by Linda Jaivin
UME Huaxing International Cineplex
No. 44 Kexueyuan South Road, Shuangyushu, Haidian district. www.bjume.com (in Chinese)
Beijing’s first five-star Cineplex. Megabox at Sanlitun’s Village is also a good place to catch both Western and Chinese films (b1/f Sanlitun Village South, 19 Sanlitun Lu, Chaoyang district). English-language listings at www.taikoolisanlitun.com/eng.
Chaoyang Theatre
36 North East Third Ring Road, Chaoyang district. www.chaoyangtheatre.com
The nightly acrobatic shows are flashier and on a bigger stage at the Chaoyang but if you want to see acrobats in the neighbourhood where once you could watch them on the street, try those at the Tianqiao Acrobatic Theatre (95 Tianqiao Shichang Lu, east end of Beiwei Lu, Xuanwu district, opposite the Tianqiao Theatre. www.tianqiaoacrobatictheater.com).
Forbidden City Concert Hall
West Chang’an Avenue, Zhongshan Park, Xicheng district. www.fcchbj.com (in Chinese)
One of Beijing’s largest and best concert halls, set in historic Zhongshan Park, just west of Tiananmen. Traditional, classical and chamber music are the staples of this 1,400-seat theatre with its excellent acoustics and charming historical surrounds.
Red Theatre
Near the Temple of Heaven, at 44 Xingfu Dajie, Chongwen district. www.redtheatre.cn
Shaolin kung fu via Vegas. Over-the-top spectacle with a touch of Zen.
RESTAURANTS
Manfulou
38 Di’anmennei Dajie, Xicheng district
This Mongolian hotpot restaurant is a reliable, atmospheric and reasonably priced lao zihao, or ‘old brand’ restaurant. Just north of Jingshan Park, close to Shichahai, it serves Beijing’s favourite cold-weather meal: frozen sliced lamb and other meats, vegetables, tofu and vermicelli that you cook in individual hotpots and eat with accompaniments such as sesame buns and pickled garlic.
Da Dong Roast Duck
1–2f, Nanxincang International Plaza, 22a Dongsishitiao, Dongcheng. www.dadongdadong.com/en
Quanjude is the iconic Peking duck restaurant with branches throughout the city, including one at 30 Qianmen Street that is the largest Peking duck restaurant in the world. I prefer others – check various websites for the duck restaurant du jour. Da Dong at the old Imperial Granary Nanxincang offers lean duck and other dishes such as sautéed chestnuts with Chinese cabbage and stewed veal with wild mushrooms, in an upmarket atmosphere with friendly service. Desserts include double-boiled lily bulbs with rose jelly and tiramisu with toffee fruit.
Old Beijing Zhajiang Noodle King
56 Dongxinglong Street, Chongwen district
This unpretentious, noisy, cheap and cheerful restaurant north of the Temple of Heaven specializes in hand-pulled noodles and traditional, tasty Beijing fare. The signature dish, zhajiang mian, is a hearty bowl of noodles with stir-fried minced pork, fresh vegetables and savoury fermented soybean paste.
Baoyuan Jiaozi Wu
6 Maizidian Jie, Chaoyang district
Baoyuan Jiaozi Wu serves a rainbow variety of (naturally coloured) dumplings with a range of fillings and accompaniments. The decor is as colourful as the dumplings. Vegetarian options include crackling rice-filled purple dumplings and lotus root dumplings in a spinach-green skin. But Beijing is full of great dumpling restaurants. Check online listings for up-to-date recommendations.
Imperial Cuisine
Various locations
Once, Fangshan Tang, on the north shore of Hortensia Island, inside an imperial pavilion with a fabulous view onto Beihai Park (www.fangshanfanzhuang.com.cn), was a de rigueur Beijing experience. Today the view remains spectacular; the food not so much. A second well-known imperial banquet restaurant is located in another scenic and historic building, one of Empress Dowager Cixi’s opera theatres and banquet halls in the Summer Palace: Tingliguan. Tingliguan (the Pavilion for Listening to the Orioles Restaurant), on the south slope of Longevity Hill in the Summer Palace, by Kunming Lake, does three lunch sittings during the high tourist season. But if you want the full Qing extravaganza (costumed servers, music and so on) done in style and with better food, then head to the Bai Family Garden Restaurant, situated on the grounds of a former princely mansion at 15 Suzhou St, Haidian. Or, for a more intimate experience, go to the also well-reviewed, tiny but lovely Li Family Restaurant near the Back Lake and the old Deshengmen city gate: 11 Yangfang Hutong, Denei Avenue. The grandfather of the owner, maths professor Li Shanlin, was Minister of Household Affairs for the Qing court. Reservations are necessary for both the Bai and Li family restaurants.
