Beijing travel guide

Top 10 sights in Beijing

Ranked by Wikipedia language editions — proven fame.

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   1© N509FZ · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Forbidden City

   The imperial palace of the Ming and Qing, nine hundred and eighty buildings on seventy-two hectares, occupied by twenty-four emperors and closed to ordinary Chinese for five centuries. Walking the central axis from the Meridian Gate to the north gate takes over two hours; entry is by advance booking with a passport.

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   2© N509FZ · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Tiananmen Square

   One of the largest city squares in the world, laid out in its present form in 1958, with the Monument to the People's Heroes at the centre and the Great Hall of the People on one side. The flag is raised at sunrise, and the events of June 1989 are not marked anywhere on it.

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   3© Shujianyang · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Temple of Heaven

   The complex where emperors sacrificed for the harvest, whose Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests is a circular wooden building under three blue-tiled roofs, built without a single nail. The park around it fills at dawn with people doing tai chi and singing.

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   4© xiquinhosilva · CC BY 2.0

   Summer Palace

   An imperial garden of nearly three square kilometres around Kunming Lake, rebuilt by Cixi with money diverted from the navy. The Long Corridor along the shore runs seven hundred and twenty-eight metres and carries some fourteen thousand painted scenes.

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   5© xiquinhosilva · CC BY 2.0

   National Museum of China

   One of the largest museums in the world by floor area, on the east side of Tiananmen Square, and free to enter. Its bronzes include the Houmuwu ding, the heaviest ancient bronze vessel ever found, and the modern history galleries are their own kind of document.

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   Zhongnanhai

   The walled compound west of the Forbidden City that holds the offices and residences of the Chinese leadership — the imperial lakeside gardens turned into a seat of government in 1949. It cannot be entered or photographed, and its name is used to mean the leadership itself.

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   7© xiquinhosilva · CC BY 2.0

   Mausoleum of Mao Zedong

   The hall on Tiananmen Square where Mao Zedong's embalmed body lies in a crystal coffin, built in 1977 within a year of his death and against his own stated wish to be cremated. Entry is free, bags are not allowed, and the queue moves without stopping.

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   8© 颐园新居 · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Old Summer Palace

   Complex of palaces and gardens near Beijing, built from 1707 for the Qing emperors. British and French troops looted and burned it in 1860, and only ruins remain.

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   9© User:Vmenkov · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Niujie Mosque

   The oldest mosque in Beijing, founded in 996 under the Liao, destroyed by the Mongols and rebuilt in the fifteenth century. It is built entirely in Chinese temple form — timber halls, courtyards, upturned eaves — with the Arabic inscriptions inside, and the tombs of two Persian imams in the yard.

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    10© N509FZ · CC BY-SA 4.0

    Jingshan Park

    An artificial hill north of the Forbidden City, raised from the earth dug out of the palace moat, with a pavilion on top. It gives the only proper view down onto the sea of golden roofs, and the last Ming emperor hanged himself on its slope in 1644.

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   The Palace Museum

   The museum that holds and studies the imperial collection inside the Forbidden City, whose galleries of painting, ceramics and clocks are separate from the walk through the halls. The other half of the collection is in Taipei, taken there in 1948.

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   2© Shakti · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Yonghe Temple

   The largest Tibetan Buddhist temple in Beijing, converted from a prince's palace in 1744 as part of Qing management of Tibet and Mongolia. Its rear hall holds a Maitreya eighteen metres high carved from a single sandalwood trunk, and it is a working temple with real crowds.

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   3© Yaoleilei · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Monument to the People's Heroes

   A granite obelisk of thirty-eight metres in the middle of Tiananmen Square, finished in 1958, faced with eight marble reliefs running from the burning of opium in 1839 to the crossing of the Yangtze in 1949. Wreaths were laid at its base in the spring of 1989.

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   4© Tyg728 · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Military Museum of the Chinese People's Revolution

   China's national military museum, built in 1959 as one of the ten great buildings for the tenth anniversary of the republic. Tanks, aircraft and captured American equipment from Korea fill the halls, and the account given is the official one.

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   5© FishOil (talk) · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Beihai Park

   Seventy hectares of imperial garden northwest of the Forbidden City, laid out from the twelfth century around a lake. The White Pagoda of 1651 stands on Jade Flower Island in the middle; Beijingers row on the water in summer and skate on it in winter.

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   6© User zh:User:用心阁 on zh.wikipedia · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Prince Gong's Mansion

   The best-preserved princely mansion in Beijing, built for Heshen, the Qianlong emperor's favourite and the most spectacular embezzler in Qing history, and later given to Prince Gong. Its garden holds a stele carved with the character for good fortune that visitors queue to photograph.

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   7© Eunice winG from Malaysia · CC BY 2.0

   Zhengyangmen

   The great gate that guarded the southern entrance to the Inner City, standing just south of Tiananmen Square on Beijing's central axis. Built in 1419 and rebuilt after the fire of 1900, its 42-metre tower is one of the few survivors of the demolished city wall.

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   8© Zheng Zhou · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Church of the Saviour

   The Catholic cathedral of Beijing, first built in 1703 on land the Kangxi emperor gave the Jesuits and rebuilt in 1888. Some three thousand Chinese Catholics and a handful of foreign troops held it through a two-month siege in the Boxer summer of 1900; its Gothic towers stand between two Chinese pavilions.

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   9© N509FZ · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Beijing Zoo

   Founded in 1906 in the last years of the Qing as an imperial experimental farm, and the oldest zoo in China. The panda house is what everyone comes for, and the animals are most active just after opening.

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    10© Gene Zhang · CC BY 2.0

    White Cloud Temple

    The principal Taoist temple of Beijing and one of the three ancestral halls of the Quanzhen school, founded in the eighth century and rebuilt many times. Its new year temple fair is the largest in the city, and the bronze donkey by the gate is rubbed for luck.

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