Most visitors arrive in Beijing expecting one of two things: a polished imperial showpiece or a glass-and-steel megacity. You get both, sometimes within the same block. The interesting part of this city is not either era on its own — it is the seams where they meet, and the choices the place has made about which parts to keep, which to flatten, and which to renovate into something neither old nor new.
This is not a how-to-visit-Beijing guide. For that, the Beijing Travel Guide covers what to see, skip, and eat. This piece is about the contrast itself, and where you can stand in one spot and watch two centuries argue with each other.
The Forbidden City and the CCTV Tower: Two Skylines, Six Kilometers Apart
Stand on Jingshan Hill at sunset and the contrast does the work for you. To the south, the long axial spine of the Forbidden City — 72 hectares of gold-tile roofs, sealed off by red walls, finished in 1420. To the east, the loop of the CCTV Headquarters by Rem Koolhaas — finished in 2012, structurally improbable, locally nicknamed “the big pants.” The distance is about six kilometers and roughly six centuries.
What’s worth noticing is that these are not accidental neighbors. Both are political statements. The Forbidden City was the literal center of imperial cosmology. The CCTV building was meant to announce a different kind of capital: a state broadcaster that wanted to look like the future. You can read Beijing as a series of these statements stacked on top of each other.
Where to see the two skylines in one frame
Jingshan Park (10 yuan, open 6:30am to 9pm) is the obvious one — the central pavilion gives you the Forbidden City directly south and the CBD skyline to the east in the same panorama. Get there an hour before sunset; the south-facing slope fills up by then but the east terrace is usually quieter. In my experience, the morning light is actually better on the Forbidden City roofs, but you trade away the skyline silhouette.
For a less obvious vantage point, the rooftop bar at the NUO Hotel in Sanlitun looks straight across at the CCTV building, with the older grey-brick neighborhoods in the foreground. A drink runs about 90 yuan; it is one of the few rooftops where the contrast is the whole point of the view.
Hutongs vs Skyscrapers: How Much of Old Beijing Is Actually Left
The honest answer is: less than the postcards suggest, but more than the demolition headlines suggest. At the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, the city had something like 3,000 hutongs — narrow grey-brick alleys lined with siheyuan courtyard houses. By the 2000s, roughly half were gone, mostly cleared during the build-up to the 2008 Olympics. What remains has been protected, sometimes aggressively, since around 2017.
The biggest surviving hutong cluster is the area between Houhai Lake, the Bell and Drum Towers, and Nanluoguxiang. You can walk from Yandai Xiejie (an 800-year-old former pipe-makers street, now mostly cafes) up through Mao’er Hutong, where Soong Ching-ling’s residence sits at number 35. The neighborhood is real; many of the courtyards are still lived in. The shops are tourist-facing, but the residential layer is intact.
The neighborhoods worth your time, ranked
Wudaoying Hutong — Quieter than Nanluoguxiang, mostly cafes and small design shops, plus the Confucius Temple at the east end. The best concentration of small bookshops in central Beijing.
Fangjia Hutong — A long, fairly authentic stretch with a working artist complex (Fangjia 46) tucked halfway down. Almost no tour buses. This is where I send people who think Nanluoguxiang has been ruined.
Dongsi Hutongs (3–8 Tiao) — A grid of numbered alleys east of the Forbidden City, still mostly residential. Few signs in English. Walking through at dinner time you smell garlic and hear televisions; this is what hutong life is, minus the Instagram shop fronts.
Honestly, the more “preserved” a hutong looks, the less you are seeing the real thing. The lived-in alleys have laundry, parked scooters, exposed wiring, and someone yelling about cabbage prices. That is the texture worth coming for.
The skyscraper side: Guomao and beyond
The Central Business District (Guomao) is where Beijing made its choice about what a modern Chinese capital should look like — and the answer was, more or less, “very tall.” China Zun (Citic Tower) tops out at 528 meters and held the city’s tallest building title from 2018; the cluster around it includes CCTV, the World Trade Center towers, and a perimeter of supertall hotels.