Zhong Ba Lou (Middle 8)
8 Dongsanlitun Zhong Jie, Chaoyang district (opposite the 3.3 Shopping Centre in the Sanlitun bar street)
The spicy, piquant tastes of China’s southwest, including Sichuan, Guizhou and Yunnan, are popular in Beijing. This Yunnan eatery offers everything from succulent banana leaf-wrapped meats to insects for the adventurous. Chic, clean, popular. Not cheap, but not over-priced.
Gui Jie (Ghost Street)
Dongzhimennei Dajie, Dongcheng district
A street of noisy, popular restaurants that comes alive at night – every night, all night. Strings of red lanterns and lines of double-parked cars tell you you’ve arrived. Follow the crowds to the popular places: you’ll find everything here from spicy Sichuanese to hotpot, seafood and vegetarian. The shouting you hear is the sound of Chinese drinking games. Ghost Street is where serious drinkers come to eat. The gui in the original name signified an old-style food container; people switched to the homonym meaning ‘ghost’ when street food vendors set up in the pre-dawn hours in the 1990s to feed taxi drivers and shift workers, their lanterns and dim lights creating a ‘ghostly’ atmosphere. Stalls gave way to restaurants, but the all-night tradition – and the lanterns – remain.
1949 – The Hidden City
Behind Pacific Century Place on Gongti Beilu (Workers Stadium North Road) in Sanlitun, Chaoyang district
An upmarket cluster of restaurants, bars, art and events spaces, and even a noodle bar, in what City Weekend describes as ‘6,000 sq. meters of neo-industrial chic’ – the former Beijing Machinery and Electric Institute. Duck de Chine serves Peking duck and confit de canard, Bollie optional. One of a number of dining complexes in the city.
Kong Yiji
2a Dongming Hutong Deshengmennei Dajie, Houhai (Back Lake), Xicheng district
This charming and atmospheric, reasonably priced restaurant next to Shichahai’s Back Lake features southern Zhejiang cuisine. Its ‘stinky beancurd’ (chou doufu) and stewed fatty pork (dongpo rou) are sublime, and there’s plenty on the menu for less adventurous palates in this lovely old restaurant. The paths to the front door are lined with ceramic wine pots. A personal favourite.
Capital M
3f, No. 2 Qianmen Pedestrian Street (just south of Tiananmen Square). www.capital-m-beijing.com
First-rate Western food in a stylish restaurant-cum-bar on the eastern side of Qianmen Shopping Street, this Australian-run restaurant has a to-die-for view of the old city gates all the way (on a clear day) to Tiananmen and beyond. Capital M also runs a yearly literary festival with international guests and hosts other cultural events such as chamber music concerts; check the website for details.
BARS AND CAFÉS
Flat White
Various locations. www.caffelaffare.com.cn
New Zealanders are behind this excellent café mini-chain and the Rickshaw Roasters that is its home brew. Flat White has branches in 798, the Silk Market, the embassy district of Dongzhimen and elsewhere.
Backyard
Liangmahe Nanlu, Chaoyang district
Located on the south side of the Liangma River in Sanlitun, the pocket-sized Backyard serves Rickshaw Roasters coffee, free-range eggs and healthy, creative dishes with vegetarian options and homemade bread. Detox by day, return at night for a glass of wine. Other notable cafés on the riverbank include a branch of Wudaoying’s popular Vineyard Café (see below).
Wudaoying Hutong and Environs
Close to the Lama Temple and both Andingmen and Yonghegong subway stations
This hutong close to the Lama Temple and other hutong in the vicinity are packed with interesting small bars, cafés and shops. The Vineyard Café (31 Wudaoying Hutong), with its skylit courtyard, weekend brunch and Tuesday–Friday lunch deals, is a stalwart of the scene; its seedling Vine Leaf (9 Jianchang Hutong) picks up the slack on Monday. Vegetarians praise the hummus at the vegan café Veggie Table, open from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. Some venues present live music at night, including jazz.
