The Summer Palace, Yuanmingyuan & the Western Hills

The imperial mountain park at the western edge of the city — 188 hectares rising to the 575 m Incense Burner Peak, a Jin-dynasty retreat from 1186 that Qianlong walled as the Garden of Tranquil Pleasure in 1745, burnt twice by foreign armies and opened as a public park in 1956. Beijingers know it for one thing: the smoke-tree leaves that turn red in late October and bring the biggest weekend crowds outside the centre. Off-season it is a ¥10 (¥5 in winter) hill walk with a chairlift, the temple where Mao lived in the spring of 1949, and Biyun Temple's diamond-throne pagoda inside the same wall on a ¥15 combined ticket.

The best-preserved imperial garden in China and the one Beijing sight that rewards a slow day: 290 hectares of lake and hill laid out in 1750 on the model of Hangzhou's West Lake, rebuilt by the Empress Dowager Cixi in the 1880s with navy money and used as her court until 1908. The highlights are the 728 m Long Corridor, the Tower of Buddhist Incense on Longevity Hill, the Marble Boat, the Seventeen-Arch Bridge and a mile of causeway on the far shore. Tickets come in two layers: a ¥30 park ticket (¥20 in winter) and a ¥60 combined ticket that adds the four inner gardens, which, unlike the park, close on Mondays. All seven gates sell tickets, and the tourism bureau's own page says over-60 foreign visitors go in free on a passport.

The 'Garden of Gardens' that five Qing emperors built over 150 years and an Anglo-French force looted and burnt in October 1860 — 350 hectares of lakes, islands and foundations next door to the Summer Palace, kept as a ruin on purpose. What every visitor comes for is the small north-east corner: the Western-style palaces the Jesuits designed for Qianlong, whose broken marble columns at the Great Fountain are China's most famous image of the century of humiliation. That corner is a separate ¥15 ticket inside the ¥10 park (¥25 for the whole thing), open from 7:00 to dusk, no closure day, and, unusually, a full English notice on the park's own site. For Western visitors this is the one Beijing site where the history is partly yours.

China's oldest zoo (opened in 1906 as the Qing court's agricultural experiment station and menagerie on the site of a prince's garden outside Xizhimen) and its largest urban one at 86 hectares, with the giant pandas most visitors come for, a good primate house, and late-Qing garden buildings among the enclosures. It is the cheapest big-name ticket in Beijing: ¥15 in season, ¥19 with the panda house, open from 7:30, gates on Xizhimen Outer Street two minutes from Line 4 Dongwuyuan station, and, across the canal at the north gate, the Five-Pagoda Temple. A municipal park, so the open question of passports on its online real-name ticketing applies, but the tourism-bureau page lists foreign students among the concessions and the gates sell tickets.

A 1733 Qing temple on the north Third Ring that has been the museum of Chinese bells since 1985, built around one object: the Yongle Bell, cast in the 1420s, 46.5 tonnes and 6.75 m tall, with over 230,000 characters of Buddhist scripture cast into its inside and outside surfaces and a tone that carries 40 km on a still night. Around it, halls of bronze bells from the Zhou dynasty to the Qing, a set of chime bells you can strike, and the temple courtyards themselves. ¥30, no booking, Tuesday to Sunday with free tours at 10:00 and 14:00 — a 400 m walk from Line 13 Dazhongsi station.

The temple inside Fragrant Hills Park's north wall that is the best building on the hill: founded 1331 as a hermitage, rebuilt by two Ming eunuchs as their intended tomb, and crowned in 1748 with a 35 m diamond-throne pagoda — five stupas on a carved marble base in the Indian Bodh Gaya form. It also has a hall of 500 gilded arhats and, since 1925, Sun Yat-sen's memorial hall and symbolic tomb; his coffin rested here for four years before Nanjing was ready. ¥10 on its own or ¥15 combined with the park; six terraces up the slope, so it is a climb.

The national botanical garden created in April 2022 by fusing the Beijing Botanical Garden with the Academy of Sciences' garden across the road. Its 400 hectares lie under the Western Hills, and the North Garden is the visitor half: 15 specialist gardens (China's largest rose garden, peonies, lilacs, a peach-blossom valley), a 9,800 m² conservatory with the three 'flagship' giants of the greenhouse world, Cherry Valley's stream walk, Cao Xueqin's memorial cottage, and at the top of the axis the Tang-founded Reclining Buddha Temple with its 5.3 m Yuan-dynasty bronze Buddha. ¥10 at the gate (tourism-bureau page), ¥50 for a pass that adds the conservatory and the temple, both of which close Mondays.

Across the canal from the Zoo's north gate: the 1473 diamond-throne pagoda of the vanished Zhenjue Temple — five stupas on a carved stone platform in the Indian Bodh Gaya form, the earliest and finest of the dozen such 'vajrasana' pagodas in China. Its base is covered in over a thousand carved Buddhas, and the Buddha's footprints are cut into the central stupa's south face. Since 1987 the courtyard has held the city's open-air museum of stone carving: 500-odd pieces from Han tomb pillars and Northern dynasties statues to Ming and Qing epitaphs, arranged in eight groups under old ginkgos. ¥20, no booking, Tuesday to Sunday, free for the first 200 on Wednesdays — and almost nobody.