The Wall takes a day. Beijing needs the other five.
Which wall section is worth the drive out. What the Forbidden City gate actually asks you for. Whether a transit stop is long enough for both. Reviews of every tour you can book in Beijing.
Mutianyu, the palace gate, a lane of skewers, and the wild wall.
The four bookings a first week in Beijing is built around. What each costs, and what the travellers who took it say.
01The wall dayMutianyu Great Wall Daily Tour with Ticket & LunchMutianyu with the entry ticket and lunch already handled, leaving early enough to be on the battlements before the cable-car queue builds.- 02The palace morningForbidden City Tour(Group/Private)-Tickets IncludedForbidden City entry with the real-name booking done for you. That booking is the part that turns people away at the gate.
03The eveningBeijing Hutong Walking Food and Beer Tour at Hidden RestaurantsSkewers, beer and back-lane restaurants behind the Drum Tower, walked rather than driven. Come hungry and wear flat shoes.
04The wild wallSmall Group Hike at Jinshanling Great WallJinshanling on foot: unrestored, steep, and mostly empty. Three hours out of the city each way, and the reason people go twice.
Mutianyu, Badaling, Jinshanling, Simatai: not the same day out.
The Great Wall is not one place. Four sections take day-trippers from Beijing, and they differ by two hours of driving, several hundred steps and roughly everybody else in the country. Here is what each one costs to reach.
★★★★★★★★★★ 4.9 · Mutianyu Great Wall Tours with Options
MutianyuRestored battlements, a cable car up, a toboggan down.
JinshanlingUnrestored ridge walking, small groups, almost nobody else.
BadalingClosest to the city, steepest steps, busiest by a distance.
Simatai & GubeiThe one section lit after dark, with a water town below it.
All 142 Great Wall days →
Six Beijing landmarks, and the best day out at each.
A wall with four usable sections, a palace that takes half a day at a jog, a lake with a marble boat on it, a park that wakes at six, a grid of grey-brick lanes, and whatever you can fit between two flights.
The Forbidden City runs on timed slots and your passport number.
Everything imperial →
Tickets are capped by the day and sold against a real name, which is why so many people book the palace through a tour rather than the official site. Go north through the halls, climb Jingshan for the view back over the roofs, and keep the lake and the drum for the afternoon.
Guided, or just the entry code
The ticket is the hard part, not the walking. A guided entry hands you the booking and a route through nine hundred rooms; the ticket-only listings do the same job for a few dollars and leave you to it.
The Summer Palace, arriving by water
An imperial garden the size of a district, built round a lake that was dug by hand. Come in at the east gate for the long painted corridor, and take the boat back rather than walking the shoreline twice.
Temple of Heaven, before nine
The blue-tiled hall is the photograph, but the park around it is the reason to be early: retired Beijingers filling the walkways with cards, ribbons, choirs and tai chi from first light until the tour buses arrive.
The Beijing days more travellers book than anything else.
Every Beijing tour we have reviewed →The tours that move the most people through the city and out to the wall, and what earns each of them the slot.
1
Mutianyu Great Wall Tours with Options
Mutianyu Great Wall by direct bus, with four to five hours on the Wall, multilingual guides, optional lunch, and no shopping stops.
From · $19
Read our review →
2
Forbidden City Tour(Group/Private)-Tickets Included
from $4
3
T-Square & Forbidden City Group or Private Tour
from $17
4
Mutianyu Great Wall Daily Tour with Ticket & Lunch
from $18
5
All-Inclusive Tour: Tiananmen Square, Forbidden City, Great Wall
from $128
6
MuBus: Mutianyu Great Wall ENG/ESP/RUS Guided Bus Tour
from $20
7
4-Hour Small Group Tour to Forbidden City with Entry Tickets
from $15
8
Beijing Full Day Tours: Tiananmen Sq, Forbidden City, Great Wall
from $99
Beijing lets most passengers out of the airport for six days.
The 144-hour transit exemption turns a connection into a trip: no visa, an onward ticket to a third country, and a queue at the transit counter. Enough for Mutianyu and the palace with a night in between, or the palace and a duck dinner if you are only on the ground until morning.
The hutongs are a grid of grey brick, and there are fewer every year.
Single-storey courtyard houses laid out on a Yuan-dynasty street plan, most of them a metre narrower than a car. The lanes around Nanluoguxiang and the Bell Tower are the ones that survived, best walked at dusk when the kitchens open and the traffic gives up.
Every hutong day →
What a day in Beijing actually costs.
Every tour on the site, grouped by what you pay per head. Beijing is cheaper than travellers expect right up until the private car appears.
