Beijing: what to see, where to stay and how to get around

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Beijing is not a city that grew; it is a city that was set out. The Ming rebuilt it from 1403 along a single north-south line 7.8 kilometres long, and everything that mattered was placed on that line in order — the outer gate, the front gate, the ceremonial square, the palace, the hill behind it, the drum tower and the bell tower. The line is a cosmological statement: the emperor sat on it facing south, between heaven above and earth below, and the city was arranged around him in ranks. UNESCO listed the whole axis as a World Heritage site in July 2024, which took fourteen years of application. Three hours of walking, and the one practical thing that will ruin the day: the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square both require booking a timed slot online against your passport number — palace tickets open exactly seven days before the visit date at eight in the evening Beijing time and routinely sell out, and there is no ticket office and no same-day option.

A short history of Beijing

More than 3,000 years ago a city called Ji already stood here. In the 13th century the Mongol Kublai Khan built Khanbaliq here, the capital of the Yuan dynasty, which Marco Polo described. The Yongle Emperor of the Ming dynasty moved the capital here in 1421, after building the Forbidden City, the imperial palace, where 24 emperors lived until 1912. On 1 October 1949 Mao Zedong proclaimed the founding of the People's Republic of China in Tiananmen Square. In June 1989 the army crushed the student protest in the square by force. In 2008 the city hosted the Olympic Games.

The ten best sights in Beijing

1
The Forbidden City
1406–1420, 980 buildings. Tickets open exactly 7 days ahead at 20:00 Beijing time and there are no same-day tickets; 60 yuan in summer, 40 in winter. Verified 10/2026
2
The Meridian Gate
The only entrance; the emperor used the central arch and everyone else the side ones
3
Hall of Supreme Harmony
The largest wooden hall in China, and the only roof in the country with ten ridge beasts on it
4
Gate of Heavenly Peace
1420, rebuilt 1651; Mao declared the People’s Republic from the balcony on 1 October 1949
5
Tiananmen Square
Expanded to 440,000 square metres in 1958 by demolishing what stood here; book a slot with your passport
6
Monument to the People’s Heroes
1958, on the central axis; thirty-eight metres of Qingdao granite and eight relief panels
7
Great Hall of the People
Built in ten months in 1959; the main auditorium seats ten thousand and the parliament meets in it
8
National Museum of China
Free and enormous; the ancient China galleries downstairs are the reason and they need two hours
9
Qianmen — Zhengyangmen
The front gate of the Ming city; the gate tower and the archery tower survive and the wall between them does not
10
Jingshan Park
A hill made from the spoil of the palace moat; the pavilion on top is the view of the whole axis

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The central axis

Zhengyangmen — the front gate · The south gate of the inner city, and the only one of the nine Ming gates whose gate tower and archery tower both survive. The wall that joined them, and the whole forty-kilometre city wall, was pulled down between 1950 and 1969 — much of it to build the second ring road and the first subway line, which runs along where the southern wall stood. The gate is forty-two metres high and you can go up it; from the top you see the axis running north through the square.
Tiananmen Square · The square as you see it is from 1958: it was enlarged to 440,000 square metres for the tenth anniversary of the republic, which required demolishing the Qing ceremonial corridor and the gates that stood in the middle of it, and it was sized to hold half a million people. The Great Hall of the People on one side and the National Museum on the other were built in ten months each. The Mao Mausoleum, added in 1977, sits directly on the imperial axis south of the monument — a deliberate break with the geomancy of the whole plan. The square is also where the protests of April to June 1989 took place and where the army ended them; the subject cannot be discussed publicly in China and there is nothing here that marks it.
The Meridian Gate · The only way into the Forbidden City and the gate at which the emperor reviewed the army and announced the calendar each year. It has five arches: the central one was for the emperor alone, with two exceptions — the empress on her wedding day, and the top three candidates in the imperial examination, once, on their way out. Officials used the side arches and were ranked by which. The gate is U-shaped so that the courtyard inside it amplified sound.
The Hall of Supreme Harmony · The largest surviving wooden structure in China and the ceremonial centre of the empire — coronations, the emperor’s birthday, the new year. The detail that encodes everything: Chinese roofs carry a line of small figures along the ridge, and the number is strictly by rank. Most important buildings have seven or nine. This roof has ten, and it is the only building in China that does; the extra one was added specifically to put it above every other building in the empire.
Jingshan Park · The hill immediately north of the palace is artificial: it is the earth dug out of the palace moat in the fifteenth century, piled up to shield the palace from the north — which in Chinese geomancy is the direction malign influences come from. It is forty-five metres high and the pavilion at the top is the only place you can see the whole Forbidden City roof plan at once, and the axis running away in both directions. The last Ming emperor hanged himself on this hill in 1644 when the rebels took the city.
The Drum and Bell Towers · The northern end of the Ming axis and the city’s clock. Twenty-four drums in the Drum Tower and a sixty-three-tonne bronze bell in the Bell Tower behind it marked the watches of the night for the whole walled city; the bell could be heard twenty kilometres away and the gates were shut when it rang. The two towers stand a hundred metres apart and perfectly aligned, and standing between them with the palace behind you is the clearest way to feel that the axis is a single designed object.

