Few capitals in the world pack in as much power, history and scale as Beijing. For more than seven centuries it was the heart of the most populous empire on Earth, the city from which the emperors, the 'Sons of Heaven', ruled 'all under heaven'. Today it is still China's centre of gravity: the place where the Forbidden City and its golden roofs, the immense Tiananmen Square, the temples with their circular altars, the alleys of courtyard houses (the hutongs) and, a few hours away, the Great Wall climbing over the mountains all live side by side. Walking around Beijing means travelling through imperial China, revolutionary China and the 21st-century superpower, often on the same block.
But Beijing isn't just monuments: it's a vibrant, modern city that's surprisingly easy to get around. It has one of the best metro systems in the world, food that ranges from the legendary Peking duck to street food in the markets, contemporary art districts in old factories, century-old teahouses and a capital-city energy that never stops. It's also a city of contrasts: skyscrapers next to temples, silent electric cars next to tricycles, and a daily life that Western travellers find both fascinating and baffling.
This guide covers the essentials of Beijing with a practical, friendly eye: how to plan your visit to the Great Wall and the Forbidden City (which require booking ahead with your passport), what to see without wearing yourself out, how to get around by metro, how to pay with your phone, and what you need to know about VPNs and the language before you arrive. Beijing can feel overwhelming at first because of its size and the language barrier, but with a little preparation it delivers some of the most impressive days of any trip through Asia.
Although there were settlements in the area more than three thousand years ago (the city of Ji, and later Yanjing), Beijing rose to prominence when the Mongol Kublai Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, made it Dadu, capital of the Yuan dynasty, in the late 13th century; Marco Polo himself described it in awe. Under the Ming dynasty, the Yongle Emperor moved the capital there in the early 15th century and ordered the construction of the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven and much of the wall we know today. Under the Manchu-led Qing dynasty, Beijing reached its imperial peak with emperors such as Kangxi and Qianlong, and the great summer palaces were built. The 19th and early 20th centuries brought humiliation and decline: the Opium Wars, the sacking of the Old Summer Palace by Anglo-French troops in 1860 and the Boxer Rebellion. In 1912 the last emperor, the child Puyi, fell. On 1 October 1949, Mao Zedong proclaimed the People's Republic of China from the Tiananmen Gate, and Beijing became the capital once again. Since then the city has been completely transformed: walls and hutongs were torn down, avenues and skyscrapers went up, and with the 2008 Olympic Games Beijing presented itself to the world as the capital of a new global power. The full story, from Kublai Khan to today, is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The historic heart of the country, the cradle of civilisation on the banks of the Yellow River: the imperial capitals, the Great Wall, the Buddhist grottoes and the Ming walled city of Pingyao.
Read the history of Northern China →If you only have one day, take a guided tour on the first one: it sets up the rest of your trip and saves you a lot of walking. We look ours up on Civitatis: guided in Spanish and booked online with no fuss. They have over 20 activities in Pekin. And there are free tours here: you book without paying and tip the guide whatever you think at the end, so trying one costs you nothing. Three are below so you get the idea: tap any of them and they all open.
If you book from here we earn a commission and you pay no more. Prices and availability come from Civitatis.
No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before it became the capital of Asia's largest empire, the site where Beijing stands today was a strategic crossroads on the edge of the great North China Plain, where fertile land meets the mountains and the steppes of the nomadic peoples. The first important settlements go back more than three thousand years: during the Zhou dynasty there was the city of Ji, capital of the small kingdom of Yan, one of the states that fought over China before imperial unification in the 3rd century BC. That kingdom of Yan gave the city one of its poetic names, Yanjing, the 'capital of Yan'.
For more than a thousand years, the city was a second-tier military and trading post, important because of where it stood: it was the gateway between the agricultural Chinese world to the south and the nomadic world to the north, and the routes leading to Manchuria and Mongolia passed nearby. The mountain passes close by, the same ones the Great Wall would guard centuries later, made it a key defensive point against raids by the peoples of the steppe.
From the 10th century onwards, the city began to rise in rank as peoples from the north took control of the region. The Khitan of the Liao dynasty made it one of their secondary capitals, and later the Jurchen of the Jin dynasty turned it into Zhongdu, the 'central capital', giving it walls and palaces. This growing importance under dynasties of nomadic origin foreshadowed what was to come: Beijing was destined to be the capital from which the conquerors of the north would rule all of China.
The great leap in Beijing's history came with the Mongols. After the conquests of Genghis Khan, his grandson Kublai Khan completed the conquest of China and founded the Yuan dynasty (1271-1368), the first dynasty of foreign origin to rule all of China. Kublai chose the site of Beijing to build an entirely new capital, which he called Dadu (the 'great capital'; Khanbaliq, the 'city of the khan', to the Mongols). It was a momentous decision: for the first time, China's centre of power moved north, close to the steppes its new masters came from.
Dadu was a city planned according to Chinese cosmological principles, with a regular grid of streets aligned to the cardinal points, rammed-earth walls, wide avenues and an imperial palace surrounded by lakes. That orderly layout, with its north-south axis, is the skeleton on which the Beijing of the following centuries would grow; many of the streets and lakes of today's centre still follow that Mongol design. The city became the eastern end of an empire stretching across half of Asia, and the trade routes of the Silk Road passed through it.
It was in this period that, according to his famous account, the Venetian Marco Polo is said to have visited the court of Kublai Khan and been dazzled by the wealth and size of the city, which he described as greater than any European city. Whatever the doubts about his journey, his testimony reflects the prestige Dadu enjoyed in the medieval world. The Yuan dynasty, however, lasted less than a century: rebellions, famines and infighting weakened it, and in 1368 a Chinese popular uprising overthrew it and founded a new native dynasty, the Ming.
