Beijing

Overview

Beijing municipality is one city and a mountain hinterland, and the hinterland is where the Great Wall is. The city of Beijing has its own guide; this page covers the whole province-level unit around it: 16 districts, mountains on three sides, and the day trips that most visitors bolt onto a capital stay.

The scale takes a moment to absorb. The municipality covers just over 16,400 km², with the Yan Mountains closing it off to the north and the Western Hills to the west, and the built-up city on the plain in the southeast corner. Everything a visitor wants outside the city lies in that horseshoe of hills: the Wall at Badaling, Mutianyu, Jinshanling, Simatai and Jiankou; the Ming Tombs in Changping; the Peking Man caves at Zhoukoudian in the southwest; temples and stone villages in Mentougou in the west.

Eight World Heritage listings sit inside the municipal boundary. Five are city sites (the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven, the Summer Palace, the Beijing Central Axis and the Beijing section of the Grand Canal); three are out in the districts (the Great Wall, the Ming Tombs and Zhoukoudian).

The practical consequence is a split itinerary. Three or four days in the city, then one day per outer sight: the Wall sections are 70 to 125 km from the centre and need a full day each, and the Ming Tombs and Zhoukoudian are separate half-day trips in different directions. The high-speed line to Badaling and the suburban trains to Huairou and Miyun have made the outer districts easier to reach without a driver than they were a decade ago, but a driver or a scheduled shuttle still saves hours at most sections.

History & character

A frontier town for two thousand years

The site was a walled settlement called Ji from around 1045 BC and later the capital of the Yan state, but for most of Chinese history it sat on the edge of the empire rather than at its centre. The Yellow River cities and Xi’an were where dynasties based themselves. Beijing’s rise came from the north: the Khitan Liao made it a secondary capital in 938, and the Jurchen Jin moved their main capital here in 1153 and renamed it Zhongdu.

Khanbalik and the Ming capital

The Mongols took Zhongdu in 1215 and its population fell to about 91,000. Kublai Khan began building a new city, Dadu (Khanbalik), in 1267, and from 1279 it was the capital of all China for the first time. The Ming Yongle Emperor kept the site: the Forbidden City went up between 1406 and 1420 and the court moved from Nanjing in 1421.

The Ming are also why the hinterland looks the way it does. The Wall you visit is Ming work: Badaling was built in 1504 to guard the Juyong Pass, Mutianyu was rebuilt in 1569, and the Jinshanling stretch dates from around 1570. The dynasty built in brick and stone rather than rammed earth, which is why the Beijing sections have lasted while the mud walls of the west have eroded. The Ming also chose the southern slope of Tianshou Mountain in Changping for their tombs, siting them by feng shui to block the northern winds.

Qing summers in the hills

The Manchu Qing took the city in 1644 and kept it as capital. They spent their summers north of the Wall at Chengde, where the Mountain Resort was built between 1703 and 1792, and four Qing emperors made the trip west to worship at Tanzhe Temple in Mentougou. The dynasty ended badly here: Anglo-French troops burned the Summer Palace in 1860, the Boxers besieged the Legation Quarter in 1900, and the last emperor abdicated in 1912.

Beiping, occupation and the People’s Republic

The Nationalists moved the capital to Nanjing in 1928 and downgraded the city to Beiping. Japanese forces occupied it from 1937 to 1945. Mao proclaimed the People’s Republic here in 1949 and the capital came back.

The decades since have reshaped the hinterland as much as the city. The Miyun Reservoir was built between September 1958 and September 1960 and is now the sole drinking-water source for over 11 million people. Badaling opened to tourists in 1957, the first Wall section to do so. Ring roads spread outwards from the Second (finished 1981) to the Sixth. The 2022 Winter Olympics put alpine and sliding venues in Yanqing and a high-speed line to reach them, and the municipal government itself moved east to Tongzhou, designated the sub-administrative centre in 2015.

The character of the region today is the contrast between the two halves: a capital of state monuments and ring roads, and 60-odd per cent of the land area in hills where villages still farm chestnuts and walnuts and the Wall runs along the ridgelines.

See & do

The Great Wall, section by section

The Ming wall runs for 8,850 km across northern China, and a 2012 survey found that 22 per cent of it had already disappeared. The Beijing sections are the best-preserved stretch of the whole thing, and the choice between them is the main decision of a Beijing trip. The Great Wall guide goes into detail; the short version follows.

