Beijing

Beijing, Peking, and one city with two spellings

Older accounts say the city was "known as Peking for decades", which implies a name change that never happened. The Chinese name has not altered. Peking and Beijing are two romanisations of the same two characters: Peking from the older postal system, Beijing from Hanyu Pinyin, which was promulgated in China in 1958 and adopted as an international standard in 1979. That second date is when English-language publishers and news organisations largely switched. What changed was the spelling convention in English, not the name of the city.

On its age, the official formulation is narrower than the one in circulation. China's National Bureau of Statistics says the history of Beijing as a city "may be traced back to about 3,000 years ago" — about, not over. The same source records Peking Man at Zhoukoudian, some 48 kilometres to the south-west, at around 600,000 years ago, and the two should not be run together: one is human occupation of the region, the other is the city. Beijing was the second capital of the Liao in the early tenth century and the capital of the Jin, Yuan, Ming and Qing until 1911.

The city in figures

The municipality covers 16,410.54 square kilometres across 16 districts — and here older accounts are right, because 16,410 is the municipal government's own figure. The population is where they fail: 21.832 million at the end of 2024, down by 26,000 on the year. The "nearly 15 million" of older accounts corresponds roughly to the household-registered population rather than the resident population, which is probably where it came from.

The Forbidden City, and nine thousand rooms that are not rooms

Start with the name, because the official one is different and more interesting. The World Heritage property is the Imperial Palaces of the Ming and Qing Dynasties in Beijing and Shenyang, inscribed in 1987 under four criteria and extended in 2004 to add the Shenyang palace. So the Forbidden City is not inscribed under that name at all: it is half of a two-site serial property shared with a city seven hundred kilometres away.

Older accounts contradict themselves on the area, giving 250 acres in one place and 720,000 square metres or 178 acres in another. The second is right. UNESCO gives the inscribed core as 72 hectares, which is exactly 720,000 square metres and 177.9 acres. The buffer zone around it runs to 1,377 hectares. The wider Palace Museum site is a different and larger thing at about 112 hectares, which may be where the 250-acre figure came from; it is close to neither.

The famous room count is a unit problem rather than an exaggeration, and this is the correction most worth making. The Beijing municipal government states that the compound has about 9,000 bays of heritage structures, and defines a bay as "an internal space defined by eave columns". The Chinese unit is a structural module between columns, not a room in the English sense. Every "9,000 rooms" and "9,999 rooms" in travel writing descends from translating that unit as "room" — UNESCO's own text loosely says "nearly 10,000 rooms", so even the inscribing body repeats it.

It was built between 1406 and 1420 under the Ming emperor Zhu Di, and saw the enthronement of fourteen Ming and ten Qing emperors across 505 years. The imperial era ended in 1912. Three figures in older accounts — seventeen palaces, more than eight hundred buildings, ten-metre walls — could not be confirmed from any official source and are better left out than repeated. So is the claim that unauthorised entry carried a death sentence: that access was restricted to the emperor, his household and officials on business is well established, but a codified capital penalty is a much stronger claim and nothing official, academic or UNESCO supports it.

Getting in, the gates, and the Starbucks that left

The practical position has changed completely since 2009 and this is the part to read before travelling. Booking is compulsory. The Palace Museum sells no same-day tickets at all. Every visitor needs a real-name reservation, made in advance, and must bring the original of the identification used to book it — overseas visitors may use a passport for both. Each person may reserve one admission per date. Annual pass holders must still book at least a day ahead.

A daily visitor cap applies. An 80,000 limit was introduced on trial in 2015, and that is the figure still repeated almost everywhere; it was subsequently reduced, reported at 40,000. No official page states any cap, so the number should be treated as reported rather than certain — what is reliable is that a cap exists and tickets go.

On the gates, older accounts have it wrong in one direction and right in the other. Entry is through the Meridian Gate, on the south side, only. There are two exits: the Gate of Divine Prowess to the north and the East Prosperity Gate to the east. But the claim that the distance between the north and south walls is nearly a kilometre is correct.

Opening is daily except Mondays, those excepted on statutory holidays: half past eight to five from April to October, with last entry at ten past four, and half past eight to half past four from November to March, with last entry at twenty to four. Two official pages disagree by ten minutes on that last figure.

The collection is larger than older accounts suggest. They say "over a million artefacts", which is true and unhelpful: the figure is over 1.86 million pieces and sets across 25 categories, and the Palace Museum was founded in 1925.

