May 27, 2021
5 mins read

Guided travel in Beijing – Experiencing Living history

As one of the world’s greatest ancient capitals, Beijing is quite extraordinary, a compelling blend of ancient and up-to-the-minute modern. This spellbinding city is stacked with fascinating places to discover, the capital of China throughout six dynasties covering 800 years of history as well as a cultural hub where some of the world’s most exciting buildings, art, theatre, architecture and food are found, a place where three million tourists a year enjoy a warm Chinese welcome. Here are some of the remarkable attractions you won’t want to miss on your China Guided Travel adventures.

The Great Wall of China – The ultimate in landscape drama

The Great Wall of China is a huge fortification built across the northern borders of ancient China and Imperial China to keep out marauding hordes from Eurasia. The Wall is made up of several shorter walls built from the 7th century BCE onwards, added to over the centuries and ultimately joined together by the first ever Chinese Emperor, Qin Shi Huang. The wall-building carried on as successive dynasties built more stretches of wall to keep the borders secure.

Sadly you can’t see the Great Wall of China from space. That’s an old wives tale. But it’s still one of the most breathtaking examples of human ingenuity and engineering, a vast structure that marches confidently across the landscape. The best times to visit Beijing’s stretch of the Great Wall are spring and autumn when there are fewer crowds and the weather isn’t as steaming hot as it gets in high summer. The mountains are lovely and cool and refreshing, the vegetation is lush, and the wall looks amazing against its natural setting.

If you’re there to hike the wall, September to November are your best bet thanks to the clear weather revealing the structure winding its way across the land through autumnal oranges, yellows and golds. Summer is the peak season, crowded and vibrant, and while winter can get very cold the wonderfully eerie emptiness of the place, when the tourists have mostly gone home, showcases the drama perfectly.

The Forbidden city – Almost 1000 buildings and more than 8000 rooms

The Forbidden City palace, bang in the centre of Beijing, is the world’s biggest imperial palace, a vast place you could spend days exploring. It contains 980 buildings and over 8,700 rooms, many packed with ancient relics. The main halls, priceless collections and bizarre legends are all worth your attention to get a feel for this crazy place. The six central halls are the most popular with visitors, with the imperial garden at the end, but there are some halls, less popular with tourists, that provide a deeper understanding of this remarkable place.

Try the Emperor’s bedroom and office for a start, an eye-opener of a place called the Hall of Mental Cultivation or Yangxin Dian. Cining Gong, the Palace of Compassion and Tranquility, was home to the Emperor’s wives. And the curiously-named Hall of Literary Profundity or Wenyuan Ge, with its beautiful green roof, was once the royal library. Visit the Palace of Prolonging Happiness or Yanxi Gong, also called the Crystal Palace, to see Western architectural influences. It was never completed, left partly built, and it’s even more fascinating as a result.

The Palace is home to over a million artworks of various kinds, and you can visit a number of exhibitions designed to reveal the Emperors’ extravagance and riches. The ceramics, paintings, calligraphy and bronzes tell a story of wealth beyond our wildest dreams, with the Clocks Gallery in the Hall of Ancestral Offerings one of the best-loved. The Treasures Gallery in the Palace of Tranquil Longevity is extraordinary, as is the work exhibited in The Paintings and Calligraphy Gallery in the Hall of Military Eminence.

For dazzlingly good Porcelain and Ceramics head for the Hall of Literary Glory, and for bronzes find the Bronzeware Gallery in the Palace of Celestial Favour. Once you’ve explored all that there’s a marvellous view across the Crimson Palace complex, a bird’s-eye view of the palace from Jingshan Park where fengshui principles rule. If you’re looking for Instagrammable views, it has to be one of the best in town.

The Temple of Heaven – Rich in ancient symbolism

The Temple of Heaven, south of the Forbidden City, is the city’s biggest imperial building complex, famed the world over for its symbolism, eccentric structure and extraordinary decor. This is a triumph in Chinese ritual building, the place where the old Ming and Qing Emperors worshipped and prayed from the 1400s to the 1900s. In a complex about the same size as New York’s Central Park, the main buildings are constructed in a series of squares and circles, the squares symbolising the earth and the circles the heavens.

Chinese emperors call themselves the Sons of Heaven, convinced that they’d been chosen by heaven to rule the earth. Sacrificial offerings were a big deal, combining ideas from the various dynasties with the principles of Confucious theory. First built in 1420, the Temple re-established Beijing as the capital of China. In 1530 the Ming Dynasty’s Jiajing Emperor felt heaven and earth should be worshipped separately, creating a circular altar to worship heaven and a square altar for worshipping the earth. The name ‘Temple of Heaven’ finally arrived in 1534.

As time passed the Temple was renovated and extended, and in 1900 it became a temporary command post from which foreign allies fought to suppress the Boxer Rebellion. Afterwards it was neglected until 1918, when the complex was turned into a public park.

One of the most dramatic elements is the circular Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests, built in 1420 and one of the world’s biggest medieval wooden buildings. It’s huge at 38m high and 36m wide, and it was built without a single nail. The Imperial Vault of Heaven and Circular Mound Altar are also amazing.

The Beijing summer palace – A beautiful retreat with a varied history

The Summer Palace, Yiheyuan, is the best-preserved imperial garden in the world as well as the biggest of its kind in the whole of China. Just 10 miles from the city centre, it’s like being on another planet. Give yourself at least half a day to explore it, and maybe save time to visit the beautiful Old Summer palace imperial garden, listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage site in 1998 as a masterpiece in Chinese landscape gardening. Expect a harmonious place where plants, winding paths, water and land, architecture and horticulture come together to create a design epitomising Chinese gardening philosophy.

The palace was a summer retreat for the Chinese royal family, where they’d stay instead of enduring the heat of the walled Forbidden City. Extravagance and excess were the name of the game here right from the start, in 1750, when it began life to celebrate the Emperor’s mum’s 60th birthday. Completed in 1764, it was originally called Qingyiyuan, the Clear Ripples Garden. By the time the late Qing Dynasty was underway the garden fell into disrepair, burned down in 1860 by British and French allied forces then not rebuilt until 1884. Apparently the cost was so high it almost bankrupted the army, contributing to the Qing government’s defeat in the 1895 Sino-Japanese War. In 1900 the gardens were destroyed all over again, only to be recreated once more in 1902.

So that’s just four of the countless astonishing places to see in Beiijing alone, a city where you could easily spend weeks exploring but never really scratch the surface. If you’re holidaying in China you’ll love this city and its many fantastic attractions.

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