Gu Lou (The Drum Tower)
The neighbourhood on all sides of the Drum Tower
The streets and hutong around the Drum and Bell Towers, including Nanluoguxiang, have seen bars and cafés come and go; at the time of publication, the shabby-hip Temple in the complex at 206 Gulou Dong Dajie was on the hot list, but the heat goes out of places pretty quickly in Beijing, so best to check current listings.
Bookworm
4 Nan Sanlitun Road, Chaoyang district. www.beijingbookworm.com
A café within a cosy, vibrant English-language bookshop and reading library that features a regular programme of English-language activities, including author talks and its own writers’ festival.
Chocolate
Northwest corner of Ritan Park
A vast, literally underground Russian nightclub featuring live entertainment and, according to City Weekend, ‘half of Vladivostok’. Smoke hookahs, drink flaming cocktails, admire yourself in gilded mirrors by the light of chandeliers and relieve yourself in golden toilets. Chocolate is best consumed before midnight.
Workers Stadium and Bar Street
Gongti (Workers Stadium) Beilu and Sanlitun Beilu
Pumping nightclubs, bars and beer barns of varying degrees of salubriousness cluster in and around these Sanlitun landmarks. Mix it up with clubbers of all nations, nouveau riche Chinese businessmen, desperados and Chinese ‘models’, ‘actresses’ and other faux-ingénues on the make. Money might just buy you love.
Destination
Dong Yingfanghutong, 7 Gongti (Workers Stadium) West Road, Chaoyang district. www.bjdestinaton.com
DJs, cultural activities, free HIV testing and the odd art exhibition make this multi-level warren of bars and lounges more than just Beijing’s premier gay bar. The cruise ship picks up steam after 10 p.m.; Wednesdays and weekends is when things really kick off.
Timezone 8
4 Jiuxianqiao Lu, Dashanzi Art District, Chaoyang district (across from Ullens Center in 798). www.timezone8.com
This café-restaurant-bar in the heart of the 798 art district is associated with an art and design bookshop. For top places to eat in 798 check online listings.
Element Fresh
Various locations. www.elementfresh.com
Element Fresh calls itself a restaurant, and it’s bigger than any other café, but its consistently good coffees and seasonal café-style meals (including sandwiches, pasta and a superb range of salads) let it squeeze on to this list. The one in Sanlitun Village features an outdoor seating area that is delightful when the weather is too.
SHOPS
Panjiayuan
Third Ring Road East, Chaoyang district
The days when a careful search could turn up a priceless heirloom – or even an authentic Little Red Book – may have passed, but this bustling, historic flea market bazaar still tantalizes with the promise that somewhere amid the new-for-old Tang porcelains and born-yesterday Mao badges there may lie true gems. One Beijing native’s trash . . .
Silk Markets
8 Xiushui East Street, Chaoyang district. www.silkstreet.cc (in Chinese)
Replacing a thriving laneway of street stalls selling knock-off designer fashions, the Silk Markets is a clamorous multi-storey clothing bazaar on Xiushui Jie (‘Silk Street’). The old Qing dynasty name for the place was choushui, ‘stinky water’. There are plenty of other such markets and a number of similar places, some with more reliable designer brands and less clamour, but the Silk Markets is your Daddy. Bargain hard here.
Liulichang
Liulichang Xijie, Xuanwu district. www.ebeijing.gov.cn/feature_2/liulichang
After the Yuan dynasty established its imperial kiln in Haiwang Village, it was renamed Liulichang, Glazed Tile Factory; the kilns produced the golden roof tiles and other ceramic tiles for both the Yuan and Ming palaces. By the eighteenth century the area was famed for its antique shops, and in the early twentieth century hosted a lively and progressive publishing scene. Rebuilt as a replica of its former self in the early 1980s, nearly a kilometre of shops along Liulichang Street specialize in scrolls, paintings, seal carvings and the traditional ‘four treasures of the study’: brush, ink stick, ink stone and paper.
Yandai Xiejie (Tobacco Pipe Slanting Street)
Very close to Shichahai’s Back Lake, Di’anmen, Xicheng
Every souvenir you could possibly want to snare, from folding lanterns and teapots to panda-head hats and Mao-branded teacups and other kitsch is on sale here, along with such seasonal necessities as rabbit-fur earmuffs for winter, fans for summer and Tibetan jewellery for all occasions. This still-atmospheric street, crooked like a pipe, leads to the lakes of Shichahai.
