Beijing

• 1. Introduction

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  Beijing, once romanized as Peking, holds more than 22 million residents, making it the world's most populous national capital. It sits on the northern edge of the North China Plain, with mountains rising on three sides to shield the inland city. For most of the past eight centuries it has been the political center of China, and for much of the second millennium it was the largest city on earth. Yet its recorded history reaches back over three millennia, far past any throne. Hidden in caves near a village called Zhoukoudian, the bones of an ancient human waited 230,000 years to be found. How does a settlement that began as a frontier outpost become a place that hosts both the Summer and Winter Olympics? What does it mean for one city to carry imperial palaces and 528-meter skyscrapers at the same time? And why has Beijing answered to so many different names? The story runs from rammed earth walls to a city that spreads, in a local phrase, like a pancake.

• 2. A City Of Many Names

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  The name Beijing means 'Northern Capital', from the characters 北 for north and 京 for capital. It was applied in 1403 during the Ming dynasty to set the city apart from Nanjing, the 'Southern Capital'. Over the past 3,000 years, though, the place has answered to a long roll of other names. The first walled city here was Ji, capital of the state of Ji, sitting around the present Guang'anmen area in the south. The rebel commander An Lushan called it Yanjing, the 'Yan Capital', during the An-Shi Rebellion. The Khitan Liao dynasty treated it as Nanjing, a 'Southern Capital' among four secondary capitals. The Jurchen Jin made it Zhongdu, the 'Central Capital', in 1153. The English spelling Peking came from the Jesuit missionary Martino Martini, who used it in a popular atlas published in Amsterdam in 1655. The modern spelling Beijing follows the government's official romanization, adopted in the 1980s, of how the characters sound in Standard Mandarin. The old form has not vanished entirely. Beijing Capital International Airport still carries the IATA code PEK, and Peking University keeps the former spelling in its name.

• 3. Frontier To Forbidden City

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  After the First Emperor unified China in 221 BC, the settlement of Ji became the capital of Guangyang Commandery, a provincial seat on the empire's northern guard. Genghis Khan's army besieged the city in 1213 and razed it to the ground two years later. Two generations on, Kublai Khan ordered a new capital named Dadu, known to the Mongols as Khanbaliq, built northeast of the Zhongdu ruins. Construction ran from 1264 to 1293 and lifted a city on the northern fringe of China proper into a seat of power. In 1368 the rebel leader Zhu Yuanzhang captured Dadu and razed the Yuan palaces. The conquered city was renamed Beiping, meaning 'Northern Peace', and handed to his son Zhu Di, created 'Prince of Yan'. When Zhu Di won the throne, he raised his fief into a co-capital. The construction of the Forbidden City took from 1406 to 1420, and the same years gave the city the Temple of Heaven and Tian'anmen. On the 28th of October 1420, Beijing was officially designated the Ming capital, in the same year the Forbidden City was completed. By the 15th century, the city had essentially taken its current shape. The old Ming city wall served until 1965, when it was pulled down and the Beijing Subway was built on its foundations.

• 4. Empire And Indemnity

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  Beijing was declared the sole capital of the empire in 1644, after the Manchu army of Prince Dorgon arrived 40 days behind the peasant army that had ended the Ming dynasty. The Qing kept the Ming buildings and the general layout largely unchanged, added facilities for Manchu worship, and made signage bilingual or Chinese. During the Second Opium War, Anglo-French forces looted and burned the Old Summer Palace in 1860. The Convention of Peking that ended the war let Western powers establish permanent diplomatic presences in the city for the first time. From the 14th to the 15th of August 1900, the Battle of Peking was fought as part of the Boxer Rebellion. The attempt by the Boxers to drive out the foreign presence brought reoccupation by eight foreign powers, and the fighting destroyed the Hanlin Academy and the new Summer Palace. A peace agreement was signed by Li Hongzhang and Yikuang on the 7th of September 1901. The treaty required China to pay an indemnity of US$335 million, plus interest, over 39 years. The Empress Dowager Cixi returned to Beijing on the 7th of January 1902. She died in 1908, and the dynasty imploded in 1911.