As for the Starbucks, it is long gone, and it had gone before the accounts that mention it were written. It opened in 2000, at the invitation of palace managers who wanted revenue for maintenance, and had closed by July 2007. The usual telling is that public outcry evicted it. The reported mechanism was narrower: after sustained objection, the museum offered it continued trading under a different name, and the company declined, its Greater China vice-president saying it was not its custom anywhere to have outlets under any other name.

The Temple of Heaven

Inscribed in 1998 as the Temple of Heaven: an Imperial Sacrificial Altar in Beijing, under three criteria, covering 273 hectares. The "270 acres" of older accounts is that hectare figure with the unit changed — the second such slip in a single article, which is why every area figure in those accounts is worth distrusting.

The superlative needs quoting exactly rather than paraphrasing. UNESCO calls it the world's largest existing building complex for offering sacrifice to heaven, and the most complete existing imperial sacrificial complex in China. Those are precise claims about a category. Broadened to "the largest religious building in China", as older accounts have it, a true statement becomes a false one.

One sentence in those accounts should go entirely: that visitors can see the complex "thanks to the relaxing of religious repression". Nothing official or academic supports that as the explanation for public access. It became a public park in 1918.

The park opens from six in the morning to ten at night, last entry at nine. The charged buildings inside keep shorter hours and close on Mondays except statutory holidays. Booking one to seven days ahead is available and usual; same-day purchase at the gate is possible if capacity has not been reached.

The Summer Palace, in hectares

Inscribed in 1998 as the Summer Palace, an Imperial Garden in Beijing. It covers 290 hectares — about 716 acres — of which three quarters is water. Older accounts call it a 290-acre park, which is the same unit error again and understates it by a factor of two and a half.

Its history is a sequence of destructions. It was built between 1750 and 1764 under the Qianlong emperor, originally named Qingyiyuan; burned in 1860 during the Anglo-French invasion; rebuilt as Yiheyuan from 1888 by the Empress Dowager Cixi; damaged again by allied forces in 1900; and restored in 1903.

Gates open early — six in the morning in the peak season from April to October, half past six otherwise — while the charged buildings inside open later and close on Mondays out of season. Booking one to seven days ahead is through the park's own channel, and a passport is required on the day for anyone who booked with one.

Tiananmen Square

The square runs 880 metres north to south and 500 east to west, about 440,000 square metres on the Chinese government's own figure, which also gives its capacity as a million people. Older accounts say a million can fit "comfortably"; the figure is official, the adverb is not. It was laid out in 1651, enlarged to four times its original size and paved over in 1958, and was closed to ordinary people under the Ming and Qing — the Beiyang government opened it to the public in May 1914. The People's Republic was proclaimed here on 1 October 1949.

Around it stand the Monument to the People's Heroes of 1958, at the centre on the city's axis; the Great Hall of the People and the two national museum buildings, all completed in 1959 and the museums later merged into the National Museum of China; and Chairman Mao's Memorial Hall, opened in September 1977. The Tiananmen gate itself was first built in 1417.

It is not the largest public square in the world, as older accounts claim. Britannica calls it one of the largest, and no authoritative ranking of the world's squares exists to settle the question — so the sensible course is to give the area and leave the superlative alone.

The square is also the site of the protests of spring 1989 and their suppression. Student-led demonstrations grew from April, after the death of the reformist former party general secretary Hu Yaobang, and spread to Shanghai, Nanjing, Xi'an, Changsha and Chengdu; one gathering in May drew about a million people. Martial law was declared in Beijing in late May, and on the night of 3 to 4 June troops and tanks advanced on the square, firing on or crushing those who blocked their way. It was cleared by the following morning, and the military held the city by 5 June. The Chinese government's official count was 241 dead, including soldiers, and about 7,000 wounded; most other estimates are considerably higher. Chinese official and tourism material does not discuss the events, and public commemoration is banned.

Access is controlled more tightly than at most public spaces. Visits must be booked in advance — at least a day ahead for individuals and twelve hours for groups, under a notice issued in April 2023, with the same requirement covering the National Museum, the Palace Museum and the Mao Memorial Hall. Watching the flag-raising ceremony needs a separate time slot, bookable one to nine days ahead. Arrival must match the booking or entry is refused, and lighters are among the prohibited items. Those lead times have not been restated since 2023 and are worth confirming. Identification is checked, and British government advice is that printed copies of a passport are not accepted anywhere in China.

Yonghegong, which was not built by monks

Older accounts call it the Lama Temple and say it was built by Tibetan monks. The official name is Yonghegong, and it was built in 1694 as a residence — the future Yongzheng emperor lived there as a prince, with his son, the future Qianlong emperor. It became a lamasery in 1744, when the Qing changed its status and made it the national centre of Lama administration. It was built by Chinese emperors with an interest in Tibetan Buddhism, which is a different thing.

