When various people – say friends, or honoured guests – arrive and depart in China, they of course must normally do so via ‘doors’. And while this seems perfectly natural, it has some intriguing implications, not the least of which is that doors themselves become very significant features of the Chinese social landscape. The Chinese word which is used to mean both ‘door’ (as in the door to a house or a room), and ‘gate’ (for instance the gate to a farmhouse compound or animal enclosure), is men. The same term also covers the many large and symbolically important public gates (or arches) found throughout China – such as the Gate of Heavenly Peace, Tian'anmen. It can in fact be argued that the symbolic centre of modern China, Tian'anmen, is not the famous square (gongchang) at the heart of Beijing, but rather the famous gate (men) which looks down upon it. For as Angela Zito has pointed out, imperial architecture (i.e. the architecture of imperial cities, palaces, and sacred sites in China) greatly emphasised not only walls, which served to delineate inside and outside (see also Hay 1994), but also gates which, as ‘mediating spaces’ (Zito 1997: 140), played a crucial role in imperial ritual activity: