Temple of Heaven, Xiannongtan & Liulichang

The altar across the road from the Temple of Heaven where the emperor ploughed three furrows each spring to open the farming year — 1420, same builder, same axis, and on a good day fewer than a hundred visitors. Since 1991 its Taisui Hall complex has housed the museum of Chinese timber architecture: the 'one mu, three fen' ritual field and the Viewing-the-Ploughing Terrace restored in front, and inside, the finest surviving Ming ceiling in Beijing (the caisson rescued from the demolished Longfu Temple), plus a room-sized model of the old city. ¥15 at the door, no booking, closed Mondays (Tuesdays in summer), and the museum's own service page is one of the clearest in the city.

The 1807 guild hall of the Hunan and Hubei sojourners at Hufangqiao, the last of Beijing's provincial guild halls to keep its theatre: a two-storey galleried playhouse where Tan Xinpei and Yu Shuyan sang in the late Qing, and where Sun Yat-sen chaired the founding meeting of the Kuomintang in August 1912. Closed for eighteen months of restoration and reopened in January 2024 as the Beijing Opera Museum, it is free to visit by booking, closed Mondays. On Saturday afternoons the theatre hosts a ticketed 'Xuannan Shuguan' performance — the one place in Beijing to hear opera in a 200-year-old hall rather than a modern auditorium.

The altar complex where Ming and Qing emperors prayed for the harvest each spring and thanked Heaven at the winter solstice: 273 hectares walled off south of Qianmen in 1420, with the blue three-tiered Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests at the north end, the Circular Mound and the Echo Wall at the south, and a 360 m raised causeway between them. It is two things at once: a UNESCO site with the largest sacrificial buildings in China, and from 6:00 the neighbourhood's park, where retirees sing, dance and play cards under the cypresses before the halls open at 8:00. There are two tickets (a park ticket and a combined ticket with the halls), and the halls, unlike the park, close on Mondays.

The oldest temple in the old city — founded 645 by the Tang emperor Taizong as the Minzhong Temple for soldiers killed in Korea, renamed Fayuan under Yongzheng. Seven halls stand on a 230 m axis behind the Caishikou execution ground, and since 1956 it has been the home of the Buddhist Academy of China, which is why the courtyards are full of student monks and short on tourists. Free, no booking, three sticks of incense handed to you at the gate (tourism-bureau article, 2024), open 8:30-16:00. In late April come the lilacs that made Qi Baishi lodge here and brought Tagore, Xu Zhimo and Lin Huiyin to a flower party in 1924.

The five-storey indoor market across the road from the Temple of Heaven's East Gate that has been 'the Pearl Market' to foreign visitors since the 1990s — freshwater pearls by the strand on the upper floors, electronics, bags, watches and souvenirs below, and a roof terrace with the best free view of the blue hall. Everything is haggled; nothing is priced. It survives because tour buses stop here, which is exactly why you should know the rules before you go in.

The antiques-and-calligraphy street outside Hepingmen — a Yuan-dynasty glazed-tile kiln site ('liuli chang') that became the book and curio market for exam candidates lodging nearby under the Qing, and by the 1700s the empire's centre for old books, rubbings, brushes and ink. What you walk today is a 1980s reconstruction in Qing style, 800 m of grey two-storey shopfronts split by Nanxinhua Street into an east street of curios and a west street of the serious old names: Rongbaozhai, China Bookstore, Daiyuexuan brushes. Free, always open, and honest about what it is: a place to look and learn, not to find a bargain.

The dinosaur museum — China's oldest natural history museum (1951, as the Beijing Natural History Museum), raised to national status in 2023, opposite the Temple of Heaven's West Gate: Mamenchisaurus and Tsintaosaurus skeletons, the Chinese fossil record from Chengjiang to Jehol, and a 4D cinema. Free, but the strictest booking discipline in the district — real-name, three days ahead on the museum's site or WeChat, released daily at 11:00, no walk-ups, timed sessions you must not miss, and three no-shows in a month lock you out for 90 days. The official rules name passports and say foreign visitors collect their ticket at the window on the day.

Beijing's oldest and largest mosque, founded in 996 by an Arab scholar in Liao service and rebuilt in 1442 and 1696 in the form you see: a Chinese temple plan of glazed roofs and painted beams with the prayer hall turned to face Mecca, a hexagonal 'moon-watching' tower in place of a minaret, and two Yuan-dynasty tombs of visiting imams in the courtyard. Around it, Niujie is the centre of the city's Hui Muslim community: halal butchers, the Jubaoyuan hotpot queue, the pastry counters of Baiji and Hongji, and a halal supermarket. A gate ticket (bring ¥10 in cash; the official listings say ¥2 on one page and ¥10 on another) gets non-Muslims into the courtyards outside prayer times; the prayer hall itself is for worshippers.

The one shop on Liulichang you can visit as a museum: the art-and-stationery house that traces itself to the Songzhuzhai of 1672 and took the name Rongbaozhai in 1894, home to two national-heritage crafts — woodblock watercolour printing, which reproduces ink paintings so closely that Qi Baishi could not tell his own from the print, and scroll mounting. Its west-street block at no. 19 holds sales floors, a free gallery (closed Mondays), the woodblock workshop and a café; the Beijing Daily calls it 'the people's Forbidden City'. No ticket, a Xu Beihong horse print for the price of dinner, and the only place in the city to watch the printing done.

The south city's lake park, laid out in 1952 around the Taoranting — a 1695 pavilion on the Cibei Nunnery mound that Qing scholars made the capital's poets' corner, and where Li Dazhao and the young Mao Zedong met in the 1920s. 59 hectares, 17 of them water, a 'garden of famous pavilions' with replicas of ten from across China, boats in summer, ice slides in winter and a spring kite festival. A municipal park at ¥2, open 6:00 to 22:00, and the only green space of size between the Temple of Heaven and Niujie — the neighbourhood's living room rather than a sight.