Ge Yu Lu (road) Favorite 

In 2017 Ge Yulu became a national sensation in China. That year, he submitted his final project as a student at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, revealing the unnamed road in Beijing that he had claimed in 2014 as his own. Because the Lu character in his name means road, he erected a sign for Geyu Road that blended seamlessly into the setting. Geyu Road soon appeared on AutoNavi, the Chinese equivalent of Google Maps, and on Google Maps itself.

Once the project became public knowledge, it caused a media storm, with positive coverage even from China Central Television (CCTV), an official Chinese government broadcast network. But soon enough, authorities clamped down and installed four street signs along the 400-meter stretch of asphalt, renaming Geyu Road to Baiziwannanyi Road. “When I saw the news photo, I found it very interesting that they made one sign for every 100 meters, as if they wanted to suppress something there,” Ge told writer Charlotte Gao in The Diplomat.

The “error” captured something quintessential about the friction between China’s tight state controls and the looser, improvisational, often frontier-like side of daily life in its rapidly growing cities. People began to debate Ge Yu Road’s significance online. On July 9, 2017, a user on Zhihu, China’s Quora-like Q&A website, wrote about the story of “Ge Yu Road” as an answer to the question “What are skills that don’t seem easy but actually everyone can acquire?” The story soon went viral. Some argued “Ge Yu Lu” remedied a deficiency in city management and made life in the neighborhood more convenient, while others criticized Ge for his transgression.

On July 12, the Beijing Municipal Commission of Urban Planning posted on its official Weibo account that the street actually had had an official name since 2005. Later, the local street office further explained that because the street had been under temporary management of a property developer it didn’t have a street sign yet.

Despite voices calling for the street to remain Ge Yu Lu, city authorities removed Ge’s sign on July 13. Chinese maps followed suit, and the street resumed its decade-long “anonymity” for another 10 days, until on July 23 a new sign appeared for “Baiziwannanyi Road,” and the road had a name again, this time officially.