Why it looks like this

Hefei is one of China's youngest-feeling capitals: in 1952 the province of Anhui settled its government in what was then a walled county town of modest size. The old moat still traces a neat loop at the centre — the city wall became a ring of parks and roads.

Around that loop, seventy years of planned growth spread in rings and spokes: universities and research campuses (Hefei is a national science centre), then vast new districts around artificial Swan Lake, where a second, modern centre was built from scratch.