The hutong

Everything outside the palace walls was laid out as a grid of lanes, and the lane is called a hutong — probably from a Mongolian word for a well, inherited from the Yuan city of the thirteenth century. Each lane was lined with siheyuan, courtyard houses that turn blank grey walls to the street and open inward onto a single courtyard, and the rank of the occupant was readable from the gate: the number of steps, the colour of the doors, the two stone blocks beside them. There were around three thousand hutong before 1949. A great many have gone — to roads, to blocks of flats, to the Olympic rebuilding — and the ones that remain north of the palace are now protected and expensive. Two and a half hours, mostly flat, and go at seven in the morning or after five.

Shijia Hutong Museum · Start here and the rest of the walk makes sense. It is a courtyard house in a surviving hutong, turned in 2013 into a free museum of the hutong itself — with models of how a siheyuan was divided, recordings of the street cries of the different trades, and the bare fact of what happened to the housing stock: after 1949 the courtyard houses were subdivided among multiple families, one room each, with shared water and no private toilet, and most of them stayed that way for fifty years.
Guozijian Street · The one street in Beijing that still has all four of its original ceremonial arches standing — everywhere else they were taken down for traffic. The street is named for the Imperial College at its eastern end, the highest educational institution in China from the Yuan dynasty until the examination system was abolished in 1905, and the Confucius temple next door holds 198 stone stelae carved with the names of 51,624 men who passed the top level of the examinations over six hundred years.
The Lama Temple · Built in 1694 as a prince’s palace, and when that prince became the Yongzheng emperor it could not revert to ordinary use, so in 1744 his successor turned it into a Tibetan Buddhist monastery — which was also a political instrument for managing Tibet and Mongolia from Beijing. The last hall holds a standing Maitreya twenty-six metres high, carved from a single trunk of white sandalwood that the seventh Dalai Lama sent from Nepal through Tibet, a journey of three years. It is still a working monastery with resident monks.
Wudaoying Hutong · Two hundred metres west of the Lama Temple and the useful comparison to Nanluoguxiang: the same thing — cafés and small shops in a hutong — but it happened later, more slowly and with less money, so the lane still has residents in it, bicycles in the gateways and a public toilet halfway along. Most of Beijing’s remaining hutong have no private plumbing, which is why there is a public toilet every hundred metres, and that single fact explains more about hutong life than any museum.
Houhai and Shichahai · Three connected lakes that are the surviving northern terminus of the Grand Canal — the thousand-mile waterway that brought grain from the Yangtze to the capital from the thirteenth century, and the reason Beijing could be a capital at all in a region that cannot feed itself. The lakes were the port. They are now bars on the western shore and old men playing cards and swimming on the eastern, and in January the ice is thick enough to skate on and the city does.
Prince Gong Mansion · The largest surviving princely mansion in Beijing, and a reminder of how the city was ranked: this is what a first-rank imperial prince was allowed, and it is a fraction of the palace. Prince Gong himself was the sixth son of the Daoguang emperor and the man who ran China’s dealings with the foreign powers after the 1860 defeat — he negotiated with the people who had just burned the Summer Palace. The mansion is often said to be the model for the garden in Dream of the Red Chamber, which is a nice story and is not established.

