Nanluoguxiang, the Lama Temple & the Eastern Hutongs

Two walled compounds side by side on Guozijian Street, 300 m from the Lama Temple and a tenth as crowded: the Confucius Temple (1302) with 198 stone tablets naming every successful candidate of the Yuan, Ming and Qing civil-service exams (51,624 names), and the Imperial College (1287), the empire's top school for three dynasties, where the Biyong hall sits in a square moat so the emperor could lecture from the centre. One ¥30 ticket covers both; tickets are sold three days ahead on WeChat, and also at the door and through a scan-to-pay code. The museum closes Mondays (Tuesdays in summer 2026) and lets over-60s and under-18s in free on a Chinese ID or a permanent-residence card — an ordinary passport pays.

A 786 m north-south lane laid out with the Yuan capital in the 1270s and, with the eight hutongs branching off each side, the best-preserved piece of that chessboard grid left in Beijing — the whole block reads as a centipede from the air. The main lane is now a snack-and-souvenir strip with weekend crowds to match; the side lanes are the point: Mao Dun's courtyard in Houyuan'ensi, the Ju'er Hutong 'new courtyards' that won a UN habitat award in 1992, Wanrong's family home in Mao'er, Qi Baishi's in Yu'er. All of it is lived in. Free, always open, and 8 minutes' walk from the Drum Tower.

The prince's mansion where the Yongzheng Emperor lived before the throne and the Qianlong Emperor was born, turned into a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in 1744 and still Beijing's largest working Gelug temple: five halls climbing north to the Wanfu Pavilion and its 18 m Maitreya carved from one sandalwood trunk. It is the busiest place of worship in the city, and the one Beijing sight whose rules are worth reading first: ¥25, 9:00 opening, tickets sold online on the temple's own WeChat official account and at a window on site, and, unusually for Beijing, the official ticket page spells out exactly how a passport holder gets in (full-price online ticket, QR code at the gate).

The Temple of Heaven's northern twin: the square altar built in 1530 where Ming and Qing emperors sacrificed to the Earth every summer solstice — square where Tiantan is round, sunk where Tiantan is raised, and almost empty on any day that is not Spring Festival. 37 hectares of cypress and ginkgo just north of the Lama Temple, ¥2 to enter and ¥5 more for the Huangqi Hall, open from 6:00 until 21:30 in summer. Beijing readers know it from Shi Tiesheng's essay 'I and the Temple of Earth'; foreign visitors mostly do not know it exists.

A complete three-courtyard siheyuan from about 1940 at 77 Dongsi 4th Alley (the former Dongsi police station), opened as a museum so that the building itself is the main exhibit: screen wall, moon gate, repainted festoon gate, the main and side halls of the second court, and a 'Dongsi impressions' display of door piers, cabinets and roof tiles. It sits in the Dongsi 3rd-to-8th Alleys, the best-preserved hutong block in the city. Free; the open days are uncertain. The only official statement (2021) says Tuesday to Saturday, later listings say Tuesday to Sunday — so confirm before you go; the opening days are what trip up most visitors.

The national gallery of 20th-century and contemporary Chinese art, in a 1962 yellow-tiled building on May Fourth Street: Qi Baishi, Xu Beihong's horses, Luo Zhonglin's 'Father', plus a rolling programme of loan shows (a Renaissance exhibition and a Nikolai Fechin show among them; dates are on the official exhibition calendar). Free, but real-name booked: 6,000 places a day, released at 16:00 seven days ahead on the museum's website and WeChat, one visit per person per day, and, rare for Beijing, the official rule names passports as the document for foreign visitors. Closed Mondays; 800 m from Nanluoguxiang's south end.

Beijing's first hutong museum (2013), in the two-courtyard home of the writer Ling Shuhua at 24 Shijia Hutong — the lane that produced the forerunner of Tsinghua University and the Beijing People's Art Theatre. A 1:100 model of the whole hutong with 130 courtyards, a sound archive of 70-odd vanished street cries and pedlars' rattles, and rooms restored to 1970s-90s Beijing life. Free, no booking for individuals, closed Mondays and over lunch — the one place in the district that explains what you are looking at when you walk the lanes.

The grey Romanesque church with three domed towers halfway up Wangfujing — the 'East Church', founded by Jesuits in 1655, burnt in 1807 and 1900, and rebuilt in its present form in 1904 — set back on a paved square that the district opened in 2000 and that is now the street's one public place to sit. It is a working Catholic parish of the Beijing diocese: the square is always open, the church itself opens for Mass, and an English Sunday-afternoon Mass is widely listed but not published by the parish itself, so phone or ask at the door.

Beijing's department-store street since the 1900s and the pedestrian mall every first-timer ends up on: 800-odd metres from Dongdan to Dengshikou lined with the 1955 Beijing Department Store, the Foreign Languages Bookstore, the Oriental Plaza mall at the south end and St Joseph's Church halfway up. It is where you buy a suitcase or a duck at Quanjude, not where you see old Beijing — and the famous 'scorpion-on-a-stick' night market visitors still ask about closed in June 2016; the indoor snack street that followed it shut in 2019. Free, always open, and hutongs start two blocks east.

The lane one block north of the Confucius Temple that did what Nanluoguxiang did a decade earlier and stopped before it became a food court: 600 m of low grey houses with small cafés, a vegetarian restaurant, a few design shops and a lot of residents, running from Yonghegong St west to Andingmen Inner St. The natural third stop after the Lama Temple and the Imperial College, and the place in this district to sit down.

The private temple of Wang Zhen, the eunuch who ran the Ming court until the 1449 Tumu disaster — built 1443-44 and left alone since, which makes its four courtyards the most complete Ming timber complex in Beijing: black glazed roofs, 9,000 miniature Buddha niches lining the Rulai Hall, the city's oldest revolving sutra cabinet, and Ming ceilings so fine that two of them were sold to American museums in the 1930s. The reason to come is the sound: the temple's own Buddhist orchestra has played the same court repertoire since 1446, and gives short free performances in the second courtyard most days. ¥20, closed Mondays, ten minutes from Chaoyangmen.