Tiananmen, the Forbidden City & Qianmen

The 192,000 m² museum on the east side of Tiananmen Square — the 'Ancient China' permanent galleries are the single best chronological walk through Chinese history in the country, from the Simuwu ding to Qing court art. Free, but real-name booked up to seven days ahead with a daily 17:00 release, three timed sessions, a limit of one booking per account per week, and a Monday closure. The museum runs its own booking site with an English version, which makes it one of the few Beijing venues with an official route for passport holders — we have not been able to read that English site's rules.

The Ming and Qing imperial palace, 1420 to 1912, and since 1925 the Palace Museum — the one Beijing sight nobody skips, and the one whose booking rule trips up more foreign visitors than any other. Every ticket is real-name and dated, released at 20:00 seven days ahead, sold out for weekends within minutes, and there is no same-day sale at all. The museum's own ticketing page lists passports among the documents accepted for booking and gate check, and the page has a language switch (the version we could fetch was the Chinese one). You enter only by the Meridian Gate and walk the 1 km axis north to leave by the Gate of Divine Prowess.

The 44-hectare square between the Tiananmen gate tower and Zhengyangmen — flag-raising at dawn, the Monument to the People's Heroes, the Mausoleum, the Great Hall of the People on the west and the National Museum on the east. It is free, but since December 2021 you cannot simply walk in: every visitor, Chinese or foreign, books a session (flag-raising, morning, afternoon, flag-lowering) on the Tiananmen Area Administration's platform, and the official rules name the passport as the foreigner's document. The 2021 rules let a booking for the Palace Museum, National Museum, Mausoleum, Zhongshan Park or the Working People's Cultural Palace stand in for a square booking; no 2025-26 notice repeats this, so book the square itself if you want to stand on it.

The city-planning hall on Qianmen East Street, beside the old railway station — a 302 m² scale model of the whole city under a 1,000 m² aerial photo, a bronze relief of the walled old town, and galleries on how Beijing grew from Yuan Dadu to the 2017 master plan. It is the Beijing counterpart of Shanghai's planning hall and the fastest way to understand the axis you have been walking. It is open: the planning commission posted holiday-opening notices for every 2026 holiday so far, the latest for National Day. The regular hours come from an undated tourism-bureau listing, the bureau's two pages disagree on whether admission is free, and entry is by booking on the museum's WeChat official account.

Beijing's own history museum — the one place that tells the story of the city rather than of China, from the Zhoukoudian caves through the Yuan capital to the 1950s, with the best Beijing-opera and folk-custom galleries in town. It sits 4 km west of Tiananmen on Chang'an Avenue (Line 1 Muxidi), which is why nobody goes. In 2026 it is also the easiest big museum in the city to get into: no advance lottery, just show ID at the north gate and register. Through 18 October 2026 it closes Tuesdays instead of Mondays and stays open to 20:00 for the ticketed Maya-and-Andes blockbuster.

The 1977 mausoleum at the south end of the square where Mao Zedong lies in a crystal coffin. Free, mornings only (Tuesday to Sunday 8:00-12:00), real-name booked one to six days ahead on the hall's own WeChat channels, and the strictest bag rule in Beijing: no bags, cameras, bottles or liquids at all, with a paid storage office on the east side of the square. The line moves fast — you are inside for a couple of minutes, walking, in silence. Whether a foreign passport works on the booking channel is not written in the official notice; local listings say it does.

The grey-and-white 1906 terminus of the Beijing-Fengtian railway on the south-east corner of Tiananmen Square — the biggest station in China when it opened, retired in 1959 when the new Beijing Station took over, and since 2008 the railway museum's city branch on Chinese railway history. Four floors, almost no visitors, free entry — but since 2026 booked through a WeChat official account rather than sold at the door.

The Taimiao — the Ming-Qing emperors' ancestral temple, built 1420 to the same 'ancestors left, grain right' rule as Zhongshan Park across the axis, and China's largest surviving imperial ancestral complex. Since 1950 it has been the Working People's Cultural Palace of the city trade union, which is why the signs and the ¥2 ticket carry that name. The 14-hectare cypress grounds are ¥2 and open from 6:30; the three-hall historic compound, with a Front Hall that stands 2 m taller than the Hall of Supreme Harmony and a bell exhibition, is a separate ¥15/¥10 ticket, closed Mondays. Almost no foreign visitors come, and it is 150 m from Tiananmen.

Paul Andreu's titanium-and-glass ellipsoid in a lake, 2007, just west of the Great Hall of the People — the building most foreign visitors photograph from Chang'an Avenue without realising they can go in. A ¥40 daytime visitor ticket (Tue-Sun 9:00-17:00) takes you under the lake into the halls: the two art galleries and public spaces open every day, the opera house, concert hall and theatre only on a weekly rota the NCPA publishes. There is also a free Chinese-language tour at 10:00 and 14:00 and short free concerts in the foyers. Real-name ticketing, one ticket per ID per day, sold online — evenings are for performances with their own tickets.

The commercial quarter outside the front gate, in three grades of 'old': Qianmen Street, the 840 m pedestrian avenue rebuilt from scratch in 2008 with a replica tram, chain stores and tourist pricing; Dashilar, the lane one block west where the genuinely old brands still trade — Tongrentang pharmacy (self-dated 1669), Ruifuxiang silks, Neiliansheng cloth shoes, Zhangyiyuan tea — and the Daguanlou cinema where China's first film was shown in 1905; and Yangmeizhu Xiejie, the diagonal lane beyond it that the 2010s regeneration filled with small bookshops, studios and cafés without clearing the residents. Beijing Fun (北京坊) and its 1905 Quanyechang department store sit at the west end. No tickets anywhere; the value is in knowing which street is which.

The gate with the portrait — the 1417 'Gate of Heavenly Peace', outer gate of the imperial city, from whose rostrum the People's Republic was proclaimed on 1 October 1949. Most foreign visitors do not know the tower itself can be climbed: a ¥15 ticket puts you on the rostrum looking down the square and up the axis to the Meridian Gate. It takes its own real-name booking, separate from both the square and the Forbidden City and released a day ahead, with no bags allowed on top.

The 1419 front gate of the Ming inner city — the only one of Beijing's nine inner-city gates to survive with both its gate tower and its archery tower — standing at the south end of Tiananmen Square. After six years of restoration the gate tower has reopened, timed to the second anniversary of the Central Axis World Heritage listing, with a permanent exhibition 'Majestic Zhengyang' and a ¥20 real-name ticket sold only on the Beijing Central Axis Heritage Conservation Centre's WeChat official account; the official notice names passports for booking and entry. The archery tower across the road reopened earlier, in December 2024. The roof is also the summer home of the Beijing swift, the city's only 'Beijing-named' bird.

The imperial Altar of Land and Grain — the 'right' half of the 'ancestors left, grain right' pair flanking the Forbidden City's front gate, laid out in 1420 with the palace itself — and since 1914 Beijing's first public park, renamed for Sun Yat-sen in 1928. A ¥3 ticket (¥10 during the spring tulip show), no advance lottery, and a five-coloured earth altar, 500-year-old cypresses and a 1916 lakeside pavilion 200 m from Tiananmen. The 2021 Tiananmen rules listed it among the venues whose booking got you through the square checkpoint (not restated in 2025), and it is also the quietest way into the square area.