Five Days in Beijing: Start on the Axis, End on the Wall

Beijing punishes improvisation. It is not a city that rewards drifting, because it was never grown; it was drawn. In July 2024, at its session in New Delhi, the UNESCO World Heritage Committee inscribed the Beijing Central Axis on the World Heritage List, describing it as a building ensemble exhibiting the ideal order of the Chinese capital: fifteen components strung along one straight line that runs a little under eight kilometres, from the southern city gate to the Bell and Drum towers in the north. Almost everything a first-time visitor comes here to see sits on that line, or was deliberately placed off it.

That is the planning problem, and also its solution. Read the axis from south to north across your first three days, in the order the city was built to be entered. Then step off it, twice: west to the Summer Palace, north-east to the Great Wall. Do it the other way round and you will spend a morning on the Fifth Ring Road and then arrive at the Forbidden City with no idea what you are looking at.

How many days Beijing needs

Five. The Forbidden City alone absorbs three to four hours for its central halls and five to six if you add the side galleries. The Summer Palace is a separate half-to-full day a good fifteen kilometres north-west of the centre. The Great Wall is a full day out and back whichever section you choose. The hutongs, the Bell and Drum towers and the Temple of Heaven do not fit around those; they need daylight of their own.

At four days, something real gets cut, and it should be the Summer Palace rather than the Wall. At three, you are choosing between the palace and the Wall and seeing almost nothing of the living city in between, which is the part most people remember. At six or seven you can add the contemporary city out past the ring roads, which is genuinely worth a day if you have one.

Book the Forbidden City before you book anything else, because it constrains the whole trip. The Palace Museum sells its entire daily quota by real-name advance reservation and does not sell tickets at the gate on the day. Tickets for a given date typically go on sale seven days earlier, around eight in the evening Beijing time, and busy dates can clear within minutes. Reserve using the passport you will actually travel on, and carry that physical passport to the gate, because the document is scanned and a photograph of it will not pass.

Then note the other constraint: Monday is the day Beijing closes. The Palace Museum shuts on Mondays except on public holidays, and the ticketed monuments inside the Temple of Heaven and the halls inside the Summer Palace generally close then too, as does UCCA out in the 798 art district. If your trip contains a Monday, that is your Great Wall day. Deciding that one thing reorders everything below it.

Where to base yourself

Three areas work, and the choice is a real trade rather than a matter of taste. The lanes behind the Drum Tower, around Baochao and Fangjia hutongs, put you inside the northern end of the axis: you walk out of your door into grey-brick alleys and are at the Bell Tower in minutes. The Orchid, a small courtyard hotel of around ten rooms in those lanes, is the type specimen, and it is small enough to need booking well ahead. The Temple Hotel, a restored Qing-era temple complex in the streets between the Forbidden City's north-east corner and Jingshan Park, is the grander version of the same idea.

Dongcheng around Wangfujing is the unromantic but efficient choice, with international hotels, several subway lines and a fifteen-minute walk to the palace moat. Sanlitun, east of the centre, is where the bars and the newer restaurants are, and it costs you twenty minutes on the subway to everything historic. Hutong courtyard rooms are charming and often small, low-ceilinged and thinly insulated, which matters in a Beijing winter; ask what the heating is before you book a February night.

Getting in from either airport is straightforward. From Capital Airport, the Airport Express costs around CNY 25 and takes roughly twenty minutes to Sanyuanqiao, where you change to the subway. From Daxing, the Airport Express is about CNY 35 and runs non-stop to Caoqiao in something under twenty minutes, putting you on Line 10.

Day one: the southern axis, on foot

Start at the Temple of Heaven, at the southern end of the line, and start early. The park gates open around dawn in high season and roughly half an hour later in winter, while the ticketed monuments open later in the morning. Buy the through ticket rather than the grounds-only one. The first hour is the reason to come early: under the long covered walkway on the eastern side, several hundred people are playing cards, singing in choirs, working through tai chi forms and ballroom dancing on the flagstones, and it is the most unguarded hour you will spend in the city. Then walk the altar complex itself, south to north, as the emperor did: the Circular Mound Altar, the Imperial Vault of Heaven, and the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests on its three marble terraces. Two hours is enough.

