Beijing

Overview

Beijing is the political capital, the imperial capital of three dynasties, and the city where most China itineraries either begin or end. The grid of the old city was laid out by the Yongle Emperor in the early 1400s, the Forbidden City sits dead in the middle of it, and the alleys (hutong) of the older quarters around the Drum and Bell Towers still work the way they did a hundred years ago: low courtyard houses, fruit sellers on the corner, men playing chess in the shade.

Beijing is also a 21-million-person megacity that rebuilt itself for the 2008 Olympics, then again for the 2022 Winter Games. The Sixth Ring Road encloses 2,267 km², the metro network passed 30 lines and 909 km, and the smog problem of a decade ago has improved sharply (PM2.5 in central Beijing dropped about 65% between 2013 and 2022) without disappearing.

Six UNESCO World Heritage sites sit inside the municipality, including the Forbidden City (1987), the Temple of Heaven (1998), the Summer Palace (1998), the Ming Tombs (2000), portions of the Great Wall, and Peking Man at Zhoukoudian. The Great Wall is the most-visited section of the lot, with the restored Mutianyu, Badaling and Jinshanling all reachable as day trips.

The food is northern: Peking duck roasted over fruitwood, lamb hotpot, hand-pulled wheat noodles, jianbing crepes from carts on weekday mornings, sweet bean paste baozi. The administrative scope of the “region” here is the municipality itself, equivalent in tier to a province, plus the suburban counties that hold most of the Wall and most of the parks.

History & character

Early settlement to Liao and Jin

Settlements at this site are recorded as early as 1045 BC, when the city was a frontier outpost called Ji. For most of Chinese history, however, this place sat outside the central heartland: the Yellow River cities of Luoyang, Kaifeng and Xi’an were where dynasties usually based themselves. Beijing’s rise begins with the non-Han powers who pressed in from the north. The Khitan Liao made it a secondary capital from 938; the Jurchen Jin made it their main capital, Zhongdu, in 1153 and walled it in eight gates.

Yuan: Khanbalik

In 1215 Genghis Khan razed the Jin city; in 1267 his grandson Kublai Khan rebuilt it as Dadu (Great Capital), known to outsiders as Khanbalik. By 1279 Kublai had finished off the Southern Song and Khanbalik was the capital of the largest contiguous empire in history. Marco Polo’s account, whatever its accuracy, describes a city of 100,000 households and a court of unimaginable scale. The basic axial layout, the rectangular grid, and the system of walls and gates date to this Mongol-era foundation.

Ming: the Forbidden City

The Ming dynasty’s third emperor, Yongle, moved the capital from Nanjing back to Beijing in 1421 and gave the city the form it still has. Construction of the Forbidden City ran from 1406 to 1420 and required around a million labourers; the Temple of Heaven, the Bell and Drum Towers, the original Great Wall sections you see at Mutianyu and Badaling, and the rebuilt Beijing city walls (largely demolished in the 1950s and 60s for ring roads) all date from this era.

Qing and the late imperial collapse

The Manchu Qing took Beijing in 1644 and kept it as their capital. The Summer Palace and Old Summer Palace (Yuanmingyuan) belong to this period, as does the segregation of the Inner City for Manchu bannermen and the Outer City for Han Chinese. The 19th century broke the dynasty here: Anglo-French troops burned the Old Summer Palace in 1860, the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 led to a multinational army occupying the Forbidden City, and the boy-emperor Puyi abdicated in 1912 in the Hall of Mental Cultivation.

Republic and PRC

After the abdication, Beijing remained a cultural and intellectual capital (Peking University, the May Fourth Movement of 1919) but lost political weight to Nanjing under the Kuomintang. Japanese forces occupied the city from 1937 to 1945. On 1 October 1949 Mao declared the People’s Republic from atop Tiananmen Gate to a crowd of around 500,000.

The Mao decades reshaped the city brutally. The 25 km of Ming city walls were torn down between 1958 and 1969 to make way for the Second Ring Road and the metro; almost no original wall sections survive aboveground today. The Cultural Revolution (1966–76) targeted temples and traditional courtyard residences, and Tiananmen Square was rebuilt as a parade ground for socialist mass events. Reform-era Beijing has restored what survived, demolished much of the rest, and rebuilt around the Olympics. The city’s character today balances state monumentality (Tiananmen Square, the National Museum, the Great Hall of the People), surviving hutong quarters in Xicheng and Dongcheng, and high-rise sprawl out to the Sixth Ring.

