, 2013 to September 20, 2021 — and that Yuhe Tianxia was behind on property fees from March 1, 2017 to February 2018, some 37,500 yuan in all.

Mao Mingrui, founder of Urban Quadrant, came to Qianmen that day too, to photograph the district for a city-management training class the next day. His company had worked for years with property firms under the Xicheng and Dongcheng district governments, studying the Qianmen, Dashilan and Xianyukou areas with data.

Standing at the shut gate of the Taiwan Guild Hall in Dajiang Hutong, Mao Mingrui talked about the Taiwan Cultural Business District's transition and said he has only ever believed in commerce-driven urban renewal. "Commerce equals service. Drive out commerce and you drive out service. Drive out service and you drive out people. Without people, without any interaction with people, what's the difference between these exhibition halls and show flats? And without subsidies, how could they stay open at all?"

Cheng Xu had also wandered through the intangible-heritage experience halls in Dajiang Hutong, hoping to learn how to design an experiential space. He found the shops had put almost no work into their interiors — a few roll-up banners on the wall, a handful of display cases with miniature walnut carvings or porcelain. Many had a single clerk, less a salesperson than a caretaker. Asked how many people came in on a given day, one clerk said, "Sometimes not a single person comes in." Asked, "Can that pay salaries?" the clerk said, "It's a state-owned enterprise anyway. They've got money."

At 5 p.m., more than a dozen Australian boys formed a circle at the south entrance and kicked a jianzi, a feathered shuttlecock, back and forth, while Julia held up her phone to photograph them. Julia teaches Chinese at a boys' high school in Tasmania, Australia, and brings students to Beijing every year for about a week. For them, the thin crowds at the southern end of Qianmen Street turn it into something like a city square — a comfortable public space.

The other draw is cheap souvenirs. "You know, the kids don't have much money, but they want to bring gifts back for family and friends," Julia said. They had not noticed the intangible-heritage experience halls.

For Tianjie Group and Yongxin Huayun, though, there may never be a better moment to push intangible heritage.

The Beijing Municipal Master Plan (2016-2035), issued last September and known as the "new master plan," calls for protecting the traditional central axis and restoring the historic rivers and lakes: "Relying on historic and cultural districts, build a network of cultural landscapes combining charismatic cultural sites, premium cultural routes and areas of cultural essence, making the old city a region that carries forward China's fine traditional culture." Beijing Party Secretary Cai Qi has said the core districts must do more to relocate functions the capital does not need, so the area can "quiet down." Specifically: population density, building density, tourism density and commercial density all have to come down.

Cheng Xu feels nothing for Qianmen Street now. The only thing that still stings is the 2 million yuan spent fitting out the shop.

(*Ding Hong and Xu Xia are pseudonyms.)

Unless otherwise noted, the cover image and photographs were taken on site.