Tiananmen Square destroyed, the gate. Tiananmen Square was designed and built in 1651, and has since been enlarged by four times its original size in the 1950s. Near the centre of the square stood the "Great Ming Gate", the southern gate to the Imperial City, renamed "Great Qing Gate" during the Qing dynasty, and "Gate of China" during the Republican era. Unlike the other gates in Beijing, such as the Tiananmen and the Zhengyangmen, this was a purely ceremonial gateway, with three arches but no ramparts, similar in style to the ceremonial gateways found in the Ming tombs. This gate had a
Tiananmen Square self-immolation incident on 17 March. Some Falun Gong sources argue that she may have been killed by the government as a way of guaranteeing her silence. The program suggests that the reaction time of state-run television crews and police on Tiananmen Square demonstrates they had advance knowledge of the event. They observed that officers arrived almost immediately on the scene equipped with numerous fire extinguishers. Fire extinguishers are not standard equipment for police on Tiananmen Square; the nearest building that would house them was several minutes away from the scene. The World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong further called