798 Art District
4 Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang district
The Bauhaus-designed former military-industrial complex turns out art, design and fashion – some of it quite exceptional – the way it used to turn out rocket components. Buy art, clothes, design.
Xinjiekou South Street
Xinjiekou Nanjie, Xicheng
This street is packed with shops selling both Western and Chinese traditional musical instruments, sheet music and cds. Many of the shops offer music lessons as well. Haggling over price is acceptable in many of these shops, but beware of counterfeit Western brands, especially with such things as electric guitars. If you’ve mastered your instrument, the street also boasts a number of recording studios, including some where China’s top rock and other musicians have made their most iconic albums.
The Village
Stretching over several blocks, it is most easily accessed via Gongti Beilu or Sanlitun Beijie. www.sanlitunvillage.com
Come here for brands, local as well as international, not bargaining. Clothing (from agnès b. to Ziggy Chen), Apple products, imported foodstuffs, homewares – The Village has it all. Shop till you need to drop into one of this pleasant, multi-structure shopping centre’s many restaurants, cafés, bars or even its multiplex cinema. Be sure to stop in on the local designers’ showcase Brand New China at NLG-09A, Sanlitun Village North.
Bookshops
The Beijing Books Building is a Xidan district landmark: floor after dizzying floor of books, audio-visual and other related products (17 West Chang’an Avenue, Xicheng. www.bjbb.com, in Chinese). If you’re looking for English-language books, however, best head to Chaterhouse Booktrader (B107 The Place, 9 Guanghua Lu, CBD/Guomao), Bookworm (Sanlitun Nanjie, Bldg 4), with its programme of events and reading library (see listing under Bars and Cafés), or one of the several branches of the Singapore chain Page One, whose Sanlitun branch, along with its café, is open 24/7 (1–2f, Building S2, The Village. www.pageonegroup.com/1/china.html).
Tea Street
11 Maliandao Road, Xuanwu District
Over 1,000 tea shops cluster here, inside a four-storey building where wholesale dealers sell brews from everywhere in China, and in the many shops that spill down the side streets as well. Buy tea, teapots and accessories – even tea tables – in Beijing’s largest tea mart and north China’s biggest tea distribution centre.
Eyeglasses City
East Third Ring Road Nan Lu (South Road), near the Jinsong subway station, Chaoyang district
Just as once there were guild streets specializing in jade polishing or palace headgear, you can now find clusters of like shops selling electronics, guitars and – a personal favourite – eyeglasses. At this cluster of optometrist shops,
they’ll test your eyes, help you choose your frames and then send you off for a coffee while they grind the lenses: the whole process takes about an hour for straightforward prescriptions.
CHRONOLOGY
780,000–100,000 years ago
Peking Man and other hominids inhabit caves in Fangshan county in what is now southwest Beijing.
7th century BCE
A small walled town called Ji in what today is the southwestern sector of Beijing’s Inner City becomes part of the city-state of Yan and flourishes. Over the centuries, the city is conquered, assimilated and renamed (Yan, Youzhou) numerous times.
283–209 BCE
Defensive ‘Great Walls’ of tamped earth crest the ridges of the mountains north of the city.
938 CE
The Buddhist Khitans conquer the city, make it the secondary capital of the Liao dynasty, and rename it Nanjing and later Yanjing.
1115
The Jurchens, ancestors of the Manchus, establish the Jin dynasty; in 1553, having vanquished the Liao, they move their capital to Yanjing and rename it Zhongdu.
1179
The Jin Shizong emperor constructs Hortensia Isle in Taiye Pond, today’s Beihai Park.
1214
Genghis Khan ‘knocks on the gates’ of the city, and leaves with hostages and plunder. He visits again a year later and inflicts ‘glorious slaughter’.
1271
Genghis’s grandson Khubilai Khan makes the city the capital of the Yuan dynasty and Mongol-ruled China. He will give the city, renamed Khanbalik, its grid-like layout and first hutong laneways. Later, Marco Polo visits and calls it one of the world’s grandest cities.
1368
Founding of the Ming dynasty. The Ming becomes the fourth dynasty and in 1421 the first Han Chinese one to make the city its capital, renaming it Beijing. The Ming palace precinct, including the Forbidden City, as well as the city walls and layout, including a new walled Outer City attached to the south wall of what is now called the Inner City, survive nearly intact until the Communist era.
