Beijing

The site was a frontier settlement of the Zhou-era state of Yan, and a garrison and trading town under later dynasties, guarding the passes between the North China Plain and the steppe. Its imperial career began with the northern conquest dynasties: the Khitan Liao made it a secondary capital, the Jurchen Jin a main one, and Kublai Khan laid out Dadu here as the seat of the Yuan, on a grid whose axis the modern city still follows.

The Ming Yongle emperor moved his capital north from Nanjing in the early 15th century and gave Beijing its enduring shape — the Forbidden City on the central axis, the Temple of Heaven to the south, a walled and gated grid around them, and the Great Wall rebuilt in brick along the ridges to the north. The Manchu Qing took the city in 1644 and kept the palace and the plan largely as they found them, adding garden palaces in the north-west.

The 19th and 20th centuries were harsh on it. British and French troops burned the Old Summer Palace in 1860; the siege of the foreign legations in 1900 ended in occupation; the last emperor abdicated in 1912. Mao Zedong proclaimed the People's Republic from the Tiananmen gate in 1949, and the new government demolished most of the city walls for ring roads and widened the square. Protests in the square in 1989 were suppressed by the army. Since the 1990s Beijing has grown outward through a series of ring roads, hosted the 2008 Summer Olympics and the 2022 Winter Olympics, and pushed industry and some government functions out into Hebei.

Beijing is the country's cultural as well as political capital, and it carries that with a certain self-assurance. Its Mandarin is the basis of the standard language, though locals speak it with the rolling erhua ending that outsiders imitate. Beijingers have a national reputation for talking a great deal, for dry humour and for opinions about everything, delivered to strangers without much preamble.

Peking opera took shape here in the late 18th and 19th centuries, with painted faces, falsetto singing and acrobatic combat, and is still performed in the city's theatres. Around it grew other old entertainments: storytelling, cross-talk comedy and acrobatics. Modern Beijing is equally a centre of cinema, contemporary art and rock music, with the Film Academy, the Central Academy of Fine Arts and the galleries of 798 producing much of what the rest of the country watches and argues about.

Everyday culture belongs to the hutongs and the parks. Retired residents gather early to practise taiji, sing opera arias, fly kites and walk caged songbirds, and in the evening squares across the city fill with amateur dance groups. Neighbours in a courtyard compound live close together, and life spills into the lane. Temple fairs at the Spring Festival, chess on the pavement and swimming in the lakes in all weather are part of the local self-image, as is a slightly weary awareness that the capital's rules, checks and crowds come with the address.

About 22 million people live in the municipality, which stretches far beyond the built-up area into farmland and mountains. The core districts of Dongcheng and Xicheng hold the old city; most residents live in blocks of flats between the third and sixth ring roads, and commutes of an hour or more each way are normal on a metro network that carries many millions of trips a day.

The economy runs on government, the headquarters of state-owned companies, banking, universities and the technology firms of Zhongguancun and the north-west. Industry has been steadily moved out to Hebei, along with some administrative offices, in an attempt to relieve the capital. Housing costs are among the highest in China, and the hukou residence permit that governs access to schools and services is famously hard to obtain, so a substantial part of the workforce lives in the city without it.

The day starts early, with soy milk, fried dough sticks or a jianbing pancake from a stall, and ends with parks full of walkers and dancers. Winter brings dry cold and, in some years, hazy air; summer brings heat and sudden downpours. The steady loss of old hutong neighbourhoods to redevelopment, the tidying-up of street-level shops, water scarcity and the pressure of school admissions are the subjects that recur in ordinary conversation.

Beijing's most famous dish is roast duck, developed in imperial kitchens and refined by restaurants in the 19th century: the bird is air-dried, glazed and roasted until the skin is crisp, then carved at the table and eaten in thin pancakes with spring onion, cucumber and sweet bean sauce. Two traditions compete — the open hung oven fired with fruitwood, and the older closed oven heated by burning straw.

The everyday food is wheat-based. Zhajiangmian, thick noodles under a salty fried soybean paste with pork and heaps of shredded vegetables, is the household dish; jiaozi dumplings are boiled at the new year and eaten all year; and steamed buns, sesame flatbreads and noodle soups fill the canteens. Winter belongs to shuan yangrou, paper-thin mutton swirled in a copper pot of plain boiling water and dipped in sesame sauce, an inheritance from the northern grasslands. The Hui Muslim quarter around Niujie adds lamb skewers, beef pies and sesame sweets.

Street snacks are a local test of nerve. Tanghulu, hawthorn berries glazed in hard sugar on a stick, are easy to like; luzhu huoshao, a stew of offal and flatbread, and douzhi, a sour fermented mung-bean drink often taken with a deep-fried ring of dough, divide even Beijingers. Sweet options include aiwowo and lüdagunr, glutinous rice cakes rolled in soybean flour. The cheap local spirit is erguotou, a sharp clear grain baijiu sold in small green bottles, drunk with skewers on a summer pavement.