4 days in Beijing: Complete Itinerary with map
Beijing, what a great surprise! The beginning of our 7-month trip through Asia has been Beijing, the capital of the giant China. We plan to travel for 1 month around the country on our own. And after seeing this great city, we want to bring you our ideal guide of 4 days in Beijing.
After these 4 intense days in the city, we can tell you that it is easily in our top cities we have been. And in Beijing, it is impossible to get bored. If it is not a street with all kinds of food stalls, it is a park with a thousand stimuli or an impressive temple. Because of this, and seeing some mistakes we have made, we want to explain our ideal route, with tips and the order in which we would visit things.
4 days should be enough to see the highlights, although for our taste, we would have liked some more days just to experience the city a little more.
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Preliminary considerations
We are going to bring it to you in a general post about tips for visiting China, but there are many things to take into account before entering the country.
- Payments: Having Alipay or Wechat is a must. Really, everything can be paid this way. And it is suuuuper easy. We will bring you a post about it soon.
- Subway: the subway works like a shot, we have never seen anything like it. You can buy each ticket in the machines at each station, switching to English and selecting your destination station. A must-have app for this is MetroMan. You put station origin and destination and it gives you all the information: transfers, price, time. You will thank us 🙂
- Time to move: Beijing is huge. Any displacement is longer than it seems. We tried to calculate the times we would use in Barcelona and, almost always, we ended up running to places. Add 15-30 more to the estimate to be on the safe side.
- Maps: Iphone Maps (if you have it) is perfect, but Google Maps is not so good. The Chinese app for this is Baidu, but it is all in Chinese. Finally, a very good option is the maps.me app, which allows you to have the maps offline.
- Weekends: the number of people there is multiplied, so if you are lucky enough to be able to go days out of the weekend, take advantage of it to do the most tourist activities there.
Día 1, 4 días en Pekín
As we said above, it all depends on whether it is a weekend or not, so move the days at your leisure depending on when you go. The first day of our ideal 4 days in Beijing, we are going to start with the Summer Palace.
The Summer Palace in Beijing is an impressive complex of gardens and palaces that, as its name suggests, was the summer residence of the emperors for several centuries. It was built in 1750 by the Qing dynasty, destroyed in 1860 in the Second Opium War and rebuilt in 1888 by Empress Cixi.
Our main advice in this park is to go with time (minimum 3 hours) as it is huge and has many corners. We will give you the main points to see, but get lost and walk around seeing places that catch your attention, as the most touristy will be crowded. Key points of interest:
- Kunming Lake (a real folly).
- Longevity Hill and Fragrant
- Buddha Temple
- Jade Wave Pavilion and Marble Bench
- Seventeen Arches Bridge.
After this visit, we would take the subway and move to the Lama Temple area, a quicker visit that can take about 1 hour.
The Temple of the Lamas is one of the most important Buddhist temples in the world outside of Tibet, and you will feel its importance as soon as you enter.
In this temple you can see the curious ritual of the 3 incenses, see several Buddhist temples with great figures. In short, it is a must on our ideal route of 4 days in Beijing.
Just outside the Temple of the Lamas, you have at your fingertips several of the most interesting hutongs in the city. We will leave below the route we recommend to see the coolest hutongs in the area, but basically, it is to go from the Temple of the Lamas to the Drum and Bell Square walking (and getting lost). The top streets to see are:
- Nanluoguxiang: A street with low gray houses super nice.
- Gulou E Avenue -> we ate super top street food for 4 per head. Our favorite.
- Guozijian Street or Fangjia Hutong: They are parallel and are the ones you will take from the Temple of the Lamas to go to the Drum Tower.
With this, we would say that the first day of our ideal route through Beijing is done, as we have said the distances are very large and surely you are that you do not hold you 🙂
Day 2, 4 days in Beijing
Day 2 of our 4 days in Beijing will be dedicated to the jewel in the crown, the Great Wall of China. From Beijing there are many options to visit the wall. We will bring you soon our post on how to visit the Great Wall of China from Mutianyu so you can see how we did it.
The Great Wall doesn’t need much introduction, but it is one of the 7 wonders of the modern world and one of the most visited monuments in the world.
Wherever you go, visiting the Great Wall of China will take you almost the whole day (count about 8-9 hours between going, visiting and coming back) so this day will be almost over. Beijing is a perfect place to visit as it has access to 4 main places to visit. The options are:
- Badaling: the closest and most crowded.
- Mutianyu: less touristic and with easy access and state. This is the one we did.
- Jianshanling: more remote and in not so good condition, physical fitness is required.
- Jiankou: the most adventurous and complicated.
If you feel like doing something else, you can go to one of the most famous streets of the city, Wangfujing, which is one of the main commercial arteries of the city and is located in the heart of Beijing.
We recommend you to try the Peking Duck in one of its restaurants. In that area is the Siji Minfu, which is the most famous, but we do not think it is worth so much to do almost 3 hours in line, as you have Peking duck in almost every corner. Another quite famous chain in the center is Quanjude. We tried it at our hotel, the Zhong An Hotel, and it was delicious.
Day 3, 4 days in Beijing
The third day of our 4 days in Beijing, will take us, in an intense day, to visit the most touristic points of the city.
We will start the day very early by one of the most important and largest squares in the world, Tiananmen Square. We were very amazed by its size, it is crazy. We recommend you to go early (between 6 and 8 am) because we went on a Sunday at noon and we were 1 hour to enter due to the queue at the security checkpoints.
To enter the Tiananmen Square, you must book the entrance (for free), we leave you as in this other post (coming soon). The visit to the square will take you around one hour.
