Beijing Travel Guide: What to See, Eat and Know | Palace Tours

Beijing has been the seat of Chinese power for the better part of eight centuries, and the city still wears that history openly. Spread across a broad plain in the north of the country, hemmed in by the Yan Mountains to the north and west, the capital was laid out on a strict north–south axis that runs for miles through the heart of the old city — from the Bell and Drum Towers, through the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square, down to the Temple of Heaven. Successive dynasties, the Yuan, the Ming and the Qing, each added to the plan rather than erasing it, which is why a walk through central Beijing can take you past a Mongol-era drum tower, a Ming imperial palace and a Qing summer retreat in the space of a single afternoon.

Modern Beijing is a city of more than twenty million people and six ring roads, but the pleasures for a visitor remain unhurried ones: grey-brick hutong lanes behind the Drum Tower, the willow-lined lakes of Houhai and Beihai, the pine-shaded courtyards of the Lama Temple. The Great Wall runs through the mountains roughly 50 to 80 kilometres north of the centre, close enough for a half-day excursion. For travellers on the Trans-Siberian route, Beijing is the great southern gateway — the point where a journey across Mongolia, the Gobi and Siberia to Moscow begins, and the last chance to spend a few days in one of the world’s most consequential cities before the train pulls out.

What to see in Beijing

• The Forbidden City — The imperial palace of the Ming and Qing dynasties, and the largest surviving complex of ancient wooden architecture on earth. Nearly a thousand buildings sit behind a moat and vermilion walls; allow at least half a day to walk the central axis from the Meridian Gate to the Imperial Garden.
• The Great Wall at Mutianyu and Badaling — The most accessible restored stretches of the Wall, climbing steeply along forested ridgelines north of the city. Mutianyu is generally the quieter of the two and has a cable car for those who would rather save their legs for the watchtowers.
• The Temple of Heaven — A Ming-era complex set in a vast park, where emperors performed the annual sacrifices for a good harvest. The circular Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests, built without a single nail, is one of the defining images of Chinese architecture.
• The Summer Palace — An imperial garden retreat on the shores of Kunming Lake, laced with covered walkways, moon-gate bridges, pavilions and the famous marble boat. It is at its best in the early morning, when local residents arrive to practise tai chi and sing opera.
• Tiananmen Square and the surrounding monuments — One of the largest public squares in the world, flanked by the Great Hall of the People and the National Museum of China, and the ceremonial threshold to the Forbidden City just to the north.
• The Lama Temple (Yonghegong) — A Tibetan Buddhist monastery converted from a Qing prince’s residence, thick with incense smoke and home to an eighteen-metre statue of the Maitreya Buddha carved from a single sandalwood trunk.
• The hutongs and the Drum and Bell Towers — The lattice of narrow grey-walled alleys around Nanluoguxiang and Houhai preserves the courtyard-house city that existed before the ring roads. Climbing the Drum Tower gives you the best rooftop view of what survives.
• The 798 Art District — A decommissioned Bauhaus-style electronics factory in the north-east now filled with galleries, studios and cafes; the counterweight to a week of imperial sightseeing.

What to eat in Beijing

Peking duck is the obvious starting point and deserves its reputation: the bird is air-dried, glazed and roasted until the skin lacquers, then carved at the table and wrapped in thin pancakes with scallion, cucumber and sweet fermented bean sauce. Beyond duck, the northern kitchen leans on wheat rather than rice — hand-pulled noodles, boiled and pan-fried jiaozi dumplings, and zhajiangmian, thick noodles under a dark sauce of minced pork fried with fermented soybean paste. Instant-boiled mutton hotpot, cooked at the table in a brass chimney pot, is the classic cold-weather meal and a legacy of Beijing’s Mongol and Manchu influences.

Street food and snacks are their own tradition. Look for jianbing, a savoury crepe folded around egg, crisp cracker and chilli sauce, sold from carts in the morning; skewers of grilled lamb dusted with cumin; and steamed buns filled with pork and cabbage. Sweets run to tanghulu, candied hawthorn berries on a stick, and the pale, chilled pea-flour cake called wandouhuang once served in the palace. To drink, jasmine and pu-erh teas are everywhere, and the local Yanjing beer is the standard accompaniment to a plate of skewers. The famously sour fermented douzhi is best treated as a dare rather than a recommendation.

Shopping & crafts

Beijing’s craft traditions are imperial ones: cloisonné enamelware, carved lacquer, jade, hand-painted inside-glass snuff bottles and silk. Liulichang, a restored street of antique and art shops west of Tiananmen, is the traditional place to look for calligraphy brushes, ink stones, seals and woodblock prints. Panjiayuan market on the south-east side is best early on a weekend morning for ceramics, curios and reproductions. Modern shopping runs from the department stores of Wangfujing to the boutiques of Sanlitun. Prices at tourist markets are negotiable as a matter of course; prices in fixed-price shops are not.

Best time to visit

September and October are the finest months — dry, clear and mild, with cool evenings and autumn colour in the parks and on the Wall. Late April through May is the other good window, warm and blossoming, though spring can bring dust from the north. Summer is hot, humid and prone to sudden downpours, while winter is cold and dry, with temperatures frequently below freezing; the compensation is thin crowds and the chance of snow on the Great Wall. Avoid the first week of October and the Chinese New Year period, when domestic travel peaks and sites are at their busiest.

Good to know

• Most visitors need a visa arranged in advance, and Trans-Siberian travellers typically need Chinese, Mongolian and Russian documentation. Start the paperwork early — requirements vary by nationality and change periodically.
• Beijing is enormous. The subway is clean, cheap, signposted in English and almost always faster than a taxi through the ring roads; buy a rechargeable transport card on arrival.
• Payment is overwhelmingly by mobile app, and many small vendors no longer handle cash comfortably. Carry some notes as a backstop and confirm in advance how your hotel handles card payments.
• Popular sites including the Forbidden City and the Mausoleum operate timed entry with advance booking and passport-based registration; your travel arrangements should cover this, but bring your passport to every major site.
• English is not widely spoken outside hotels and major attractions. Have your destination written in Chinese characters for taxi drivers, and expect to point and smile a good deal.