Beijing & North China

The plain around Beijing has been inhabited for a very long time: the fossils of "Peking Man", found at Zhoukoudian in the 1920s, belong to Homo erectus. In the Zhou era this was the frontier state of Yan, while Shanxi was the heartland of Jin, whose name the province still uses. Shanxi's northern town of Datong, as Pingcheng, was the capital of the Northern Wei dynasty in the 5th century, when the Yungang Grottoes were cut.

Beijing's rise came with the northern conquest dynasties. The Khitan Liao and Jurchen Jin made it a capital, and Kublai Khan built Dadu — Marco Polo's Khanbaliq — as the seat of the Yuan. The Ming Yongle emperor moved the capital here from Nanjing in the early 15th century and built the Forbidden City and the Temple of Heaven, while the Great Wall along the northern hills was rebuilt in brick and stone. In 1644 the Ming general Wu Sangui opened the pass at Shanhaiguan to the Manchus, whose Qing dynasty ruled from Beijing and summered at Chengde.

The 19th century brought foreign armies: British and French troops burned the Old Summer Palace in 1860, Tianjin became a treaty port carved into foreign concessions, and the Boxer siege of the Beijing legations in 1900 ended in occupation. Mao proclaimed the People's Republic from Tiananmen in 1949. The Tangshan earthquake of 1976 killed several hundred thousand people in Hebei, and the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square were crushed by the army. Beijing hosted the Olympics in 2008 and the Winter Olympics in 2022, the latter shared with Zhangjiakou in Hebei.

Beijingers are known across China for their talkativeness, dry humour and pride in the capital, and their Mandarin — the base of the standard language — is marked by the curled "r" sound, erhua, that ends many words. Tianjin, only half an hour away, has its own brisk accent and is a centre of xiangsheng, the comic cross-talk performed by a pair of comedians, as well as Nirenzhang clay figurines and the Yangliuqing woodblock New Year prints.

Peking opera, with its painted faces, falsetto roles and acrobatic fights, took shape in Beijing in the late 18th and 19th centuries. The old city's social life grew up in the hutongs, lanes of single-storey courtyard houses, where neighbours still play chess on the pavement, keep caged songbirds and fly kites. Temple fairs at Ditan and elsewhere mark the Spring Festival.

Shanxi is proud of its merchant past. Its bankers ran China's remittance houses in the Qing era, and their fortified family compounds — the Qiao and Wang family courtyards among them — are a regional symbol, along with Jin opera and a devotion to vinegar that other Chinese joke about. Wutai Shan in Shanxi is one of Buddhism's four sacred mountains, with monasteries that draw both Chinese and Tibetan Buddhist pilgrims. Hebei is known for the acrobats of Wuqiao and the martial-arts tradition of Cangzhou.

Beijing has about 22 million people, spread across rings of expressways from the old walled core to the tower-block suburbs; Tianjin has around 14 million. Hebei, with about 75 million, has its capital at Shijiazhuang and industrial cities such as Tangshan and Baoding, while Shanxi is centred on Taiyuan and Datong.

The economies differ sharply. Beijing runs on government, state-owned company headquarters, universities such as Peking and Tsinghua, and the technology firms clustered in Zhongguancun. Tianjin is a port and manufacturing city. Hebei makes much of China's steel, and Shanxi mines a large share of its coal, which long made its cities some of the country's most polluted. The state is moving industry out of the capital and building the Xiong'an New Area in Hebei as an overflow city.

Days start early, with breakfast of soy milk, fried dough sticks or jianbing pancakes bought from a stall, a long commute by metro, and evenings of square dancing by middle-aged residents in parks and plazas. Beijing's hukou residence permits are hard to obtain, the cost of housing is high, and the demolition of old hutongs for redevelopment remains a sore point.

The north eats wheat rather than rice. Jiaozi dumplings are boiled for the New Year, and noodles are the everyday meal: Beijing's zhajiangmian comes topped with fried soybean paste and diced pork, and Shanxi is the noodle capital of China, with daoxiao mian, shaved straight from a block of dough with a knife into boiling water, and youmian kaolaolao, rolls of oat noodles steamed in a honeycomb pattern.

Beijing's great banquet dish is Peking roast duck, its lacquered skin carved at the table and wrapped in thin pancakes with spring onion and sweet bean sauce. Winter brings shuan yangrou, thin slices of mutton dipped in a copper hotpot of boiling water, and street snacks include tanghulu, candied hawthorn berries on a stick, and douzhi, a sour fermented mung-bean drink most outsiders find hard to love. Tianjin is known for Goubuli steamed buns, jianbing guozi pancakes and deep-fried mahua dough twists, and Hebei for the donkey-meat sandwich, lürou huoshao, of Baoding and Hejian.

Shanxi's aged vinegar, lao chencu, is poured over nearly everything in the province. The strong spirits are Beijing's erguotou, a cheap grain baijiu, and Shanxi's Fenjiu, a clear sorghum liquor from Xinghuacun with a history of well over a thousand years.

Beijing holds the imperial centre: the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square, the Temple of Heaven, the lakes and gardens of the Summer Palace, Beihai Park, the Lama Temple and the Ming Tombs to the north, along with the hutongs around Houhai and Nanluoguxiang and the galleries of the 798 Art District. The Great Wall runs through the hills beyond: restored and busy at Badaling and Mutianyu, steep at Simatai, crumbling at Jiankou, and continuing into Hebei at Jinshanling. At Shanhaiguan, on the Hebei coast, the wall ends at the sea.

Tianjin's former concessions keep streets of European villas and banks, including the Italian quarter and the Five Great Avenues, and the Haihe river is lined with bridges. Inland in Hebei, Chengde's Mountain Resort — a vast walled park of lakes and pavilions built for the Qing emperors — is surrounded by the Eight Outer Temples, one of them modelled on the Potala Palace in Lhasa. The Eastern and Western Qing Tombs and the Sui-dynasty Zhaozhou Bridge are also in the province.

Shanxi rewards a longer trip. Datong has the Yungang Grottoes, with more than 50,000 Buddhist statues carved in the 5th and 6th centuries, and the Hanging Temple is clamped to the cliffs near Mount Heng to the south-east. Wutai Shan's monastery valleys lie further south, and Pingyao, with its Ming city wall, old banking houses and courtyard inns, is an easy trip from Taiyuan, near the Qiao Family Compound.