Afterwards, you can enter through the main gate where Mao Zedong’s face is to reach the most important point of the city, the Forbidden City.
The Forbidden City is the most emblematic and historically important place in the city. I recommend you to inform yourself previously before going about its history, especially the history of the last Emperor of China (you can watch the movie). Considerations for the visit:
- It is a VERY touristy place, do not expect to see it empty, because it is impossible.
- The visit, if you do it exhaustively, will take you about 3 hours.
- The tickets for this place go online every day for the next 7 days at 8 pm Beijing time and are sold out in minutes. Soon, we will tell you the best options to get tickets, we opted to book this tour with GetYourGuide to ensure the entrance, but it is the most expensive option.
If you go out the north gate, you will have right next to it, the Jingshan Park, which gives you the best views of Beijing and the entire Forbidden City.
Depending on the time you have, you can take the subway to the next destination or, if it is close to lunch time, we would go to eat at Qianmen Street, one of the most important and coolest streets in Beijing. There, you will find a lot of street food places to eat. Also, it is perfect because it is on the way to the next destination, the Temple of Heaven, the most beautiful in the city.
The Temple of Heaven, a World Heritage Site since 1998, is one of the most beautiful places in the city. The design is amazing and gives a super interesting mystical air. Originally, it was a place where the Ming and Qing dynasty made sacrificial rituals and prayers to ask for better crops.
The Temple is inside a long park that is perfect for walking and relaxing, but the place itself is the most crowded we have found as it is small. However, it is still beautiful and a highlight of our 4 days in Beijing.
After this thrashing day, I don’t think you want much more jogging, so it’s time to rest 🙂 .
Day 4, 4 days in Beijing
The last day of the ideal route of 4 days in Beijing, we will dedicate it to visit some interesting points that we have left in the previous days.
We believe that the Olympic Zone must be seen, as it gives you a sample of the immensity of the city and the tremendous avenues and buildings there. In this Olympic area, famous for hosting the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games and the Beijing 2022 Winter Games, you can admire the Bird’s Nest, one of the most iconic stadiums in the world or the Water Cube, where Phelps won 8 gold medals in the games. It also has great parks to stroll through.
Also, you can use this day to go to one of the markets of the city, such as the Silk Market, a 5-storey shopping center where you will find many items of clothing, handbags … We went and, in our opinion it is not a must, but it is impressive how big it is.
Another option would be to visit the hutongs near Qianmen Street if you have not done it before. We didn’t have time, but we would have loved to, as it is one of the areas we liked the most.
You can also visit the 798 Art District, which is a bit out of the way but can also be cool. We didn’t have time either, so we can’t give much more reference.
Finally, the plan we made was to walk and play sports like two Chinese people in one of its many parks, which are very well adapted for sports and you will see many people doing various activities. We chose the Ritan Park, because of its proximity to the hotel, highly recommended and the best way to see how the Chinese live and their customs.
Where / what to eat in Beijing
We have been talking about it above, but for us you cannot visit Beijing without a good plan to eat and taste its delicious dishes. We were lucky that our hotel had a very nice restaurant, and we tried things there, but there is such a variety, that it is almost better to recommend areas.
For us, the things we liked:
- Noodles
- Meat dumplings
- Peking Duck
- Hotpot
- Xian Bing, our favorite dish. It is a crispy pastry filled with meat that they sell in street stalls. Incredible and worth less than 1 euro.
- Giant chicken skewers
We have been to the following places, for your convenience:
- Noodles, Dumplings and Peking Duck, we tried them at our hotel, Zhong An Restaurant. You can search for famous chains to try these dishes, they are everywhere.
- Hotpot, we went to a shopping mall in Wangfujing, but we don’t remember the name of the restaurant 🙁 However, it will cost you 0 to find a hotpot, they are everywhere-.
- For Xian Bing and skewers, there are a thousand stalls in Qianmen or in the hutongs of Gulou.
There are lots and lots of extra things to try, so enjoy it and let us know your favorites. 🙂
Where to stay in Beijing
A very important thing in 4 days in Beijing, are the long distances and travel times in the city. That is why, more than ever, it is very important to have the hotel centrally located and close to a subway station. Some options that we recommend you after researching on Booking.com and Trip.com are:
Booking:
- Zhong An Hotel (€): our hotel and one of those that we believe is better quality / price. It is located 5-10 minutes from the Beijing Railway Station and its subway stop, which easily connects with the tourist spots. In addition, it has a very nice restaurant, a very complete breakfast and free laundry.
- Beijing Yasmine Seasons Park Apartments (€): Super-equipped apartments in an unbeatable location and for about 60€ per night (cheap price in Beijing). The rating is over 9 with over 300 reviews, so it has to be good. It has an indoor pool and gym.
- Beijing Wangfujing Serviced Apartment (€): Another apartment located in the city center, specifically 1.8km from downtown and 2 from Wangfujing, the most famous and important street in the city. It has a kitchen, private toilet and common room with billiards. A very good option for location and price.
Trip.com
- Yitingzhenshe Hotel: 500 meters from Qianmen, that is, the best location you will find. It is a well equipped hotel, with restaurant and breakfast at a very good price. A great option within walking distance of the main points of the city.
- Furun Jingyuan: Located very close to Chaoyangmen, a train station in the city.
Map
We leave you the places that we have been commenting, by day, each one with its color so that you can see what to do in each moment of the 4 days in Beijing.
If you go to Beijing for 4 days, keep in mind that it will be a super intense trip but where you will be able to discover many varied things culturally, gastronomically and socially that will leave a mark on you.
If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact us 🙂