Palace and park entries, hutong walks, tea and calligraphy sittings, and the bus tours out to Mutianyu.
The full days: wall and tombs together, Jinshanling on foot, duck dinners, and the classic three-sight run.
Private drivers, two-day itineraries and the wall sections that need a car of your own to reach.
Three things that only happen in Beijing.
Old walls and good dinners exist everywhere. A fortification lit for six kilometres after dark, a bird carved at the table in two courses, and a Soviet-pattern motorcycle threading a Yuan-dynasty lane do not.
The Wall at Night
Simatai is the only stretch of the Great Wall open after sunset, floodlit along the ridge above Gubei Water Town. Numbers are capped and the tickets are timed, so an evening there is booked days out rather than decided on the day. The town below is a modern build on an old garrison site, which nobody pretends otherwise, and the wall above it is the real thing.
- 1Beijing Private Transfer to Jinshanling or Simatai Great Wall★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 119 reviews
- 2Simatai Great Wall & Gubei Water Town Private Tour★★★★★★★★★★ 4.9 · 110 reviews
- 3Jinshanling Private Tour with Night View of Simatai and Gubei Water Town from Beijing★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 77 reviews
Peking Duck, Properly
The bird is air-dried, hung and roasted over fruitwood, then carved beside the table into skin and meat served separately. Skin first, dipped in sugar. Then pancakes, spring onion and a sweet bean sauce that varies by house more than anyone admits. What is left of the carcass goes back to the kitchen and returns as soup.
- 1Temple Heaven, Lama Temple, Summer Palace & Peking Duck Bus Tour★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 377 reviews
- 2Boutique Tour: Four Must-sees of Beijing and Peking Duck★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 104 reviews
- 32-Day Beijing Highlights Tour with Peking Duck★★★★★★★★★★ 4.9 · 41 reviews
The Hutongs by Sidecar
Beijing sidecar runs use Changjiang 750s, a Chinese copy of a wartime BMW that the army built for decades. They fit down lanes a taxi cannot enter, they are loud enough that nobody attempts a monologue, and the route usually ends at the Bell Tower with the driver pointing at a courtyard door and telling you who used to live behind it.
- 12-Hour “Ancient & Modern” Beijing Sidecar Tour (Day /Night)★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 36 reviews
- 24 Hours Private Discover Beijing Tour by Sidecar★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 30 reviews
- 3Ancient & Modern City Tour by Sidecar(Day/Night)★★★★★★★★★★ 4.9 · 15 reviews
Four Beijing bookings that will not wait.
Plenty of this city can be arranged over breakfast. These four run on daily caps, security registration and one departure a morning, none of which care what time you landed.
- 01Forbidden City Tour(Group/Private)-Tickets IncludedEntry is capped daily and sold against a passport number. In high season the same-day ticket effectively does not exist.
- 02All-Inclusive Tour: Tiananmen Square, Forbidden City, Great WallThe square needs an advance security registration in your own name. Without it you are looking at it from behind the fence.
- 03Small Group Hike at Jinshanling Great WallThe wild sections run one small-group departure a morning. Miss it and the next one is tomorrow.
- 04Mutianyu Great Wall Tours with OptionsThe cable car queues from mid-morning and the last car down is fixed. An afternoon start buys you half a wall.
From November the wind arrives off Siberia and the wall turns to ice.
Four months of the year the city sits below freezing and the exposed sections get genuinely dangerous underfoot. Locals do not stop going out; they go indoors. Brush and ink, a tea room, an acrobatics stage, a duck house with the windows fogged over — book the wall for the clear cold morning and put the afternoon under a roof.
Duck carved at the table, hotpot in a copper chimney, skewers at dusk.
Beijing eats late and eats out. Book the duck house before you fly, walk the lanes for the rest, and put one morning aside for a class that ends in lunch you made yourself.
By landmark
By kind of day — wall, palace, workshop or lane
Square, palace, lanes, wall: the order almost everybody takes.
The newest Beijing tour reviews.
The rest of the new ones →
Private Great Wall Tour from Tianjin Cruise Port
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Beijing’s Forbidden City with Special Viewing of Treasure Gallery and the Great Wall Ruins at Badaling
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Private Transfer to Tianjin Xingang Cruise Port-Every Group Size
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Private Day Trip to Tianjin from Beijing by Bullet Train
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Private Day Trip: Discover Tianjin by Bullet Train from Beijing
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Beijing Exclusive Private Shopping Tour: Curated Just for You
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Private Beijing Markets Tour with Tea Tasting at Hongqiao Pearl Market
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Exclusive Private Photography & Video Tour to The Forbidden City
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Xi’an Terracotta Tour by Train-All Tickets Included
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