• 5. Republic, War, And Revolution

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  The Xinhai Revolution of 1911 sought to replace Qing rule with a republic, and leaders like Sun Yat-sen first intended to return the capital to Nanjing. After the Qing general Yuan Shikai forced the last emperor's abdication, the revolutionaries accepted him as president, and he kept his capital at Beijing and declared himself emperor in 1915. His death within a year left China under the warlords. Following the Kuomintang's Northern Expedition, the capital formally moved to Nanjing in 1928, and the city's name returned to Beiping. On the 7th of July 1937, the 29th Army and the Japanese army exchanged fire at the Marco Polo Bridge near the Wanping Fortress. That Marco Polo Bridge Incident triggered the Second Sino-Japanese War, and Beijing fell to Japan on the 29th of July 1937. The People's Liberation Army seized the city peacefully on the 31st of January 1949 during the Pingjin Campaign. On the 1st of October that year, Mao Zedong announced the creation of the People's Republic of China from atop Tiananmen, and restored the name Beijing as the new capital. During the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, Red Guards systematically targeted temples, shrines and monuments. By its end, 4,922 of the 6,843 sites officially designated as historically significant had been destroyed or damaged, over 70 percent of the total.

• 6. Three Skylines

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  Tian'anmen, the Gate of Heavenly Peace, remains the trademark edifice of the People's Republic of China and anchors the first of the city's three architectural styles. Alongside it stand the Forbidden City, the Imperial Ancestral Temple and the Temple of Heaven, the traditional architecture of imperial China. Boxy structures built between the 1950s and the 1970s form a second layer, sometimes called the 'Sino-Sov' style and sometimes poorly constructed. Modern forms make the third, most visible around the Beijing CBD in the east, including the new CCTV Headquarters, the Beijing National Stadium and the National Center for the Performing Arts. The 798 Art Zone blends 1950s design with neofuturistic shapes, mixing the old with the new. Beijing's tallest building is the 528-meter China Zun. Since 2007 the city has twice won the CTBUH Skyscraper Award for best overall tall building, for the Linked Hybrid in 2009 and the CCTV Headquarters in 2013, an award given to only one building worldwide each year. Below the towers run the siheyuans, courtyards surrounded by buildings, linked by narrow alleys called hutongs. The hutongs run east to west so doorways face north and south for good Feng Shui, and some are so narrow only a few pedestrians can pass at once. Entire blocks of them are now being replaced by high-rises, and residents complain the traditional sense of community cannot be replaced.

• 7. The Air War

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  In 2013, heavy smog struck Beijing and most of northern China, impacting a total of 600 million people. That pollution shock turned air quality into a major economic and social concern. Much of the city's pollution drifts in from elsewhere; research in 2006 traced 35 to 60 percent of the ozone to sources outside the city, with Shandong Province and Tianjin a significant influence. Coal burning accounts for about 40 percent of the fine particulates known as PM2.5 in Beijing, and is the chief source of nitrogen and sulphur dioxide. In 2011 the city burned 26.3 million tons of coal, while neighboring Hebei Province burned over 300 million tons, more than all of Germany. In preparation for the 2008 Summer Olympics, nearly US$17 billion was spent to clean the city's air, with construction halted, factories closed, and motor traffic cut by half through odd and even license plate days. Beijing assembled 3,800 natural gas-powered buses, one of the largest fleets in the world. After the 'war on pollution' was declared in 2014, fine particulates fell 35 percent in 2017. By 2022 the annual average PM2.5 concentration dropped to 30 micrograms per cubic meter, the best since 2013. In 2024 the city had only two days of heavy pollution, the lowest on record, down 96.6 percent from 58 days in 2013.

• 8. Capital Of Knowledge And Wealth

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  Beijing has been ranked the city with the largest scientific research output by the Nature Index since the list began in 2016, and by the 2025 index it ranked third worldwide after China and the United States, above Germany. Its Zhongguancun area, China's silicon village in Haidian District, is a world-leading center of innovation and entrepreneurship. The city holds over 90 public colleges and universities, the largest urban public university system in Asia. Tsinghua University and Peking University rank 12th and 13th in the world by the 2025 Times Higher Education rankings, and both belong to the C9 League of elite Chinese universities. The Chinese Academy of Sciences, seated here, has been ranked the No. 1 research institute in the world by the Nature Index since 2014. Wealth concentrates here too. As of August 2022, Beijing held 54 Fortune Global 500 companies, more than the whole of Japan, and the city has been described as the 'billionaire capital of the world'. Its post-industrial economy runs on services, which generated 83.8 percent of output, while agriculture and mining made up just 0.26 percent. Among the treasures that draw visitors are eight UNESCO World Heritage Sites, from the Forbidden City to the Peking Man site at Zhoukoudian, where the bones of a gigantic hyena, Pachycrocuta brevirostris, were found beside one of the first specimens of Homo erectus.