If you want to see this side without paying for an observation deck, take Subway Line 1 to Guomao station and walk east on Jianguomenwai Avenue around 8pm on a weekday. The lobbies are open, the buildings are lit, and the contrast with the older grey-brick city to the west is sharp enough that you do not need any narration.
Tea Houses, Cocktail Bars, and the Third Beijing in Between
The real Beijing is neither of these — it is the third layer that has formed where the old and new touch. Renovated courtyards holding speakeasy cocktail bars. State-owned teahouses with WeChat ordering. Convenience stores wedged into Ming-dynasty alley fronts. This middle ground is the most interesting part of the city, and almost no one writes about it.
Traditional teahouses, used by actual locals
Skip Lao She Teahouse near Tiananmen — it is a tourist set-piece with mediocre tea and a fixed Peking opera show. The teahouses worth your time look like this: a wood storefront in a hutong, a few square tables, an old man pouring jasmine into a covered cup for 25 yuan, and four or five people playing Chinese chess in the back. Geng Mi Tang on Nanluoguxiang and the small teahouse inside Lao Beijing Quan’r Cha Yuan off Houhai both fit this profile. You pay for the tea; the seat is free for as long as you want it.
If you want to learn about tea rather than just drink it, the Maliandao Tea Market in Xicheng is the wholesale center for Chinese tea. The shops at the back of the second floor will let you taste-test a dozen varieties without obligation. Bring cash; many of the older sellers still prefer it.
The cocktail bar scene that grew up around the courtyards
Beijing’s cocktail scene matured fast after about 2015. The pattern: a high-end bar takes over a renovated siheyuan courtyard, keeps the wood beams and the grey brick, and serves drinks made with baijiu, oolong-infused gin, or smoked Sichuan peppercorn. The interior is half preservation, half theatre.
Janes + Hooch in Sanlitun is the long-running classic. Negotiator is in a courtyard off Wudaoying and runs an Asia-50-Best-list menu in a 17-seat room — book three days ahead. Hope & Sesame moved its Beijing outpost into a Liangmaqiao courtyard in 2023 and is currently the hardest reservation in town.
Expect to pay 90 to 130 yuan a drink. That is not cheap by Beijing standards, but it is roughly half what you would pay in Shanghai or Hong Kong for the same quality.
Three Walks That Cross the Old/New Border
The fastest way to see how Beijing’s two eras sit on top of each other is to walk between them rather than visit them as separate stops. Three routes that work well, all under two hours and well-connected to the subway.
Walk 1: Drum Tower to Sanlitun via the East 2nd Ring Road
Start at the Drum Tower (Gulou). Walk south through Nanluoguxiang, cut east at Mao’er Hutong, and follow Dongsi North Street until you cross the East 2nd Ring Road. On the other side you are in the diplomatic quarter — wide avenues, mid-rise buildings from the 1980s, embassy compounds. Keep going east and you hit Sanlitun, where the towers and luxury malls start. Total: about 5km. You will have crossed roughly 400 years of urban planning in 90 minutes.
Walk 2: Qianmen to Dashilan to the CBD via Subway Line 1
Qianmen Street is the over-restored historic shopping avenue south of Tiananmen — Disneyland-clean, with replica trolleys and global brands behind faux Ming facades. Walk one block west into Dashilan and the texture changes immediately: a 600-year-old commercial alley with original pharmacies, silk shops, and the Tongrentang traditional medicine flagship. Then take Line 1 east to Guomao for the modern CBD. The point of the walk is the abruptness of the transitions.
Walk 3: 798 Art District as the third Beijing
If the first two walks show you the old and new, 798 shows you what happens when the city decides to do something with the in-between. The complex was a 1950s East German-designed electronics factory; in the early 2000s artists started squatting in the empty Bauhaus-style halls. It is now a state-tolerated art district with galleries, cafes, and the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art. Take Subway Line 14 to Wangjing South and walk 15 minutes north, or DiDi from the city center for about 50 yuan.