What was taken and what was kept

Two imperial parks sit side by side in the north-west of the city, eleven kilometres from the palace, and between them they hold the sharpest story in modern Chinese history. In October 1860, at the end of the Second Opium War, British and French troops looted and then burned the Old Summer Palace — a complex of hundreds of buildings and gardens that had taken a century to build — on the orders of Lord Elgin, in retaliation for the torture and killing of a captured negotiating party. The ruins were deliberately never restored. The Summer Palace next door was damaged in the same campaign and then rebuilt by the Empress Dowager Cixi in 1888, reportedly with money diverted from the navy, nine years before that navy was destroyed by Japan. Half a day. Take the subway; the two parks are enormous and you will walk ten kilometres inside them.

The Old Summer Palace · Yuanmingyuan, the Garden of Perfect Brightness, covered 350 hectares and was the emperors’ actual residence for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — larger and more loved than the Forbidden City, with a European quarter designed by Jesuits. On 18 October 1860 some 3,500 British troops set it on fire; the burning took three days. What is left is foundations, a few carved marble fragments of the European palaces, and a lake. The Chinese state has kept it as a ruin on purpose: it is a national memorial site and school groups are brought to it.
The Summer Palace · Three quarters of this park is water, and the water is man-made: Kunming Lake was dug out by hand in 1750, enlarging an existing pond, and Longevity Hill is the spoil heap. The whole thing is a landscape painting executed at full scale, with borrowed views and a copy of a Hangzhou causeway. It was rebuilt in 1888 for Cixi’s fiftieth birthday, and the funding is the part Chinese schoolchildren are taught: money allocated to modernising the navy went into the garden instead, and in 1894–95 the Chinese fleet was annihilated by Japan.
The Long Corridor · Seven hundred and twenty-eight metres of covered walkway along the lake shore, built in 1750 so that the emperor’s mother could walk by the water in any weather. Every crossbeam and panel is painted — around fourteen thousand separate paintings, of landscapes, flowers, birds and scenes from classical novels, no two the same. It is in the Guinness book as the longest painted corridor in the world. The paintings were repainted after 1949 and again in the 1980s; the older ones underneath are documented.
Peking University · Founded in 1898 as the Imperial University, in the dying years of the Qing, and the campus is itself a Qing garden — the former estate of a prince, with a lake and a pagoda. On 4 May 1919 students from here marched on Tiananmen in protest at the Versailles treaty handing German concessions in Shandong to Japan, and the May Fourth Movement that followed is treated as the beginning of modern Chinese intellectual politics. Both the Communist Party founders Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu taught here, and Mao worked in the library.
The Olympic Forest Park · Six hundred and eighty hectares, built for 2008, and the thing worth knowing is why it is where it is: the Olympic Green was deliberately laid out as a northward extension of the Ming central axis, five kilometres beyond the Bell Tower, with the Bird’s Nest and the Water Cube placed symmetrically either side of the line and a man-made hill at the top to close it. A fifteenth-century cosmological diagram was extended by a twenty-first-century state, on purpose and at enormous expense.
798 Art Zone · A complex of factories built between 1954 and 1957 by East German architects as Joint Factory 718, making military electronics — Bauhaus industrial design, with sawtooth north-facing roof lights for even daylight, which is exactly what makes a good gallery. Production wound down in the 1990s, artists took the cheap space from 2002, and the state eventually decided to keep it rather than demolish it. Walking through is free; the galleries vary from serious to souvenir.

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Getting to Beijing and getting around

Capital International Airport · Twenty-six kilometres north-east; Terminal 3 was the largest building in the world when it opened in 2008
Daxing International Airport · Forty-six kilometres south, opened 2019, built as a starfish so no gate is more than 600 metres from the centre
Beijing Railway Station · 1959, one of the ten great buildings put up for the tenth anniversary of the republic
Beijing South Railway Station · The bullet trains: Shanghai in four and a half hours at 350 km/h; bring your passport to board
Beijing West Railway Station · The sleepers west and south-west; Lhasa is forty hours from this platform
Xizhimen · One of the old city gates and now a three-line interchange; the subway opened in 1969 and is the world’s second longest
Deshengmen · The surviving Ming archery tower, and the bus to Badaling leaves from behind it

Cheap eats in Beijing

Beijing food is northern: wheat rather than rice, lamb and mutton from the steppe, heavy fermented sauces, and almost nothing fresh in the traditional repertoire because for eight months of the year there was nothing fresh to be had. It also carries two court cuisines on top of the street food — Manchu imperial and Shandong — which is why the duck exists. Two practical rules. Almost nothing is paid in cash: set up Alipay or WeChat Pay with a foreign card before you fly. And most Western apps and sites are blocked, so maps, messaging and search all need thinking about in advance.

