Beijing

史History & character

Beijing has been a national capital, in one form or another, for most of the past eight hundred years. The Liao made it a secondary capital in the 10th century. The Jin dynasty raised the city as Zhongdu. Kublai Khan rebuilt it as Dadu, the seat of the Yuan empire. The Ming relocated their capital here in 1421 and laid out the axial plan that still defines the central districts today — the Forbidden City on the north–south spine, the Temple of Heaven to the south, the Drum and Bell Towers to the north.

The Qing inherited that grid and expanded it. The 19th and 20th centuries layered on Western legation quarters, Soviet-era ministries, the wide processional axis through Tiananmen, and finally the 21st-century ring roads and the Olympic Park. The CBD towers around Guomao sit a brisk walk from hutong courtyards that predate the United States.

The character that emerges from this layering is bureaucratic, cultural, and stubbornly local. Beijing is where decisions are made and where elite cultural institutions have settled — universities, opera companies, museums, the major think tanks. It is also a city of strong neighbourhood identities: hutong life around the Drum Tower, university culture in Wudaokou, embassy quiet in Sanlitun's quieter corners, art studios in 798. The food is heavier and saltier than in the south, the people more direct, the winters genuinely cold.