Badaling (Yanqing, about 80 km northwest) is the famous one: the first section opened to tourism, in 1957, visited by Nixon in 1972, and the one that drew close to 10 million people in 2018, which is why a 65,000-a-day cap now applies. The highest tower, Beibalou, stands at about 1,015 m. It has a high-speed rail station of its own.

Mutianyu (Huairou, about 70 km northeast) is the section to pick if you want the restored experience without Badaling’s crowds: 2,250 m of granite wall 7 to 8.5 m high, with 22 watchtowers packed unusually close together and crenellations on both parapets, so archers could fire both ways. It began as a Northern Qi wall in the sixth century and opened to visitors in 1988. You go up by gondola or chairlift and can come down by toboggan. Tickets are real-name: you book with your passport, one ticket per document per day, up to 30 days ahead. In peak season (16 March to 15 November) it opens 07:30 to 18:00 on weekdays and to 18:30 at weekends; in winter 08:00 to 17:30.

Jinshanling (125 km northeast, just over the Hebei line in Luanping County) is the walkers’ section: 10.5 km with 67 towers, restored at the entrance end and steadily wilder as it heads east towards Simatai. Entry is 65 yuan, the cable car 40. The wall hike from east Jinshanling to west Simatai is roughly 10 km and takes between two and a half and six hours depending on fitness.

Simatai (Miyun, 120 km northeast) is 5.4 km and 35 towers split by a valley: a gentle western half with 20 towers and a steep eastern half with 17, including the Fairy Tower with its twin lotus carvings, the Watching-the-Capital Tower at 986 m, the Heavenly Ladder at an 80-degree pitch and the Sky Bridge, 100 m long and 40 cm wide in places.

Jiankou (Huairou, 73 km north) is the unrestored wall in the photographs, built from 1368 on white dolomite and described as the most precarious section in Beijing. It is not an official tourist attraction; local guides walk it, and a 750 m stretch was consolidated between 2015 and 2019. The landmarks have names: the Ox Horn Edge, the Sky Ladder, the Beijing Knot where three walls meet, the Nine-Eye Tower. Huanghuacheng, also in Huairou, is the “lakeside wall”, with stretches submerged in reservoir water and only a handful of visitors; Gubeikou in Miyun is the unrestored pass with the least tourist traffic of all.

The Ming Tombs

The Ming Tombs lie 42 km north-northwest of the centre in Changping. Thirteen emperors from Yongle onwards are buried on the slope of Tianshou Mountain (the founder’s tomb is near Nanjing), and three complexes are open: Changling, the Yongle Emperor’s and the largest; Dingling, the only one excavated; and Zhaoling. The 7 km Sacred Way lined with stone animals and officials leads in from the south. UNESCO listed the site in 2000.

Zhoukoudian

The Peking Man site is about 50 km southwest of the centre in Fangshan, in limestone hills full of caves and sinkholes. It has been on the World Heritage list since 1987 for the Homo erectus fossils dug out between the 1920s and 1930s, when it was the most productive H. erectus site in the world.

The imperial city, briefly

The city’s own set (the Forbidden City, home to 24 Ming and Qing emperors, the Temple of Heaven, the Summer Palace and the National Museum of China) is covered in the Beijing guide and the individual pages. Out in the districts, the other set pieces are Longqing Gorge in Yanqing, where a 15-minute open boat runs along the bottom of the canyon and a 258 m dragon-shaped escalator climbs the dam, and the Grand Canal Cultural Park at Tongzhou, where the navigable canal ends.

Towns & cities

Beijing

Beijing is the only city, and it is where you sleep. The historic core sits inside the Second Ring Road; the 7.8 km Central Axis runs from the Drum and Bell Towers in the north to Yongdingmen in the south, through the Forbidden City and past the Temple of Heaven, and was inscribed by UNESCO in 2024. The districts below are the rest of the municipality, ordered by how likely you are to visit.

Huairou

Huairou is the Wall district most foreign visitors end up in, about 50 km northeast of the centre and 90 per cent mountainous with 69 per cent forest cover. Mutianyu, Jiankou and the lakeside wall at Huanghuacheng are all here. It is also where China Film Group built its studios in 2005, and the farms sell chestnuts, walnuts, hawthorns and apricots along the roads in autumn. Hongluo Temple charges 30 yuan.

