Overview
Beijing is China's capital and cultural heart — a city where the Forbidden City's 980 imperial buildings, the hutong alleyways of the old quarters, and the futuristic CCTV Tower share a skyline, and where several of the world's most visited Great Wall sections lie within day-trip reach.
Travel
Beijing is a city of two scales, and the trip goes better once you stop fighting the difference. There is the imperial city — a palace, a square, a temple and a hill strung along a single north-south line, built to be walked in order and still legible today. And there is the modern capital laid over it: eight-lane ring roads, a subway that runs for hundreds of kilometres, and distances that turn a casual afternoon plan into ninety minutes of travel. Between the two survives a third Beijing, the hutong lanes, where the city is suddenly one storey high and moves at walking pace. Most visitors give the city three or four days and spend one of them on the Great Wall, which is the right shape for a first trip. The thing worth planning around is not what to see but how far apart it all is.
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.
Frequently asked questions
Transport & airports
Tourism & destination guides
Diplomatic missions in Beijing
20 embassies based in this city, grouped by region.
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