798, Sanlitun & the Embassy Quarter

The 1950s electronics works in the north-east suburbs — sawtooth-roofed halls built to East German designs for the state 'Joint Factory 718' — that artists began renting as studios around 2000 and that is now a 600,000 m² district of galleries, museums, cafés, design shops and Maoist slogans still on the walls. The zone itself is open ground with no ticket; the museums inside (UCCA is the anchor) charge and mostly close on Mondays. It is 15 km from Sanlitun and until 2025 awkward to reach; Line 12's Gaojiayuan station now opens next to it. Go Tuesday to Sunday, arrive after 11:00 when the doors open, and treat it as an afternoon of galleries with a walk between them.

The open-air mall that turned Sanlitun from a bar strip into Beijing's shop window when it opened in 2008: nineteen low buildings by Kengo Kuma and others around lanes and squares, the South Village with the Apple Store, Uniqlo's flagship and the food-and-drink basement, the North Village across the road with the luxury brands and the quieter courtyards, and the whole thing lit like a stage after dark. It is where foreign visitors end up — the hotels, the embassies and most of the city's English-speaking restaurants are within a kilometre — and it is useful for exactly that: cards work, English is spoken, and everything you forgot to pack is here.

The museum that anchors 798: a 1957 factory hall of about 10,000 m² rebuilt by OMA in 2019. Founded in 2007 by the Belgian collectors Guy and Myriam Ullens, it is now China's most important non-state contemporary-art institution, showing three or four large exhibitions a year to over a million visitors. Tuesday to Sunday 10:00-19:00, tickets priced per show and sold on the museum's WeChat, at the front desk or through the usual Chinese apps, with concessions for students and over-60s — one of the few Beijing museums with an English website, a desk you can pay at, and no real-name lottery.

Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren's looped tower for China Central Television — two leaning 234 m towers joined by a 75 m cantilever 160 m up, finished in 2012 and known to every Beijinger as 'the big pants'. It is the one piece of 21st-century architecture in the city that foreign visitors ask about by shape, and the loop itself is a state broadcaster's headquarters you cannot enter. Since 29 April 2026 there is a way in next door: the Television Cultural Center (TVCC), the once-burnt tower on the north side of the same site, opened to the public. It is free with real-name booking on the '电视文化中心' WeChat mini-program, open Tuesday to Sunday 10:00-16:30 with entry until 16:00, and covers floors 1-3 (art shows, an art cinema, a recording studio and the broadcaster's own café). The dusk sightline from the Guomao flyover is still the photograph.

The Daoist temple of the God of Mount Tai, founded 1319 by the Yuan court's Orthodox Unity masters and enlarged by the Ming and Qing into 300-odd halls on 47,400 m² just outside the Chaoyangmen gate. It is the largest Zhengyi Daoist temple in northern China and the most unnerving: its courtyards are lined with the 76 'departments' of the underworld, each a chamber of painted clay officials and demons judging a different sin. Since 1997 it has housed the city's Folk Customs Museum, which runs the temple fair at New Year. ¥20 (city heritage bureau), 8:30-16:30, exhibition halls closed Mondays, and no booking needed (city heritage bureau; the museum's 2026 May Day notice) — buy at the gate or on its WeChat official account.

The canal that runs east from the embassy quarter past the Kempinski, Lufthansa Center and Solana mall — a drainage ditch until the district rebuilt 5.5 km of it in 2019-22 as a lit promenade with terraces, footbridges and a boat line. Since then it has been the evening walk of the expat and embassy neighbourhood and, on summer nights, the most photographed stretch of water in the city outside the lakes. The banks are free and open around the clock; the sightseeing boats from the Solana pier are the ticketed part. It is a commercial line, roughly ¥35 by day and ¥90 at night for the 40-minute loop per platform listings, with no booking and first come, first served, running from mid-March to autumn only.

The Ming altar to the sun, built 1530 as one of the capital's five altars and now a 20-hectare district park in the middle of the first embassy quarter. The compounds of the United States (former), Britain, India, Vietnam and a dozen others stand on its four sides, which is why most foreign visitors meet it on the way to a consular appointment rather than as a sight. Free, no booking, listed as such in the city's official park register; only the altar wall and a few sacrificial buildings (the sacred kitchen and storehouse, the slaughter pavilion, the robing hall) survive in the west half. It is a first-grade historic garden and has been a national key heritage site since 2006, and the whole is a park, not a scenic area: lawns, a rock-climbing wall and the tai chi crowd. Photograph the park; the walls around it are another matter.

Where Beijing has gone out since the 1990s, in three layers that guides still confuse: the original Bar Street on Sanlitun Rd north of the mall — now a strip of touts, cover bands and tourist prices; the lanes east of and behind the mall, home to the craft-beer bars, cocktail rooms and the restaurants foreigners actually use; and the clubs and big venues around the Workers' Stadium a few hundred metres west. The 'Dirty Street' of cheap bars behind the South Village was cleared in a clean-up around 2017 and no longer exists. Free, open all night, and the one part of the city where English is the default after 22:00.

The market that grew up with the reform era — an open-air lane of silk and knock-off stalls outside the embassy quarter from the 1980s, moved into a purpose-built block on Jianguomen Outer St in 2005 — and still the place tour buses stop for 'silk, pearls and a tailored suit'. Six floors of tailors, luggage, jewellery, tea and everything with a logo on it, all bargained, plus a floor of Chinese-brand shops at fixed prices that the management added to clean up the name. Line 1 Yong'anli station opens beneath it; the tourism bureau lists it as free and 40 years old. Know the rules on fakes before you buy anything branded.

The 1959 stadium a block from Sanlitun, demolished and rebuilt on its footprint as a 68,000-seat football-only ground that opened in April 2023 — home of Beijing Guoan, the capital's club, whose green-shirted crowd is the loudest regular event in the city. A Chinese Super League home game (season roughly March to November, most Saturdays or Sundays) is the one mass spectator experience a visitor can buy: tickets from about ¥260 (2026 notices) on the club's Damai channel, real-name, one per ID, and the club's own ticket notices say foreign passports are accepted for purchase and entry. Outside match days the stadium is a building to walk round; the clubs and bars of Gongti fill the perimeter.