798 is touristy. It is also genuinely interesting as a piece of urban history — Cold War industrial architecture preserved by art-world economics in a Communist Party capital. That is a stack of contradictions you would not get anywhere else.
What Beijing Decided to Keep and What It Decided to Lose
It is worth being honest about what disappeared. Most of the original city walls came down between 1958 and 1969 — Beijing once had a fortified ring around it, and only a few segments survive (the best preserved is along the southeast corner at the Ming City Wall Relics Park). Vast tracts of single-story grey-brick housing were cleared in the 1990s and 2000s. Some clearances were planned, some were opportunistic, and many displaced residents have not been compensated to current property values.
What got kept was largely chosen for political or aesthetic reasons: the imperial axis (Tiananmen, Forbidden City, Jingshan, the Drum and Bell Towers), the temples and lakes, and clusters of hutongs near tourist routes. What got lost was largely the unprotected fabric that connected them — the ordinary streets where most people actually lived.
That is the third thing worth carrying out of this city: a sense of how recent the modern Beijing is. The hutong you walk through is older than your country, probably. The 50-story tower next to it was built after you finished high school.
If you only do one old/new comparison, do this one
Walk from Yonghegong (Lama Temple) south along the small streets toward the Bell and Drum Towers, then continue south to the Forbidden City. Then take Subway Line 1 east to Guomao and walk through the CBD at night. Total time: an afternoon plus an evening. Total ticket cost: under 100 yuan if you skip the Forbidden City interior, around 160 if you go in.
That single sequence — temple, hutong, palace, subway, skyscraper — is the entire argument Beijing is making about itself.
A Quick Reframe: What I Got Wrong About Beijing the First Time
| What I assumed before going | What I figured out after a few trips |
|---|---|
| The old city is mostly gone — go for the modern stuff. | About half is gone, but the surviving hutongs are dense and lived-in if you walk away from Nanluoguxiang. |
| The CCTV building and the Forbidden City are unrelated tourist sights. | They are six kilometers apart on the same political axis and both reading them as statements is half the point of the city. |
| The “best” Beijing experiences are the imperial ones. | The hybrid spaces — courtyard cocktail bars, factory-art districts, hutong teahouses — are where the city is currently most alive. |
| You need a guide to make sense of it. | You need a subway map. The Line 1, 2, and 6 corridor covers 80 percent of what you came for. |
Practical Notes for Walking the Old/New Beijing Yourself
- Best months: Late September through early November and April through mid-May. The smoke-stack winter pollution is largely gone since 2017, but air quality is still better in autumn. Summer is humid; July averages 31C with frequent thunderstorms.
- Subway over taxi: Line 1, 2, and 6 reach almost every site mentioned above. Fares are 3 to 6 yuan. Buy a Yikatong transport card at any station — it works on buses too.
- Cash vs payment apps: The teahouses, hutong shops, and older bars sometimes still take cash. Most younger venues are WeChat Pay or Alipay only. Set up payment apps before you arrive; both work with foreign Visa or Mastercard since 2023.
- What to read before you go: Michael Meyer’s The Last Days of Old Beijing (2008) is the best book on the hutong clearances. It is 17 years old and still the right place to start.
- Length of stay for this angle: Three full days minimum if you want to actually walk the city rather than commute between sights. For a full trip-planning approach, see the China Itinerary Guide.
- Pair with the Great Wall: If you want to add the imperial-frontier layer, the Great Wall of China Guide explains which section gives you the contrast you actually want — restored vs unrestored, popular vs quiet.
- Best month to walk both sides of the city: Late September through early November. The wider seasonal logic is in the Best Time to Visit China piece.
One last thing: do not save the old/new contrast for the end of your trip. The city makes more sense once you have it as a framework. Walk Jingshan Hill on the first afternoon, see both skylines from one spot, and then everything else you visit slots into place.
Photos courtesy of Unsplash.
