Beijing

The Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, Jingshan and the Temple of Heaven are not scattered around Beijing; they sit on one north-south line that the Ming and Qing planners drew before the modern city existed, and reading that line is what turns a list of monuments into a single walkable day — the Imperial Beijing guide takes it gate by gate. What matters at city scale is where the line falls in the Beijing you will actually be standing in. It cuts straight through the centre, inside the second ring road, which is why the imperial sights cluster tightly enough to be done on foot while everything else in the city is a subway ride apart. Entry to the palace is capped daily and booked online, so it fixes the shape of whichever day you assign to it. Two things immediately beside the axis are easy to miss and cost nothing: Jingshan's hill, directly behind the palace's north gate, gives the golden-roof panorama that every photograph of Beijing is taken from, and Zhongshan Park alongside offers the quiet the palace itself never has.

The Wall is the one thing almost every Beijing itinerary makes room for, and the sections that matter to a visitor here all lie between roughly 70 and 130 kilometres out — close enough to leave after breakfast and be back for dinner, far enough that the day is genuinely a day. Which section to pick, and what each one is actually like to walk, is the whole subject of the Great Wall guide. The Beijing-side questions are logistical. Going with a driver or an organised trip costs more than the public bus and buys back two to three hours, which on a three-day city visit is the difference between the Wall being a day and the Wall being the day. Whichever section you choose, go early: the crowds build from mid-morning, and the light for photographs is better before them. Spring and autumn are the comfortable seasons, summer is hot and hazy, and a winter visit is cold, empty and — after snow — the most striking of the year.

Beijing's hutong neighbourhoods — the dense networks of narrow lanes lined with single-storey courtyard houses (siheyuan) — are the surviving fabric of a city that was otherwise rebuilt as a modern capital. The Shichahai lake district (Houhai, Qianhai, Xihai) preserves an interconnected area of hutongs around three connected lakes where bar terraces, teahouses, and small restaurants line the waterfront and rickshaw tours wind through residential lanes behind. Nanluoguxiang, a north-south hutong turned pedestrian shopping street, draws younger crowds to independent boutiques, rooftop cafes, and creative studios. Dashilar, the commercial hutong district south of Tiananmen, retains the atmosphere of old Beijing commerce — traditional medicine shops, silk stores, and Quanjude (the Peking duck institution, founded 1864) operate here. For a less touristic experience, explore the hutongs east of the Drum Tower or around Baitasi (White Pagoda Temple) where renovation projects have introduced architectural studios and design spaces into traditional courtyard structures without displacing residents.

Beijing's parks are not scenery, they are the city's living room, and going to one early is the most reliable way a visitor gets past the monument circuit into ordinary Beijing life. From around six in the morning the grounds of the Temple of Heaven fill with retired Beijingers who have been coming for decades — tai chi and sword forms under the cypresses, ballroom dancing on the paving, card schools, kite flyers working impossibly high lines, choirs, and men playing the erhu to whoever passes. It is free to enter the park itself, separate from the ticketed monuments inside it, and an hour there before the tour groups arrive is worth more than an extra sight. Beihai Park, a thousand-year-old imperial garden built around a lake with a white stupa on an island in the middle, runs on the same rhythm and adds rowing boats in summer and skating when the lake freezes hard. Both empty out by mid-morning and refill in the evening. Set an early alarm once and it changes the trip.

Where Chinese food as a whole is concerned, the China food guide is the place to start. What Beijing adds is a northern kitchen that surprises anyone arriving with southern expectations: wheat rather than rice, lamb rather than pork, and comparatively little chilli. Peking duck is the dish the city is built around — roasted in a hung oven until the skin turns to lacquer, carved at the table, and eaten wrapped in thin pancakes with scallion, cucumber and sweet bean sauce. It is a whole-bird order and a shared occasion, so it works badly for one and beautifully for four. The famous houses charge accordingly; the ordinary neighbourhood duck restaurant charges a fraction and is often barely worse. Around it sits the rest of the northern repertoire — jianbing, the savoury crepe folded at a street cart for breakfast; zhajiangmian, wheat noodles under a dark fermented-bean sauce; the lamb skewers and sesame flatbreads of the Muslim Hui quarter along Niujie; and a copper-pot hotpot of clear mutton broth and sesame dip that is nothing like the fiery Sichuan version. The showpiece snack streets are worth one walk for the spectacle rather than the eating.

The 798 Art District (Dashanzi), built in decommissioned military electronics factories from the 1950s (originally a joint Chinese-East German project), has evolved into one of Asia's premier contemporary art quarters. Galleries like UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Pace Gallery Beijing, and Long March Space occupy cavernous Bauhaus-influenced industrial halls. Street art, sculpture installations, and independent bookshops fill the lanes between. Free admission to most galleries; weekend crowds are heavy. Beyond 798, Beijing's cultural infrastructure includes the National Centre for the Performing Arts — a titanium-and-glass dome rising out of an artificial lake beside Tiananmen, known to everyone in the city as “the Egg” — the Capital Museum, and the expanding gallery scene in Caochangdi village nearby. The Olympic Park with the Bird's Nest stadium and Water Cube from the 2008 Games remains architecturally striking. For a dose of hypermodern Beijing, the CCTV Headquarters (Rem Koolhaas's gravity-defying loop tower) and the Wangjing SOHO complex by Zaha Hadid represent a city building at a scale and speed that exists nowhere else.

Beijing has two airports and they are nowhere near each other: Capital (PEK) to the north-east handles most international arrivals, and Daxing (PKX), a vast starfish of a terminal well to the south, takes a growing share. Check which one your connecting flight uses, because crossing between them is a serious journey rather than a transfer. Once in the city the subway does almost everything — line 1 runs east-west through Tiananmen, line 2 traces the old city walls as a ring, and between them they reach nearly every headline sight cheaply. How the trains, taxis and rail connections work across the country is covered in the China transport guide; what is specific to Beijing is the sheer scale. The city is laid out on ring roads, sights that look adjacent on a map can be forty minutes apart, and two major sights in one day plus a third across town is usually one too many. Air quality is seasonal: autumn is generally the clearest stretch of the year, the winter heating months are the haziest, and spring can carry dust in off the Gobi. Mandarin runs daily life and English thins out fast beyond hotels and ticket desks, so download an offline translation app before you arrive rather than after.