Why it looks like this

At 3:42 a.m. on 28 July 1976, a magnitude-7.6 earthquake struck directly beneath Tangshan, a coal and industrial city east of Beijing. The official toll was about 242,000 dead — among the deadliest earthquakes in recorded history — and the city was essentially levelled.

Tangshan was rebuilt on the same site through the 1980s with wide streets, low seismic-resistant blocks and memorial parks; an anti-earthquake monument anchors the central square. The map is therefore uniform in a telling way: a large city whose entire network dates from one reconstruction.