Sole searching, or shopping in history

As the inexorable progress of modern commerce and glass and steel edifices bury the old facades of Beijing, it becomes harder to seek out the essence of Old Beijing.

The shoe museum at Neiliansheng's shop, which cradles a traditional brand with more than one hundred years of shoe-making history, will take you back in time.

Neiliansheng, "the first cloth-shoe shop in China" as tagged by the China General Chamber of Commerce, boasts of being masters of the craft of "multi-layered sole", listed by authoritative archaeology magazine American Archaeology as one of the "Top 10 Archaeological Discoveries of 2008". In the same year, the craft was listed on China's second intangible cultural heritage list.