Beijing
China's capital and imperial seat for eight centuries
Beijing is China's seat of power, a capital of more than twenty million laid out around the vast axis that runs from the Forbidden City through Tiananmen Square and out to the Olympic green. Where Shanghai trades and improvises, Beijing governs and remembers: this is the city of ministries, party headquarters, and grand imperial relics, a place where political weight is measured in courtyards and ceremonial avenues.
The city occupies a broad plain at the northern tip of the North China Plain, ringed on the north and west by mountains through which the Great Wall snakes along the ridgelines. Sitting at a modest elevation of around forty metres, Beijing endures bitterly cold, dry winters driven by Siberian air and hot, humid summers, with spring dust storms blowing in from the Gobi. Its growth has spread in great concentric ring roads across the formerly farmed plain.
Settlements have existed here for three millennia, but Beijing rose to true prominence when Kublai Khan made it the capital of his Yuan empire in the thirteenth century, and the Ming dynasty rebuilt it grandly in the fifteenth, laying out the Forbidden City. Apart from brief interruptions it has governed China ever since, surviving the fall of the Qing, civil war, and the founding of the People's Republic in 1949. Today it pairs UNESCO-listed monuments with the architectural showpieces of two Olympic Games and the headquarters of a global superpower.