The Ming dynasty (1368-1644) at first set up its capital in Nanjing, in the south, but it was the third Ming emperor, Yongle, who gave Beijing back its role as the centre of the empire and the monumental shape it largely keeps today. Between 1406 and 1420, Yongle mobilised hundreds of thousands of workers to rebuild the city and raise its great monuments: the Forbidden City, the immense imperial palace with golden roofs where the emperors would live for the next five centuries; the Temple of Heaven, where the 'Son of Heaven' performed the rites for good harvests; and the walls that defined the layout of the capital. The name 'Beijing', the 'northern capital', took hold in this period as a counterpart to Nanjing, the 'southern capital'.
Ming Beijing was organised as a system of concentric cities and ritual axes: at the heart, the Forbidden City, off-limits to ordinary people; around it, the Imperial City; then the Inner or Tartar City and the Outer or Chinese City, each with its own walls and gates. Everything was arranged according to a strict cosmic and hierarchical order, with the great north-south axis running through the city from end to end and passing through the emperor's throne. It was one of the largest and most populous cities in the world.
The Ming were also the great builders of the Great Wall as we know it: the brick and stone sections with watchtowers that tourists visit today near Beijing (Badaling, Mutianyu, Jinshanling) date mostly from this dynasty, which strengthened the northern frontier to defend itself against the Mongols. Despite its splendour, the dynasty was gradually weakened by economic crises, peasant revolts and pressure from the Manchus in the northeast. In 1644, a rebel army took Beijing and the last Ming emperor hanged himself on Jingshan hill, just behind the Forbidden City; shortly afterwards, the Manchus entered the city and founded a new dynasty.
The Manchus, a people from northeastern China, founded the Qing dynasty (1644-1912), the last imperial dynasty, and kept Beijing as their capital. Under the Kangxi and Qianlong emperors, in the 17th and 18th centuries, the empire reached its greatest extent and enjoyed an era of cultural splendour and prosperity. The palaces were enlarged, the great imperial gardens were built on the outskirts, among them the Old Summer Palace (Yuanmingyuan) and the present Summer Palace (Yiheyuan), and Beijing filled with temples, lamaseries and noble residences. The Qing court, though Manchu, adopted Chinese culture and administration, and the city lived through one of its most brilliant periods.
The 19th century, by contrast, was one of decline and humiliation. China's defeat by the Western powers in the Opium Wars opened the country to foreign interference. In 1860, during the Second Opium War, British and French troops entered Beijing and looted and burned the Old Summer Palace, an act of cultural destruction whose ruins are still preserved as a reminder of that affront. Towards the end of the century, the powerful Empress Dowager Cixi ruled de facto for decades, resisting reform while the empire fell apart.
In 1900, the anti-Western and anti-Christian outbreak of the Boxer Rebellion led to the siege of the foreign legation quarter in Beijing; a coalition of eight powers took the city, looted it once again and imposed a crushing indemnity on China. The discredited dynasty could not survive much longer. The 1911 revolution ended more than two thousand years of empire: in 1912 the last emperor abdicated, a child named Puyi, who would go on living inside the Forbidden City for a while before being expelled. Imperial China had come to an end.
With the fall of the empire, Beijing became the capital of the new Republic of China, but the country entered a long period of chaos. In the city, the May Fourth Movement of 1919, a student protest in Tiananmen Square against the clauses of the Treaty of Versailles that handed Chinese territory to Japan, marked the birth of modern nationalism and mass politics in China; out of that intellectual ferment would come both the nationalism of the Kuomintang and Chinese communism. During the era of the 'warlords' who fought for power, the capital changed hands several times.
In 1928, the Kuomintang's nationalist government moved the capital to Nanjing and renamed the city Beiping ('northern peace'), stripping it of its status as capital. Soon afterwards came the tragedy of the Japanese invasion: in 1937, after an incident at the Marco Polo Bridge (Lugouqiao) on the outskirts of the city, open war broke out between China and Japan, and Beijing remained under Japanese occupation for eight years, until the end of the Second World War in 1945.
No sooner had the war against Japan ended than the civil war resumed between the Kuomintang nationalists and Mao Zedong's communists. In January 1949, communist troops entered the city peacefully; it surrendered without a fight, which preserved its heritage. The outcome was close: the Communist Party had won the war and was getting ready to refound the country, once again with Beijing as its capital.
On 1 October 1949, from the top of Tiananmen Gate, Mao Zedong proclaimed the founding of the People's Republic of China before a huge crowd. The city got back its name and its status as capital, and became the centre of a state that would radically transform the country. The early years brought huge urban changes: much of the historic walls and many hutongs were torn down to open wide avenues, and Tiananmen Square was enlarged into a vast space for mass rallies, flanked by monumental Soviet-style buildings such as the Great Hall of the People.
Beijing was the main stage for the great upheavals of the Maoist era: the Great Leap Forward and, above all, the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), which began with the mobilisation of the Red Guards in the capital and left a deep mark of cultural destruction and political violence. After Mao's death in 1976, Deng Xiaoping's economic opening reforms changed the country's course. In 1989, Tiananmen Square was once again the focus of world attention during the student protests for democratic reform, which ended in a harsh military crackdown in June of that year, an episode that is still censored within China and very present in international memory.
In the decades that followed, Beijing transformed at dizzying speed in step with China's economic boom: forests of skyscrapers, ring roads, a gigantic metro and spectacular architecture went up. The 2008 Olympic Games, with the Bird's Nest stadium, were the grand debut of the new China before the world, and in 2022 the city also hosted the Winter Games, becoming the first to stage both. Today Beijing is the capital of the world's second-largest power, a megacity of more than 21 million people where the Forbidden City and skyscrapers sit side by side, along with the political power of a state that aims to lead the 21st century and the weight of more than three thousand years of history.