Peking duck · Two different methods and the famous one is the newer; about twenty dollars for a whole bird
Zhajiangmian · Noodles under fermented soybean paste with pork and eight dishes of raw vegetables; three dollars
Lamb hotpot · A copper chimney pot of plain water, and thin lamb cooked in it for ten seconds; eight dollars a head
Jianbing · A crepe with egg, sauce, coriander and a crisp cracker, folded in a minute; a dollar, breakfast only
Chuan’r · Cumin lamb skewers over charcoal; cents each, and the smell is the smell of a Beijing summer evening
Beef pastries at Niujie · The Muslim quarter: halal butchers, sesame flatbread and the best beef pies in the city
Douzhi · A fermented mung bean drink that locals love and nobody else does; try it once, in a small glass
Luzhu · Offal and flatbread stewed together; two dollars, and it is a southern-hutong dish
Tanghulu · Hawthorn berries on a stick in hard sugar; winter only, and a dollar
Gui Jie at midnight · A kilometre and a half of restaurants open until four; crayfish in season and queues at one in the morning

Museums in Beijing

The state museums in Beijing are free and several are first-rate, and the booking system is the thing that catches people out: the National Museum, the Palace Museum and Tiananmen Square all require a timed slot reserved online days in advance against a passport number, and there is no walk-up option. Set this up before you arrive and the city is easy; turn up without it and you will stand outside the fence. The smaller museums — the Capital Museum, the hutong museum, the observatory — need nothing.

The Palace Museum · Tickets go on sale exactly seven days ahead at eight in the evening and sell out; there is no same-day option. Three hours minimum
National Museum of China · Free with a booked slot; the Ancient China galleries in the basement, and two hours is the minimum
Capital Museum · Free, no booking usually needed, and it is the museum of Beijing rather than of China
The Ancient Observatory · A platform on the Ming city wall with eight Qing bronze instruments on it; small, cheap and almost empty
Planning Exhibition Hall · A bronze floor relief of the entire Ming city; the clearest way to see the axis as one object
Shijia Hutong Museum · Free, small, in a real courtyard house, and the best explanation of hutong life anywhere
National Art Museum of China · Free, 1963, one of the ten great buildings; Chinese ink painting and the woodcut movement
798 Art Zone · Free to walk through; the galleries range from serious to souvenir and the buildings are the point

Holy places in Beijing

Beijing holds the state religion of the empire and the religions of everybody who lived under it, and the distinction matters: the Temple of Heaven was not a place of worship for the public at all — it was where one man performed one annual rite on behalf of the whole world, and ordinary people were cleared from the route. Around it are a Tibetan Buddhist monastery that was an instrument of Qing policy, a Taoist centre, a tenth-century mosque, the oldest temple in the city and a Jesuit cathedral. All of them closed in the Cultural Revolution and all reopened from 1979 onwards.

Temple of Heaven · Come at seven: the park is the city’s largest morning exercise ground before the halls open
Lama Temple · The 26-metre sandalwood Maitreya; busy with real worshippers and the incense is bought at the gate
Confucius Temple and the Imperial College · 198 stelae with 51,624 names on them; one ticket covers both and almost nobody is there
Niujie Mosque · Founded in 996 and the oldest in Beijing; Chinese architecture throughout, with Arabic inscriptions
White Cloud Temple · The centre of northern Taoism since the twelfth century; monks in blue, and a working temple
Fayuan Temple · 645 AD and the oldest surviving temple in the city; the Buddhist Academy is housed in it
St Joseph’s Church · Founded 1655 on land given to two Jesuits by the emperor; rebuilt four times after fire and the Boxers
Dongyue Temple · A Taoist temple of 1319 whose side halls model seventy-six departments of the underworld

Nature and day trips near Beijing

Beijing sits at the top of the North China Plain with mountains on three sides, and that geography explains the weather, the wall and the air: the mountains funnel dry continental air in winter and trap pollution against the city when the wind drops, and spring brings dust off the Gobi. Air quality has improved a great deal — fine particulate levels have fallen by more than half since 2013 — but winter is still the bad season. The green is almost all imperial: parks that were altars, hunting grounds or palace gardens, plus the hills to the west where the temples are.

