A short lane branching off the Wangfujing shopping street, hung with red lanterns, this was for years the place tourists came to be confronted with shock-value skewers — scorpions (sometimes still wriggling), starfish, seahorses, and assorted insects — alongside more ordinary lamb kebabs, candied haws, and noodles. It absorbed many of the vendors displaced when the larger Donghuamen night market closed in 2016.
Successive renovations have since thinned it out, and it now leans as much towards souvenirs and trinkets as food. It was always a tourist spectacle rather than a place locals ate — the genuinely good street food is on Gui Jie or at Xianyukou — but the theatre of it after dark, when the lanterns are lit, still draws a first-time crowd. Come to look and photograph; eat lightly, and don't expect the market of the old photographs.