Fragrant Hills (Xiangshan)

Forested hills in the northwest suburbs. Famous for the maple-and-smoke-tree autumn leaves; cable car to the summit.

Fragrant Hills — Xiangshan, the Incense Burner — is a 557-metre peak in the northwest Beijing suburbs, about 28 kilometres from the city centre, forming part of a chain of forested hills that runs from the Summer Palace northwest toward the Great Wall foothills. The site has been an imperial garden since the Jin dynasty; the Qing built it up into an extensive park with pavilions, gateways, and two substantial temple complexes. It was opened to the public in 1956.

The park's defining attraction is the autumn foliage. The hillsides are planted with a combination of Chinese smoke trees (Cotinus coggygria) and maples, which turn in sequence from orange-red through crimson across the late-October and early-November period. The specific week of peak colour shifts year to year depending on temperatures; when conditions are right, the slopes are a genuine natural spectacle. The catch is predictable: on weekends during the peak window, visitor numbers are very large and the park's paths and summit areas become crowded to the point of limiting enjoyment. A weekday visit is strongly preferable if the schedule allows.

Two things are worth seeing in addition to the foliage and the summit views. The Temple of the Azure Clouds (Biyun Si) in the park's eastern section is a substantial Buddhist complex with a well-preserved Hall of 500 Arhats and the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall, where the founder of the Republic of China's coffin lay between his death in 1925 and his reburial in Nanjing in 1929. The Xiangshan Temple complex in the upper park has a longer Buddhist history. The cable car to the summit operates year-round; the hiking route takes about 90 minutes each way.