The Great Wall at Jinshanling · A hundred and eleven kilometres out and partly unrestored; you can walk for hours and meet nobody
Mutianyu · Sixty kilometres out, fully restored, cable car up and a toboggan slide down; the sensible choice
Fragrant Hills · Twenty kilometres west; the smoke trees turn red for about two weeks in late October
Beihai Park · An imperial garden with an eleventh-century lake; the oldest surviving garden in the city
Tanzhe and Jietai Temples · Thirty kilometres west in the hills; Tanzhe was founded in the fourth century, before Beijing existed
Olympic Forest Park · 680 hectares built in 2008 to extend the Ming axis five kilometres further north

Things to do in Beijing with kids

Beijing with children is easy on logistics and hard on stamina: the subway is cheap, clean and reaches everything, but the imperial sites are enormous — the Forbidden City is a kilometre from gate to gate and there is no shortcut once you are in. Plan one big site a day and nothing else. Two practical points that will decide the trip: everything is booked and paid through apps, which need setting up before you fly, and most Western apps are blocked, so your maps and messaging will not work the way you expect.

The Great Wall at Mutianyu · A cable car up and a metal toboggan down; the toboggan is what a child will remember
Beijing Zoo and Aquarium · 1906, the oldest zoo in China; the pandas are indoors in summer and that is where to go
Water Cube · Half the 2008 aquatics centre is now a water park; indoors, warm and open all year
The Drum Tower · The drums are beaten on the hour; sixty-nine steep steps up and a short, loud, satisfying visit
Houhai in winter · The lake freezes hard in January and the city skates and pushes sledges on it
798 Art Zone · Big outdoor sculpture, old factory pipes and no entry fee; an easy two hours with teenagers

Nightlife in Beijing

Beijing’s night is not Shanghai’s: there is less money in it, more live music and more of it in courtyards and basements. Sanlitun is the obvious district and the most international; Gulou, around the Drum Tower, is where the city’s own music scene has been for twenty years, in small rooms with no sign on the door. The subway stops before eleven, which decides everything, and taxis after that need an app. And one thing that shapes any evening here: a great deal of it happens on the street in summer and almost none of it in January.

Sanlitun · The embassy-district bar quarter; Taikoo Li on one side and the older dive bars behind it
Gulou and the Drum Tower lanes · Where Beijing’s own live music scene lives; small rooms, no signs, and ask on the day
Houhai · The lakeside bar strip; loud, touristed and the lake at midnight is still worth the walk
Gui Jie · A kilometre and a half of restaurants that work until four in the morning; this is the real late night
Nanxincang · Fifteenth-century imperial granaries turned restaurants; the walls are a metre and a half thick
Liangma River · The embassy-district river walk, opened as a promenade; quiet, lit and free

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Frequently asked questions about Beijing

What is there to see in Beijing?

The top sights in Beijing are The Forbidden City, The Meridian Gate and Hall of Supreme Harmony. The full list on this page has 10 sights, each with a photo and a short note.

How many days do you need in Beijing?

Three to four days are enough to see the best of Beijing without rushing, including at least one walking tour.

Is there a free walking tour in Beijing?

Yes. sleepntrip has 3 free audio walks in Beijing, with no guide and no group: your phone tells the story at every stop. The first one: The central axis.

How do you get to Beijing and get around?

The main ways are Capital International Airport, Daxing International Airport and Beijing Railway Station. Full details are in the transport section on this page.

Where to stay in Beijing, and for how much?

sleepntrip shows only rooms in Beijing that meet nine conditions: a good location, high guest scores, cleanliness, and a price of up to $80 a night for two. Pick your dates and see what is free.

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