Walk north from there towards Qianmen, the Front Gate, and turn west into the Dashilan lanes and Yangmeizhu Xiejie for lunch. This is the old commercial quarter of the outer city, now a mix of restored shopfronts, coffee bars and genuinely old pharmacies and silk shops, and it is far better walking than the pedestrianised main drag of Qianmen Street itself.

End the afternoon at the gate looking north up the axis towards Tiananmen Square. Entry to the square is free but controlled, and typically requires an advance reservation tied to your passport as well as a security check; the rule has changed more than once, so confirm the current procedure a few days before rather than turning up. Then eat duck early. Siji Minfu does not generally take reservations, and the branch on the western side near the palace moat has windows onto the Forbidden City wall; weekend waits of an hour or more are normal, and a duck plus a few dishes for two should land in the low hundreds of yuan. Dadong is the glossier, more expensive alternative, and Duck de Chine, in the 1949 courtyard complex in Sanlitun, is the one to keep for a special evening.

Day two: the Forbidden City, and the hill that explains it

There is one entrance, the Meridian Gate in the south, and the route through is one-way: you leave by the Shenwu Gate in the north or the Donghua Gate in the east, and you cannot re-enter. Peak-season admission runs around CNY 60 between April and October and about CNY 40 in the colder half of the year, with the Treasure Gallery and the Clock Gallery around CNY 10 each on top. Both galleries have to be added when you make the original booking, not bought at the door, which is the single most common mistake first-time visitors make.

Walk the central spine first, while you still have patience for crowds: the three great halls on their terrace, then the inner court. Then turn east for the Treasure Gallery, the Nine Dragons Screen and the small walled gardens, which are where the human scale of the place finally appears. The western wing is quieter and you can skip it without loss. What you should not try to do is see everything; three to four hours of the central axis and one wing is a good visit, and six hours of forced marching is not.

Exit north and cross the road into Jingshan Park, where the ticket is a token few yuan. Climb to the Wanchun Pavilion at the top of the artificial hill and look south. The whole diagram is suddenly legible from there: the yellow roofs in ranks, the line running dead straight through them, the Drum Tower behind you, the modern towers pushed out beyond the ring. Late afternoon light is best. Beihai Park, immediately west, is the obvious place to finish, with a boat on the lake if the weather allows.

Day three: the northern axis and the hutongs

Eat chaogan for breakfast at Yaoji, on the broad street running east from the Drum Tower; it opens around six in the morning, and the Michelin guide's Beijing selection has recommended it. Chaogan is a thick, garlicky stew of pig offal, and it tends to divide a table completely, with very little middle ground. Then climb the Drum Tower or the Bell Tower, both steep, one of them enough, with drum performances at intervals through the day.

The rest of the day is on foot or on a shared bike, which you unlock through Alipay for a few yuan an hour and which is the correct way to see hutongs. Head to the Shichahai lakes, then Yandai Xiejie, then east into the quieter lanes: Baochao, Fangjia and eventually Guozijian Street, with the Confucius Temple and the old Imperial College facing each other under a set of painted street arches that Beijing has almost nowhere else. Yonghegong, the Lama Temple, sits at the top of that street and holds an eighteen-metre Maitreya carved from a single sandalwood trunk. On the way, stop at Wenyu Nailao on Nanluoguxiang for Beijing-style set milk curd, sold by the bowl.

Two things to skip. The main length of Nanluoguxiang has become a souvenir and bubble-tea corridor; cross it rather than walk it, and use the side lanes either side. And decline the pedicab hutong tours that circle Shichahai, which charge a lot for a fifteen-minute loop you can walk better yourself.

Day four: west, off the line, to the Summer Palace

The Summer Palace is where the Qing court went to escape its own capital, and the trip out on Line 4 takes roughly forty minutes from the centre. Get off at Beigongmen for the north gate rather than Xiyuan for the east. Buy the through ticket, around CNY 60 in high season and about CNY 50 off-peak, rather than the grounds-only ticket, and enter from the north so you climb over Longevity Hill and come down onto Kunming Lake from above. Arriving at the east gate drops you straight into the crush at the Long Corridor with nothing revealed.

