Beijing Stories

Part of A Better Guide to Běijīng

The foreigners resident in Běijīng in the first part of the last century took full advantage of the willingness of temples to rent out rooms to them, and an invitation to ‘pop down to my temple for the…

Part of A Better Guide to Běijīng

Ài Wèiwèi has had several run-ins with the authorities. His heroic effort to list by name, despite an official blackout, all the children killed by collapses of shoddy ‘tofu dregs’ school buildings in the 2008 Sìchuān earthquake and his public…

Part of A Better Guide to Běijīng

Fùchéng Mén Nèi Dàjiē is home to what was China’s first ever sex shop, the Běijīng Adam and Eve Health Centre, although in the past decade these have become commonplace in many cities — more so even than in the West.

Background from A Better Guide to Běijīng

In a narrow grey-walled alley typical of Běijīng’s back streets, men are bunched together in tightly compressed groups arched over some invisible central point and wedged into immobility. There’s the same air of excitement…

Part of A Better Guide to Běijīng

If the Wall is big, the myths are bigger, but the idea of a single, continuous, extremely long, picture-perfect, crenellated wall that kept out marauding barbarian hordes has a grip on the imagination of the travelling public that the Chinese…