Pingyao, Shanxi

Pingyao lies about 715 km from Beijing and 80 km from the provincial capital, Taiyuan. During the Qing Dynasty, Pingyao was a financial center of China. It is now renowned for its well-preserved ancient city wall. The city walls of Pingyao were constructed in the 3rd year of the Hongwu (1370). The walls have six [...]

Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal

The Grand Canal, or the Beijing–Hangzhou Canal, was a giant irrigation project of ancient China. With a history of over 1,400 years and a length of 1,794 kilometers it is one of the world’s oldest canals and is the longest man-made river in the world. The canal goes from Tongxian County, Beijing, in the north [...]

Olympic Stadium, Beijing

Sports stadiums have long followed the enduring design of one of the original wonders of the world, Rome’s Coliseum. National Stadium in Beijing is an attempt to rethink the classic sports-arena layout for more ecologically correct times. The Swiss architects wanted to provide natural ventilation for the 91.000 -seat structure- perhaps the largest “eco-friendly” sports [...]

Central Chinese Television CCTV, Beijing

The design of the new Central Chinese Television (CCTV) headquarters defies the popular conception of a skyscraper - and it broke Beijing’s building codes and required approval by a special review panel. Two leaning towers, each bent 90 degrees at the top and bottom to form a continuous loop. Designed by Rem Koolhaas and Ole [...]

Beijing International Airport, Beijing

The airport terminal will cover more than 1 million square meters, giving it a bigger footprint than the Pentagon. It’s designed to handle 43 million passengers a year initially and 55 million by 2015, figures that will probably push the new facility into the ranks of the top 10 busiest airports. The architects also kept [...]

National Swimming Center, Beijing

The “Water Cube”, being constructed for the 2008 Olympic Games, is made from panels of a lightweight form of Teflon that transforms the building into an energy-efficient greenhouse-like environment. Solar energy will also be used to heat the swimming pools, which are designed to reuse double-filtered, backwashed pool water that’s usually dumped as waste.

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798 Art District

Dashanzi Art District is located in the northeast of central Beijing. The heart of a growing art and culture community in Beijing, 798 Space is the center and the biggest space that provide cultural, artistic and commercial activities in the area. It was designed by the East German’s architects in the Bauhaus style in the [...]

LAN Club

The LAN Club is a breath-taking combination of fine design and architecture, a fusion of thinking and feeling throughout, creating a space to reflect and enhance personal moods and to arouse people’s emotions. LAN Club has crafted a restaurant that celebrates Chinese and western cuisine and pairs it masterfully with wines from around the world. [...]

Forbidden City

Lying at the center of Beijing, the Forbidden City, called Gu Gong in Chinese, was the imperial palace during the Ming and Qing dynasties. Now known as the Palace Museum, it is to the north of Tiananmen Square. Surrounded by a six meter deep moat and a ten meter high wall are 9,999 buildings. The [...]

Great Wall

The great Wall of Beijing is an intriguing place to visit or hike for the more adventurous. Most of the sections of Great Wall in Beijing are well-preserved and mainly the remains from the Ming Dynasty, an era of huge construction. The wall goes across the northern part of Beijing for over 600 kilometers with [...]

Congee

If you are sick in Beijing with a stomach problem, what does the doctor recommend you eat? Congee… This dish, which in some ways resembles porridge is actually made of rice, salt and various garnishes such as shredded pork, ginger chicken, preserved eggs! You will find people eating this dish while smoking cigarettes and speaking [...]

Fish balls

Pure genius. These balls are an awesome snack. They will give a hotdog or hamburger a run for their money any day. They are for sale everywhere. No one seems to ever know exactly what type of fish is in them. But nobody cares. 5RMB for four of these balls on a stick. Some of [...]

Shopping malls

Shopping malls are not just places for shopping in Beijing, although it is true that plenty of that goes on in malls too. Malls are somehow part of the community. As well as often housing cinemas, shopping malls also may have sporting facilities – a least two have ice rinks! There are of course restaurants [...]

The street vendors

In a place where space is certainly at a premium, these small business men and women are incredible. Tucked away in tiny nooks and crannies, in little structures, often smaller than the average garden shed, businesses are carrying on, selling goods, providing services. And then there are the mobile vendors – often not strictly legal [...]