See & do

Imperial Beijing

The Forbidden City (Palace Museum) covers 720,000 m² and 980 surviving buildings, the largest preserved palace complex on earth, and was home to 24 emperors of the Ming and Qing. Tickets must be booked online with passport details on the official Palace Museum platform, ideally 7+ days ahead. Allow 3–4 hours to walk south-to-north through the central axis and the inner courts.

The Temple of Heaven (Tiantan Park), south of the Forbidden City, is the round wooden Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests where Ming and Qing emperors performed annual rituals. The surrounding park is one of the city’s best places to watch retirees do morning tai chi, line dancing and group calligraphy.

The Summer Palace (Yiheyuan) and the ruined Old Summer Palace (Yuanmingyuan) sit together in the northwest. The Summer Palace is intact, with Kunming Lake, the Long Corridor, and Empress Dowager Cixi’s marble boat; the Old Summer Palace is a 350-hectare park of ruins, never rebuilt after the Anglo-French troops burned it in 1860.

The Great Wall

Five accessible sections cover most travellers’ needs. Mutianyu is the easiest, restored, with cable car and toboggan run, around 70 km northeast. Badaling is the most famous and most crowded, around 70 km northwest, with direct high-speed rail from the city. Jinshanling, around 130 km, is the best balance of partly-restored, partly-wild and quiet. Simatai is restored and open after dark with lighting. Jiankou is genuinely dangerous unrestored “wild wall” requiring scrambling.

Hutong and Beijing on foot

The historic alleys of Nanluoguxiang, Houhai (around the Shichahai lakes), Yandai Xiejie and the lanes around the Drum and Bell Towers are the best surviving parts of pre-1949 Beijing, with single-storey grey-brick courtyard houses (siheyuan), small temples and old businesses. They have been heavily commercialised in patches and emptied for redevelopment in others, but two or three full days of walking and pedalling rickshaws will turn up plenty that is genuine.

Religious sites

The Lama Temple (Yonghegong) in northeast Dongcheng is China’s most important Tibetan Buddhist temple outside Tibet itself, built in 1694 as Prince Yong’s residence and converted to a monastery in 1744. The Temple of Confucius next door is older. The Niujie Mosque in the southwest has been the centre of the Hui Muslim community since 996. The White Cloud Temple is the most active Daoist temple in the city.

Modern Beijing

The 2008 Olympic complex with the Bird’s Nest stadium and the Water Cube on the northern axis. The 798 Art District in Dashanzi, a 1950s East German factory turned contemporary art quarter. The CCTV Headquarters (Rem Koolhaas, completed 2012) in Guomao. The National Centre for the Performing Arts (Paul Andreu, 2007), the silver dome on the west side of Tiananmen Square.

Towns & cities

Beijing

Beijing is the city, and almost everything in this region article happens inside it or on a day trip out from it. The historic core sits inside the Second Ring Road, on the line of the demolished Ming city walls. The Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, the Temple of Heaven, the Drum and Bell Towers, the Lama Temple, and the hutong neighbourhoods of Houhai and Nanluoguxiang are all in here. Around them, ring roads stack outward to the Sixth, with the Sanlitun and Chaoyang business and embassy districts to the east, the university quarter (Haidian) and the Summer Palace to the northwest, and the airport in the far northeast.

The municipality is one of four in China governed at the same level as a province; it covers around 16,400 km², much of which is mountains, forest and reservoirs. The administratively useful way to think about it is one big city plus a hinterland of suburban counties (Yanqing, Huairou, Miyun, Pinggu, Mentougou) that hold the Great Wall sections, the Ming Tombs, and most of the weekend hiking. There is no second proper city.

Around Beijing

A few satellite places earn a separate trip. The Ming Tombs (Shisanling), 50 km north of the centre near Changping, hold the burial complexes of 13 of the 16 Ming emperors, with the Sacred Way of stone animal statues running south. Zhoukoudian, southwest of the city, is the Peking Man site where Homo erectus fossils were found in the 1920s, inscribed by UNESCO in 1987.

Chengde, technically in Hebei province but the standard summer escape from Beijing throughout the Qing dynasty, sits 230 km northeast and holds the Bishu Shanzhuang summer palace and outer temples, also UNESCO-listed. It is reachable by high-speed train in around 50 minutes from Beijing.

Food & drink

Beijing food sits inside the northern Chinese tradition: wheat over rice, salty over sweet, garlic and spring onions used liberally, and a heavy footprint of imperial cooking from four centuries as the Ming and Qing capital.

