Since Shen Congwen's literary works thematize heavily on both the urban and the provincial areas, it may not be unfair to remark that "the urban" and "the provincial" become what Shen's Janus-like feature is made of: the polarity and pairing of two faces and two voices in one person. This paper will study the way Beijing stirs and helps invent Shen's "Xiang-Xi imaginary" by probing into Shen's life and writing during his Beijing period. Upon his first arrival in Beijng, Shen found his stay at the "guildhall" only to move afterwards into the "apartment" near the beach of the Peking University. This movement symbolizes the image change of the intellectuals in the 1920s: a scholar in guildhall turns into a wanderer (or even a vagabond) in an apartment. Seriously affected by the bankruptcy of national order and moral integrity in Beijing under warlords' regime, Shen's "Beijing writing," while replete with anarchistic tones, has its language use in the detached, the dirty, and the erotic revolving around orexis, lust, love's overconsumption, and spiritual agitation, thus questioning the self-sufficiency of the nation-state discourse. What Shen intends is none other than the search for beauty in people’s sickened hearts and raging libido. Only by overlapping this pursuit with the Xiang Xi homeland in Shen's memory can Shen find a way to alleviate his anxiety for reality. In the final analysis, we may argue that only in the Beijing as is founded on a profound tradition of an old empire can Shen find the beauty that will put reality and illusion in balance. And Shen has little hesitation in taking this beauty to be an ultimate way of redeeming a 20th-century individualist.