Yanqing

Yanqing is the northwest district, 74 km out beyond the Juyong Pass, and it holds Badaling. It hosted the alpine skiing, bobsleigh, luge and skeleton at the 2022 Winter Olympics at the National Alpine Skiing Centre and National Sliding Centre, and Expo 2019 before that. Beyond the Wall there is Longqing Gorge, the Wild Duck Lake wetland, and the Guyaju cliff dwellings, cut into rock around a thousand years ago. Since December 2020 a branch of the high-speed line reaches Yanqing station in 26 minutes from the city.

Miyun

Miyun is the northeast, reservoir country, with the wilder Wall sections: Simatai, and the unrestored Gubeikou pass, which the Qianlong Emperor named in 1736 by joining “Old Pass” and “North Gate”. Gubeikou town has 7,170 residents and a railway station on the suburban line.

Changping

Changping, due north, is Ming Tombs country and the road to Badaling. Juyong Pass is here too, about 50 km from the centre in the 18 km Guangou valley: the nearest Wall section to the city, with a fortress that forms a complete ring and the Cloud Platform of 1342, a 9.5 m Yuan-dynasty marble gateway that once carried three pagodas. The G6 expressway runs straight through the pass.

Mentougou

Mentougou is the west: 1,321 km², 93 per cent mountain, old coal country, with Mount Ling (2,303 m, the municipality’s highest point) on its far edge and a low-speed maglev, Line S1, as its metro link. Tanzhe Temple, founded in 307 during the Western Jin, is older than the city (“first Tanzhe, then Beijing”, as the saying goes); Jietai Temple is nearby. The district was badly flooded by Typhoon Doksuri in 2023.

Deep in the same hills, about 90 km from the centre on an old post road, Cuandixia is a Ming village of some 500 courtyard houses, all still owned by the Han clan that arrived from Shanxi. The name uses a character so rare it is usually explained as “cooking stove”. Many houses now take overnight guests and serve meals.

Tongzhou and Fangshan

Tongzhou, 20 km east, is the northern end of the Grand Canal (a UNESCO listing since 2014), the new seat of the municipal government, and home to Universal Beijing Resort, which opened on 20 September 2021 with its own subway station on Line 7 and the Batong line. Fangshan, in the southwest, is limestone cave country and the reason Zhoukoudian is on the World Heritage list.

Over the border

Two Hebei and Tianjin cities work as day trips. Chengde, 225 km northeast, has the Qing Mountain Resort (UNESCO since 1994) and the Eight Outer Temples, including the Putuo Zongcheng Temple of 1771 modelled loosely on the Potala; high-speed trains from Beijing Chaoyang reach Chengde South. Tianjin, 120 km southeast, is 30 minutes away by intercity train, for the concession-era streets of Wudadao and the Italian Style Town.

Food & drink

Beijing cooking is Shandong cooking that went to court. The base is northern: wheat, salt, garlic, spring onion. Onto that the capital layered Huaiyang dishes brought north by officials, the Hui Muslim kitchen of Niujie, and the Manchu taste of the Qing, and it sorted its restaurants into a hierarchy from grand zhuang establishments down to street stalls (tan) that only broke down after the dynasty fell.

Peking duck is the dish everyone comes for, roasted in ovens fired with fruitwood until the skin goes glassy, then carved at the table into pancakes with cucumber, spring onion and sweet bean sauce. Two names have the history: Bianyifang, dated to 1416 and the oldest surviving restaurant in the city, and Quanjude, founded in 1864.

The winter dish is shuan yangrou, instant-boiled mutton: paper-thin lamb swished through a copper hotpot and dipped in sesame sauce, a style Donglaishun made famous from 1903. Zhajiangmian, thick wheat noodles under a fried soybean-paste and pork sauce, is the everyday noodle. The snacks are the real local signature: jianbing crepes from morning carts, luzhu huoshao (wheat cakes in offal broth), baodu (quick-fried tripe), tanghulu (candied hawthorn on a stick) and douzhi, a sour fermented mung-bean drink that most outsiders try once.