The headline dish is Peking duck (kao ya), roasted in ovens fired by jujube, peach or pear wood until the skin crackles and the meat stays moist. Sliced thin in front of the table, eaten in thin pancakes with cucumber, spring onion and sweet bean sauce. The two oldest names are Quanjude (founded 1864) and Bianyifang (Ming-era origins, current location 1950s). Newer kitchens like Da Dong have refined the technique. Roughly 200–500 yuan per duck depending on the establishment.

Lamb hotpot (shuan yangrou) is the winter staple, eaten in copper-pot communal restaurants where you shuffle thin lamb slices through boiling broth. Donglaishun in Wangfujing is the most famous version. Hot pot more broadly extends to Sichuan and Mongolian variations across the city.

Street and breakfast dishes include jianbing (savoury crepes with egg, scallion, hoisin and crispy crackers, made on griddle carts in the morning), luzhu (offal stew on the cheap end), douzhi (fermented mung bean drink, an acquired taste), and the noodle dishes: zhajiang noodles topped with fermented bean and minced pork, and the wheat-belt staples of hand-pulled and knife-shaved noodles brought in from Shanxi and Shaanxi.

The capital’s high-end and international scene is by now the most diverse in mainland China. Sichuan, Cantonese, Yunnanese, Xinjiang, Korean and Japanese restaurants are all over Sanlitun and Chaoyang, and the Michelin Guide Beijing has been awarded since 2020. Two restaurants worth flagging are TRB on the Forbidden City’s edge (Western fine dining in a former temple) and Jing Yaa Tang at the Opposite House (refined Chinese in Sanlitun). Cheap, regional, hole-in-the-wall is mostly inside the Second Ring or north of the Drum Tower.

Tap water is not drinkable. Tea (jasmine, oolong, pu’er) is universal at proper meals. Yanjing is the local industrial beer; for craft, Jing-A and Slow Boat both run brewpubs.

Nature

More than 60% of the Beijing municipality is mountains and forest, mostly in a horseshoe across the north and west: the Yan Shan range to the north, the Xishan (Western Hills) to the west, with peaks above 2,000 m on the Hebei border. This is also where most of the Great Wall sections sit, climbing along the ridge lines.

Fragrant Hills Park (Xiangshan) in the northwestern suburbs is the city’s nearest hill, popular for its red maples in late October and early November and reachable by metro Line 10 plus shuttle. Badachu (“Eight Great Sites”) nearby is a temple-and-park route up the Western Hills. Further out, the Ling Shan area on the Hebei border tops the municipality at 2,303 m and is the main weekend hiking destination for serious walkers.

For water, the Miyun Reservoir in the northeast is the city’s main drinking-water source and surrounded by quieter walking around the Black Dragon Pool gorge and Wuling Shan. Beihai Park and Houhai in the city centre are the everyday water; both are lakeside parks with rental rowboats, popular ice-skating rinks in winter, and surrounding hutong alleys.

Wildlife in the municipality is modest by Chinese standards (no pandas, no wild tigers, no big mammal megafauna) but the autumn migration brings Siberian cranes, raptors and waterbirds through Beijing’s wetlands. The Wild Duck Lake wetland in Yanqing district, north of the city, is the easy birding stop.

The 2022 Winter Olympics added permanent infrastructure in Yanqing (alpine, sliding) and Zhangjiakou (snowboarding, ski jumping); both are now functioning ski areas accessible from Beijing in 1–2 hours.

Climate

Beijing has a sharply continental climate: dry, sunny and brutally cold in winter, dry and dusty in spring, hot and stormy in summer, and clear and pleasant in autumn. January averages around -3°C with overnight lows sometimes touching -15°C; July averages 26°C and routinely passes 35°C in heatwaves.

The traveller-relevant points:

• Winter is dry, cold and bright, with little snow but very cold wind. Pack down jacket, hat and gloves; the Forbidden City and Wall are uncomfortable without them.
• Spring (March to mid-May) brings dust storms blowing in from Inner Mongolia and the Gobi, with occasional yellow-sky days. May is generally the best of the spring window.
• Summer (June to August) is hot, humid by Beijing standards (75–80%), and sees most of the year’s rain in afternoon thunderstorms. Late July and early August are the wettest two weeks.
• Autumn (mid-September to late October) is the city’s climatic prize: clear sunny days, 15–25°C, comfortable evenings, and the best air quality of the year. Book everything early.

Air pollution has improved sharply since the 2013 highs but bad-air days still happen in winter when coal heating ramps up. The AirVisual or AQICN apps work without a VPN; an N95 mask and an air purifier in your hotel room are reasonable insurance for stays longer than a week.