Allow four to five hours. The lake is large enough that walking its western causeway loses the crowds almost entirely, and the Seventeen-Arch Bridge, the Marble Boat and the canal of Suzhou Street on the far side of the hill are all on the way round. The inner halls close on Mondays, and the recorded best season here is autumn, when the hill turns and the light comes in low across the water. If you want a harder counterpoint, the ruins of the Old Summer Palace at Yuanmingyuan are one stop away, burned in 1860 and deliberately left as they fell.

Day five: the Wall, and which section

Mutianyu is the default and earns it: restored but steep, wooded, with watchtowers close enough together to give the wall a rhythm, a cable car up and a toboggan run down. Expect entry of around CNY 45, a compulsory shuttle of about CNY 15, a round-trip cable car near CNY 140 and the toboggan around CNY 100 one way. Peak-season hours run roughly from the middle of March to the middle of November, ticket sales stop about an hour before closing and ticket checks earlier still, so treat this as a morning departure rather than an afternoon idea.

By public transport, take the 916 Express from the Dongzhimen transport hub out to Huairou, then one of the local h-prefixed buses to the Mutianyu roundabout; budget two to two and a half hours each way and expect the whole journey to cost well under CNY 50. A car and driver for the day costs many times that and buys back three hours, which on a five-day trip is usually the right purchase.

If you would rather walk than sightsee, Jinshanling is the alternative: a ticket of around CNY 65, roughly two and a half hours out, and a long ridge that runs from restored wall into unrestored wall with very few people on it. A seasonal direct coach has run in the morning from near Wangjing West station with an afternoon return, but the tourist bus routes to Jinshanling have been cut and reinstated more than once, so confirm the service exists before you plan around it. Badaling is the closest section and absorbs most of the coach traffic; unless stairs are the problem, go elsewhere. And if the Wall deserves more than a day trip, the Brickyard Retreat, a converted glazed-tile factory in the village below Mutianyu, turns it into an evening and a sunrise.

If you have a sixth day

Give it to the Beijing that was built after the emperors. The 798 Art District, a Bauhaus-planned electronics factory complex from the 1950s in the north-east of the city, holds UCCA among several dozen galleries and opens Tuesday to Sunday, roughly mid-morning to early evening, closed Mondays. Further out in Tongzhou, the Beijing City Library, designed by Snohetta and opened at the end of 2023, sets 144 columns shaped like ginkgo trees over a reading hall that Guinness World Records has certified as the largest in any library; it also keeps Tuesday-to-Sunday hours. The Olympic Park, with the stadium and the aquatics centre, is a twenty-minute subway ride on the way back and best at dusk.

Getting around, and roughly what it costs

The subway does almost all of this. Most central journeys cost about CNY 4 or CNY 5, fares are charged by distance, and trains run from early morning until late evening depending on the line. Alipay linked to a foreign card generates a transit QR code you scan at the gate, which is the most reliable method for visitors; contactless foreign Visa and Mastercard now tap in directly at many stations, and a Beijing Pass card can be bought at staffed counters at both airports and the main railway stations. Taxis are inexpensive by international standards and slow in rush hour; Didi works inside Alipay without a separate app.

Cash and foreign cards are patchily accepted in small hutong restaurants, and the QR wallets are how the city actually pays for things, so set that up before you arrive rather than on the pavement. For two people staying in mid-range hotels, eating well without booking tasting menus and using the subway, a daily budget of roughly CNY 800 to CNY 1,200 excluding flights is a realistic planning figure.

One last piece of paperwork. Through 2026 China has been granting thirty-day visa-free entry to nationals of more than seventy countries, and visa-free transit of up to 240 hours to a further group of around fifty-five, with the lists amended repeatedly and some of the arrangements carrying end dates. Check your own passport against the National Immigration Administration's current notice before you book anything, because the policy has moved faster than most published guides.

Read the line first, and Beijing stops being an overwhelming sprawl of unrelated monuments. Everything you see in the first three days is one argument about where the centre of the world was, and the two days after that are what the court did when it wanted to leave it.