The statue is understated rather than overstated in those accounts. The Maitreya is 18 metres — about 59 feet, not the 54 they give — and the detail they get right is the best one: it is carved from a single piece of sandalwood.

The Big Bell, and Jingshan's borrowed date

The Big Bell Temple, formally Juesheng Temple, was built in 1733 — older accounts have that right, though the official tourism page muddles its own text by placing 1733 in the Ming dynasty, when it is Qing.

The bell is not the oldest. The Yongle bell was cast around 1420, roughly three centuries before the temple that houses it, and Chinese bronze bells run back to the Shang and Zhou — so "the world's oldest and largest" fails on the first half. It weighs about 46.5 tonnes; two official pages disagree on its height, giving 6.75 and 5.6 metres. The better superlative is one older accounts miss: the municipal government claims for it the world record for the number of inscriptions on a bell, over 230,000 characters in Chinese and Sanskrit. And the museum holds about 400 bells, not the thousands those accounts describe.

Jingshan Park has acquired a date that belongs somewhere else. The official account describes a small hill called Qingshan on the site in the Yuan dynasty, and the taller artificial mount — Wansui Mountain — raised in the Ming Yongle period from soil excavated from the palace moat. It gives no construction date at all, and certainly not the 1179 in circulation. The park covers about 23 hectares, its five summits standing some 43 metres high, and it sits directly north of the Forbidden City on the central axis — which is why the view south over the roofs is the reason to climb it.

The Great Wall from Beijing

The wall itself, its two official lengths and the myth about seeing it from space are dealt with on the China page. What belongs here is the section most Beijing visitors actually walk.

Mutianyu is more complicated than either older accounts or their critics allow. The official Beijing tourism body states that the first wall on the site was built in the mid-sixth century under the Northern Qi — so "a 6th-century section" is not invented. But the wall, towers and battlements a visitor walks on are Ming: begun under the general Xu Da, with the pass added in 1404, brought to their present form in Qi Jiguang's rebuild of 1569, and restored between 1982 and 1986 by the Beijing government as a tourist attraction rather than as a defence. The error in the old description is one of emphasis — it credits the foundations and ignores everything above them.

Access uses real-name booking through the site's own channel, with entry by scanning identification. A summer night-time opening runs from late June to the end of August, with the wall lit in the evening. Closures for extreme weather are announced in advance through the site's own notices.

Air, which older accounts ignore

A real consideration, entirely absent from the old descriptions, and the trend is the story. For 2025 the annual average PM2.5 reading was 27.0 micrograms per cubic metre — below 30 for the first time. There were 311 days of good or moderate air quality, 21 more than in 2024 and the highest share since monitoring began, and one heavily polluted day, the fewest on record. Measured against the PM2.5 standard alone, 348 days met it, against 144 fewer in 2013, and a run of 227 consecutive days from March to October stayed below the threshold, where the best stretch in 2013 was thirteen days.

Two percentages circulate from that announcement and they measure different things: about 85 per cent of days good or moderate across all pollutants, and about 95 per cent meeting the PM2.5 standard specifically. They are easily conflated. The honest reading is that this is a very large improvement on 2013 rather than a clean bill of health.

Getting around, and what is coming

The metro ran to 909 kilometres of operating length as of the municipal work report in January 2026, described as the most extensive urban rail system in China, with three new lines in 2025 adding thirty kilometres and more than forty kilometres targeted for 2026. No official line or station count is published.

There are two airports. Beijing Daxing International opened on 25 September 2019, forty-six kilometres south of the centre, intended ultimately for over a hundred million passengers a year; Beijing Capital International continues to operate. On rail, the Beijing to Shanghai high-speed line runs 1,318 kilometres with a fastest journey of four hours and eighteen minutes, on the operator's own figures.

Two things were due and have not been announced as finished. A Beijing to Xiong'an express rail link — 86 kilometres, eight stations, about half an hour from Xiong'an to Daxing airport — entered testing with opening expected in the second half of 2026. And the Palace Museum's northern branch at Shangzhuang in Haidian, about 102,000 square metres with twelve exhibition halls able to show twenty to thirty thousand items a year, roughly three times the main museum's current exhibition volume, was scheduled for completion in May 2026 with no opening date given. Both dates have passed without a published announcement.

Beyond those, nothing is announced between now and the end of 2028. The Palace Museum's centenary fell in 2025 and has passed.