Beijing
Beijing is a city where you can stand in a courtyard built in 1420 and watch the shadow of a 528-metre tower fall across the rooftiles. That tension — between an imperial capital that ran on ritual and cosmology, and a 21st-century metropolis that builds the world's tallest atriums — is not a contradiction here. It is the whole point.
The city rewards attention to the specific. The way the Drum Tower anchors a hutong neighbourhood that has been rearranging itself since the Yuan dynasty. The particular weight of silence inside the Temple of Heaven's circular hall. Thirty subway lines connect nearly all of it, and the scale, once you stop fighting it, starts to make sense.
💛 What travellers fall for
People who come back tend to stop planning around the major sites and start planning around the mornings. The Forbidden City before the tour groups arrive, the hutongs of Xicheng before the coffee shops open. Line 1 runs straight through the historical axis of the city — Tiananmen West to Guomao — and riding it end to end costs less than a bottle of water.
How Beijing came to be
The site has been a walled settlement since at least the early first millennium BC, when the state of Yan established its capital Ji near what is now the Guang'anmen area. Successive dynasties repositioned and renamed it — the Liao called it Nanjing, the Jin called it Zhongdu — but it was Kublai Khan who, from 1267, ordered an entirely new city built on the ruins of the Jin capital. He called it Dadu, and it became the heart of the Yuan empire.
The city as it largely stands today is a Ming creation. In 1403, the Yongle Emperor renamed Beiping as Beijing and moved the imperial capital north from Nanjing. Construction of the Forbidden City began in 1406 and was complete by 1420. Beijing served as imperial capital through the Ming and Qing dynasties until 1911, and on 1 October 1949 became the capital of the People's Republic of China.
Who and what shaped it
People who shaped it
Landmark buildings
See Beijing in motion
Plan your visit
On the map
When to go
Spring (April–May) and autumn (September–October) give you cool air and reasonable visibility. Summer is hot and humid with frequent downpours; winter temperatures regularly drop below freezing, but the dry air and low crowds have their own appeal.
Right now
Background & history adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) · specs from Wikidata (CC0) · weather from Open-Meteo · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · photos from Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash with per-image credit. No third-party reviews or social posts reproduced.