Out in the districts the food is farm food. Huairou grows chestnuts, walnuts, hawthorns, pears and apricots, and the hawthorns are what end up on those tanghulu sticks. In Cuandixia the courtyard houses double as inns and cook for their guests.

To drink: Yanjing is the city’s own mass-market lager, and erguotou is the cheap, strong local baijiu, sold in 500 ml red-star bottles at any convenience store.

Nature

The municipality is roughly 62 per cent mountain and 38 per cent plain. The Western Hills (Xishan) belong to the Taihang range and run down the west side; the Yan Mountains run east to west across the north. The city sits on the flat at 40 to 60 m, and the rivers that cross it (the Yongding, Chaobai and Juma) drain southeast to the Bohai Sea some 150 km away via Tianjin.

The high ground

Mount Ling (Dongling) is the roof of the municipality at 2,303 m, but it sits 122 km from the centre on the Hebei border in Mentougou; Haituo Mountain in Yanqing, 2,241 m, is the second summit and the one the Olympic ski runs were cut into. Closer in, Fragrant Hills Park (Xiangshan) in Haidian is the hill Beijingers actually climb: 160 hectares of pine, cypress, maple, smoke tree and persimmon rising to Incense Burner Peak at about 575 m, laid out from 1186 under the Jin, enlarged by Qianlong in 1745, and a public park since 1956. The smoke trees turn red and the whole city comes for the Red Leaf Festival. It has its own subway station.

Water

Miyun Reservoir is the big water: 180 km², built between 1958 and 1960 at the meeting of the Chao and Bai rivers, with a storage capacity of four billion cubic metres, and the largest artificial lake in Asia by its own account. The 110 km Huanku Road circles it, and that ring road, not the reservoir itself, is what visitors use.

Wild Duck Lake (Yeya Hu) in Yanqing is a 6,873-hectare wetland reserve and the municipality’s main bird habitat. Huanghuacheng in Huairou is where the Wall itself runs down into reservoir water.

Forest

Huairou calls itself the city’s “oxygen bar” on the strength of 69 per cent forest cover, and the Labagoumen mountain park in its far north is the district’s foliage spot. The woodland around Mutianyu is over 90 per cent tree cover, which is a large part of why it photographs better than Badaling.

Climate

Beijing’s climate is humid continental on the edge of semi-arid: a hot, wet monsoon summer and a short, cold, dry winter under the Siberian high. The January daily mean is minus 2.7°C and the July mean 27.2°C; the coldest days fall in early January and the hottest in early August. Annual precipitation is only around 528 mm, and nearly all of it comes in the summer months. The extremes on record run from minus 27.4°C to 41.9°C.

Two things matter for the outer districts. First, altitude: the mountain areas have annual mean temperatures of 0 to 10°C against 13°C in the city, so the Wall is colder and windier than the forecast for Beijing suggests, in every season. Second, the seasons themselves are short at the edges. By China’s own seasonal standard Beijing enters spring on 26 March, summer on 20 May, autumn on 13 September and winter on 31 October, and autumn has been getting shorter.

Spring brings sandstorms off the Gobi across the Mongolian steppe; one storm in April 2002 dropped close to 50,000 tonnes of dust on the city before moving on to Korea and Japan. Summer rain can be violent: Typhoon Doksuri flooded Mentougou in 2023.

Air quality is the other climate. Annual PM2.5 fell from 89.5 micrograms per cubic metre in 2013, the “airpocalypse” year, to 32 in 2023, and the worst days now cluster in the coal-heating season from 15 November to 15 March, when the mountains trap what blows in from Hebei.

When to go

September and October are the months to aim for: the monsoon rain has stopped, the heating season has not started, and the Wall walks are at their most comfortable. The one week to avoid inside that window is the National Day Golden Week around 1 October, seven days (eight if Mid-Autumn Festival falls close by) when hundreds of millions of Chinese travel at once and the daily cap at Badaling becomes a real constraint.

Leaf season follows: the smoke trees at Fragrant Hills turn from late October into early November and the park fills for its Red Leaf Festival, so go on a weekday or go early.

Late April and May work as a second choice once the dust season is easing, with one caveat: the Labour Day Golden Week from 1 May was reinstated in 2019 and brings the same crowds as October for a shorter stretch.