When to go

Mid-September to late October is the best window. Skies are clear, temperatures sit between 15 and 25°C, foliage at Fragrant Hills peaks in the last week of October and first week of November, and the worst summer crowds at the Wall and Forbidden City are gone. Avoid the 1–7 October National Day Golden Week, which is the single most-visited week of the year at every famous site in the country.

Late April through May is the second prize. Spring blossoms (cherry at Yuyuantan Park, magnolia at Tan Zhe Si) come through, the dust storms taper off after early April, and temperatures climb steadily. The 1–5 May Labour Day holiday packs the city; pad your dates around it.

Avoid Chinese New Year, which falls in late January or February depending on the lunar calendar. Trains and flights are jammed, hotel prices spike, and many small businesses outside the central tourist circuit close for a week or more. The Lantern Festival on the 15th day of the new year is the public exception worth being there for.

Summer (late June to August) is hot, sticky, smoggy in pulses, and hosts the heaviest domestic-tourist crowds. The Wall is uncomfortable in afternoon heat; mornings are bearable. Hotel prices on the upper end actually drop slightly in July as foreign business travel slows.

Winter (December to early March) rewards travellers willing to wear serious cold-weather kit. The Forbidden City covered in snow is the photograph; the Wall at Mutianyu in dawn frost is the experience; queues are at their shortest of the year. Beijing’s open-air ice-skating on Houhai usually runs January through mid-February. The 2022 Winter Olympics infrastructure means there are now functional ski resorts within 90 minutes of the city.

Getting there

Two main airports serve the municipality. Beijing Capital International (PEK), in the northeast, is connected to the city by the Airport Express line (around 25 minutes to Dongzhimen) and by long taxi rides through dense traffic. Beijing Daxing International (PKX), opened 2019 in the southern suburbs, was designed by Zaha Hadid and connects to the city via the Daxing Airport Express line (19 minutes to Caoqiao) and an extension of metro Line 4. Most international flights from Europe and North America still arrive at Capital, but Daxing is increasingly the alternative; check before booking transit.

By rail, Beijing is the northern hub of the Chinese high-speed network. The major terminals are Beijing South (Beijingnan), the high-speed terminus for Shanghai, Tianjin, Xi’an and Guangzhou; Beijing West (Beijingxi), serving Hong Kong, Lhasa, Wuhan and Chengdu high-speed services; Beijing North for Hebei and Inner Mongolia conventional rail; and Beijing Chaoyang, opened 2021, for routes to Harbin and Shenyang. Travel times: Tianjin 30 minutes, Xi’an 4h 30m, Shanghai 4h 18m on the fastest service, Hong Kong about 9 hours direct.

Long-distance buses operate but are largely obsolete for foreign travellers given the rail coverage; the exceptions are some Inner Mongolia and Hebei rural destinations.

For onward travel within China, almost every high-speed and conventional route either starts in Beijing or is one transfer away. The Trans-Mongolian and Trans-Manchurian trains to Moscow depart from Beijing Railway Station (with very thin frequency in current operations).

Getting around

The Beijing Subway is the default. Thirty lines and counting, around 909 km, signage and announcements bilingual, fares 3–10 yuan most journeys. Buy single tickets at vending machines (cash or QR), or ride with the Beijing Yikatong card (refundable deposit, top up at any station) or by linking your passport to Alipay’s metro mini-program. Lines 1, 2, 4, 5, 6 and 10 cover almost every central tourist need.

Taxis are metered, plentiful and cheap (start fare 13 yuan, plus 2.3 yuan/km). The reality of hailing one in central Beijing during rush hour or rain is rough; Didi is the dominant ride-hailing app, with English available. Print your destination in Chinese characters or have it ready on a phone screen for either taxis or Didi cars.

Bicycles make sense for the hutong circuits and the flat city centre. The two big share-bike systems (Meituan / Hellobike) work on QR codes through Alipay or WeChat. Designated bike lanes exist on most major roads, though navigating mixed scooter-bicycle-pedestrian traffic takes a session to get used to.

For the Wall and the suburban day trips, options are: official tour buses from Qianmen and Dongzhimen Hub (cheapest, slowest), private driver booked through hotel or Trip.com (most flexible, around 600–900 yuan for a full day), or the new Mutianyu shuttle from Dongzhimen direct (the simplest scheduled service for that section). High-speed rail to Badaling takes 30 minutes from Beijing North.

Walking inside the Second Ring Road covers most of imperial Beijing if you have the legs; the Forbidden City alone is around 3 km north-to-south end-to-end including walking around courts.