About Beijing Tourism Guide

Beijing is a difficult city to plan a first trip to, and not for the reasons people expect. The sights are well signposted and the metro is excellent. What catches visitors out is the admin: which visa or visa-free transit scheme you actually qualify for, why your Visa card will not work at a noodle shop, which section of the Great Wall is worth the drive, and why the Forbidden City sold out three weeks before you looked. Beijing Tourism Guide exists to answer those questions properly, in one place, before you are standing in a queue trying to solve them on bad airport Wi-Fi.

What this site covers

There are 126 guides here, grouped into thirteen sections that map onto the decisions a trip to Beijing actually requires. Entry and paperwork sits in the visa and entry requirements section, including the transit visa-free schemes that let a lot of travellers skip a visa application entirely. Moving around the city is covered in getting around Beijing — the subway, taxis, DiDi, the airport transfers, and the things that go wrong at each. Then the substance: imperial landmarks and historical sites, the Great Wall sections near Beijing, the hutongs, temples, food, shopping, nightlife, where to stay, day trips and festivals and events.

The guides are long on purpose. A 300-word listicle telling you the Great Wall is “a must-see” costs you nothing and teaches you nothing. Knowing that Mutianyu has a toboggan run and a cable car and is roughly 90 minutes out, that Badaling is the one the tour buses go to, and that Jinshanling is where you go if you want the ridgeline mostly to yourself — that is the difference between a good day and a wasted one.

How the guides are put together

Every guide starts from primary sources wherever a primary source exists. Visa and entry information is checked against the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs consular service and the official China Online Visa Application portal rather than against other travel blogs, because entry rules are exactly the sort of thing that gets copied around the internet years after it has changed. Rail information comes from China Railway’s own booking platform. Opening hours, ticketing windows and reservation rules come from the venue’s own site or its WeChat account.

Where something is a judgement rather than a fact — whether a queue is worth it, whether a neighbourhood suits a first-time visitor, whether a restaurant deserves the detour — it is written as a judgement and the reasoning is shown, so you can disagree with it if your trip is different from the one we had in mind.

Why things get revisited

Beijing changes faster than most destinations, and the parts that change are the parts that matter operationally. Transit visa-free eligibility has been extended and rewritten repeatedly. Mobile payment went from unusable with a foreign card to workable through Alipay and WeChat Pay in the space of a couple of years. Museums that used to take walk-ups moved to passport-linked timed booking. Subway lines open. Because of that, guides are dated and revisited rather than written once and left, and the entry and payment guides are checked more often than the ones about the Ming tombs.

If you find something on this site that is out of date or simply wrong, the contact form has a “correction” option and it is the fastest way to get it fixed. Corrections from readers who have just been are the single most useful input this site receives.

Independence

Beijing Tourism Guide is an independently published site. It is not operated by, affiliated with, or endorsed by the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Culture and Tourism, the China National Tourism Administration, or any government body, tour operator or hotel group.

No hotel, restaurant, tour company or attraction has paid to appear on this site, and there is no arrangement under which any of them could. Recommendations are not sponsored and are not affiliate placements, and there are currently no affiliate links anywhere on the site. We are preparing to fund the site through advertising placed alongside the guides; that advertising is not running yet, and when it starts it will be sold and served independently of the editorial content, with no advertiser input into what is recommended and no advance sight of it. Any other change to how the site is funded will be disclosed on this page.

Get in touch

Corrections, questions about a specific guide, press enquiries and advertising enquiries all go through the contact page. Our privacy policy explains what happens to the information you send, and the terms of use set out what you can rely on this site for and what you should always check yourself.