Summer is hot, sticky and the peak for domestic tourism; the Wall sections open early (Mutianyu from 07:30 in peak season) and the morning is the only sensible time to be on them.

Winter is for people with the right coat. Temperatures easily drop below minus 10°C, but queues are short, the Wall is empty, and Longqing Gorge stages its Ice Lantern Festival, running for more than 30 years now, with around 150 ice sculptures in an ice pavilion. Chinese New Year, in January or February, is the third Golden Week and the hardest of the three to travel through.

Getting there

By air

Beijing Capital (PEK) is 32 km northeast of the centre in Shunyi, the Air China hub, with Terminal 3 (Foster + Partners, 2008) built as the largest single-phase terminal complex in the world. The Capital Airport Express runs from the terminals to Sanyuanqiao (Line 10), Dongzhimen (Line 2) and Beixinqiao (Line 5) for 25 yuan, every 10 to 15 minutes between 06:30 and 23:00, in around 25 minutes.

Beijing Daxing (PKX) opened on 25 September 2019, 46 km south of the centre, in a Zaha Hadid Architects terminal nicknamed the starfish. It is the SkyTeam base (China Southern, China Eastern, XiamenAir moved here from Capital). The Daxing Airport Express reaches Caoqiao on Line 10 in about 19 minutes for 35 yuan; the ticket machines reject foreign passports, so buy from the counter. The Beijing to Xiong’an intercity railway gets you to Beijing West station in under 30 minutes.

By rail

Beijing has a station per direction, and the trick is knowing which. Beijing South (Lines 4 and 14) is the high-speed terminus for Shanghai, Hangzhou and the Tianjin intercity. Beijing West (Lines 7 and 9) serves Xi’an, Chengdu, Chongqing, Lhasa and Hong Kong West Kowloon. Beijing Railway Station (Line 2) sends high-speed trains to the northeast and the conventional trains to Ulaanbaatar, Russia and North Korea. Beijing North and Qinghe handle the Zhangjiakou line, which is also the Badaling and Yanqing line; Beijing Chaoyang (Line 3) is the station for Chengde and the northeast.

The Beijing to Zhangjiakou high-speed railway, opened on 30 December 2019 for the Winter Olympics, is worth knowing as a piece of engineering as well as a route: 174 km at up to 350 km/h, the first fully driverless high-speed line in the world, cutting the Zhangjiakou trip from over three hours to about 47 minutes.

Getting around

In the city

The subway is the tool: 30 lines, 541 stations and 909 km, the longest metro in the world by route length since December 2023, carrying an average of 9.46 million people a day. Fares start at 3 yuan for up to 6 km and climb slowly with distance (a 40 km ride is 7 yuan). Pay with a Yikatong card, a single-journey ticket, the Yitongxing app’s QR code (one- to seven-day passes cost 20 to 90 yuan), or, since January 2025, a contactless bank card at the gate. Taxis are cheap and honest; most people order them through DiDi inside Alipay, and it helps to have your destination written in characters.

Out to the Wall and the tombs

Every major section has a public-transport route, and every one of them takes longer than the map suggests.

• Badaling: the Beijing to Zhangjiakou high-speed line from Beijing North or Qinghe stops at an underground Badaling Great Wall station. The slower S2 suburban train also runs from Huangtudian to Badaling and Yanqing, and bus 877 leaves frequently from Deshengmen.
• Mutianyu: bus 916 express from Dongzhimen to Huairou Beidajie, then bus H24 to the car park (only twice a day), or the Mubus round-trip shuttle from downtown for 80 yuan. At the site, the shuttle from the entrance is 15 yuan return, the cable car or chairlift 120 return and the toboggan 55.
• Simatai, Gubeikou and Miyun: bus 980 express from Dongzhimen to central Miyun, and the Huairou to Miyun suburban railway from Beijing North via Changping North to Gubeikou.
• Ming Tombs: bus 872 from Deshengmen drops you near the Sacred Way. The Changping subway line has a Ming Tombs station, but it is a long way from the tombs themselves; getting off at Changping and taking a bus is usually faster.

In the countryside, private minibuses fill the gaps, usually under 10 yuan a hop. Mentougou has its own oddity, the S1 low-speed maglev, and Tongzhou is served by six subway lines including the Line 7 extension to Universal Resort.