Beijing Scenery

Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics

The 2022 Winter Olympics was an international winter multi-sport event held between 4 and 20 February 2022 in Beijing, China, and surrounding areas with competition in selected events beginning 2 February 2022. Beijing was selected as host city in 2015 at the 128th IOC Session in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, marking its second time hosting the Olympics, and the last of three consecutive Olympics hosted in East Asia. Having previously hosted the 2008 Summer Olympics, Beijing became the first city to have hosted both the Summer and Winter Olympics.

The National Stadium

The National Stadium (国家体育场), also known as the Bird's Nest (鸟巢), is an 80,000-capacity stadium in Beijing. The stadium was jointly designed by architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron from Basel-based architecture team Herzog & de Meuron, project architect Stefan Marbach, artist Ai Weiwei, and CADG, which was led by chief architect Li Xinggang. The stadium was designed for use throughout the 2008 Summer Olympics and Paralympics and again in the 2022 Winter Olympics and Paralympics. The Bird's Nest sometimes has temporary large screens installed at the stands.

Ice Cube

China’s National Aquatics Center, commonly referred to as the “Water Cube” during the Beijing Summer Olympics in 2008, will be known as the “Ice Cube” for the upcoming Beijing Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games starting this week. After renovations, the ten-lane pool was converted into a four-sheet curling rink. The “Ice Cube” in its current configuration host up to 4,600 people. During the 2008 Olympics, the facility had a capacity of 17,000 “The 50-meter pool had been completely drained and filled in with a very complex floor structure built on scaffolding with concrete blocks to ensure the folly would not move when the weight of the ice and players were added,” said Mark Callan, Deputy Chief Ice Technician for the Games in an interview with the World Curling Federation. The transformation from “Water Cube” to “Ice Cube” makes this building the only stadium in the world to host both aquatic and ice sports at the same time. “According to the current plan, it will only take a month to accomplish the transformation from swimming courses to ice rinks. And in the future, the two modes can be switched to one another to create a recyclable system,” Yang Qiyong, general manager of the National Aquatics Center said in an interview with Beijing Tourism. Given the COVID-19 regulations in Beijing, the Olympics are operating under a “closed loop” system, and China stopped selling tickets to mainland China residents earlier this month. Currently, only special guests will be allowed to attend competitions. During the 2008 Olympics, the “Water Cube” had a capacity of 17,000 with 6,000 permanent seats and 11,000 temporary seats that were added for the Olympics. After the Games, it was converted to a public water park with huge water slides, while maintaining its competitive swimming and training pools.

The Great Wall

Draped dreamily across mountains, the Great Wall of China is more gravity-defying beside the capital than anywhere along its epic course. Leave the city behind, and inside two hours you'll be watchtower-hopping along the undulating back of China's stone dragon. Restored stretches have cable cars to whisk you up to the battlements. For the rest – rambling, wild and remote – you'll need hiking shoes and a head for heights. Whatever your speed, a trip to the Wall is the ultimate bucket-list adventure.

The Forbidden City

For all its antiquity, less than a century has passed since the last emperor left the Forbidden City, the divine stronghold around which Beijing ripples outwards. It opened as a museum a year later in 1925, and such is its size that to this day previously unexplored halls, courtyards and cloisters continue to open to the public for the first time. Residing within are the ghosts of 24 emperors and their concubines, eunuchs, officials and servants; a humongous cache of treasure; and the essence of one of the world's great civilisations.

Hutong Adventures

One of the great pleasures of Beijing is picking your way through the hutong, a dense matrix of residential alleyways shaped by the enclosing walls of traditional courtyard homes known as sìhéyuàn. Surviving in pockets, such as around the Bell Tower, the hutong are where you'll see local life unfold: gossiping grannies minding trussed-up infants; fruit-sellers, cleaver-sharpeners and rag-and-bone men (and women); and chess contests drawing enraptured crowds. A unique form of residential architecture found nowhere else in China, the hutong are Beijing's ever-diminishing heart and soul – visit before they're gone.

The Temple of Heaven

A divine conduit to the cosmos, here is where emperors were compelled by arcane ritual to drop a line to the big boss upstairs and beg their blessing. Peace and harmony reigned as long as fortune favoured the emperor. But god forbid floods, famine, earthquakes – signs that a ruler might be losing the mandate of heaven. Imbued with esoteric symbolism, the Temple of Heaven is a joy to behold, while the enclosing parkland reveals the locals at play, performing taichi, kung-fu or callisthenics under the gnarled old cypress trees.

The Summer Palace

Royal pleasure gardens of Empress Dowager Cixi, the Unesco-listed Summer Palace is a sprawling tapestry of hillside temples, pagodas, bridges and whimsical follies set around postcard-perfect Kunming Lake. Extravagant wonders like the 728m 'Long Corridor', adorned with thousands of individual paintings, the imperious Hall of Benevolence & Longevity, and the 'marble boat' pavillion draw the crowds, but the real tale here is a human one: of Cixi, the most remarkable woman in Chinese imperial history, ruling from behind the Dragon Throne in a man's world for nearly 50 years.