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PASSAGE: Beijing

China · 10 stories · Two to three days

From flour on your hands in a hutong kitchen to Picun on the city's eastern edge — a route about who builds Beijing, who gets to stay in it, and what the old city looks like from the inside.

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Stories along the way

  1. 1. Flour on Your HandsThis is the rare moment on any trip where you stop being a passer-by. Flour on your hands, steam coming off the basket, someone patiently showing you how much filling is too much…
  2. 2. Willows and SwimmersWillow branches come down to the water here, and old Beijingers swim and fish off the banks in almost any weather. This is the city's lake district — a soft, green counterpoint to…
  3. 3. A Generation at RestGet here at opening, before the tour groups, and the Temple of Heaven belongs to Beijing's retirees. Choirs fill the long corridors, ballroom couples turn slowly on the paving,…
  4. 4. Everything Arrives From SomewherePanjiayuan at the weekend is acres of stalls: Mao-era badges and enamel mugs, jade of every possible honesty, furniture, coins, and porcelain with a story attached. Most of the…
  5. 5. Golden Hour on Grey BrickThese two towers once told the whole city when to wake and when to sleep, and the square between them still gathers people at the end of the day. Pigeon keepers send their flocks…
  6. 6. Behind the Souvenir StripOne street off the souvenir run, the hutongs go back to being where people live. Doorways stand open at dinner hour, courtyards appear and vanish as you pass, and the lane narrows…
  7. 7. Who Gets to StayDashilar has been a commercial street for about five hundred years, and it is currently being renovated one alley at a time. Walk it and you can read the process directly: a…
  8. 8. The Rooftop SeaClimb the artificial hill in Jingshan and the Forbidden City opens out below you as a sea of golden rooftops, laid out along the axis the whole city was built around. It is the…
  9. 9. PicunPicun sits out on Beijing's eastern edge, under the flight path, and it is the real subject of this whole journey rather than a stand-in for it. It is a migrant workers' village —…
  10. 10. Ground That Keeps MovingCaochangdi is the rawer, less curated cousin of Beijing's polished art districts: grey brick studios, galleries behind unmarked gates, and very little signage. It has also lived…