The Most Beautiful Castles, Palaces and Fortresses in the People's Republic of China
8 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful castles, palaces and fortresses in the People's Republic of China are Forbidden City, Potala Palace and Yonghe Temple. The list covers 8 castles, palaces and fortresses. Last updated 14 October 2026.
China's palaces and fortifications grew out of an imperial state that, for two thousand years, ruled from walled capitals and guarded its northern frontier with walls. Palace architecture followed strict rules of symmetry, orientation and colour that expressed the emperor's place at the centre of the world, while military engineering produced city walls, passes and watchtowers on a scale seen nowhere else. The Ming dynasty in particular rebuilt much of what survives today.
The Forbidden City in Beijing, built in the early fifteenth century, was the home of Ming and Qing emperors for nearly five hundred years, its yellow-roofed halls arranged along a single north-south axis. The Summer Palace on the edge of Beijing sets pavilions, a long painted corridor and a marble boat around Kunming Lake and Longevity Hill. The Potala Palace in Lhasa, the winter residence of the Dalai Lamas since the seventeenth century, rises in white and red tiers over the city from a rocky hill.
The fortifications are just as impressive. Xi'an City Wall, rebuilt under the Ming, is one of the most complete city walls in China, wide enough to walk or cycle around on top. Jiayuguan in Gansu guards the western end of the Ming Great Wall, while Jinshanling in the mountains north-east of Beijing follows ridgelines with dense watchtowers. In Guangdong, the Kaiping Diaolou are fortified multi-storey village towers built by returning emigrants, mixing Chinese and Western styles.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Forbidden City | Palace | ✓ |
| 2 | Potala Palace | Palace | ✓ |
| 3 | Yonghe Temple | Palace | |
| 4 | Summer Palace, Beijing | Palace | ✓ |
| 5 | Xi'an City Wall | City walls | |
| 6 | Jiayuguan | Fortress | |
| 7 | Kaiping Diaolou and Villages | Fortified tower | |
| 8 | Jinshanling | City walls |
01 Forbidden City
People's Republic of China · 1.6 km from Beijing39.916° N 116.391° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
N509FZ · CC BY-SA 4.0 The layout is a rectangle about 960 by 750 metres, surrounded by a moat 52 metres wide and a wall almost 8 metres high, with elaborate corner towers. Roughly 980 buildings survive, all laid out along the north-south axis that still structures central Beijing, running from Tiananmen through the palace to Jingshan Park.
Did you know? Its pillars were whole logs of precious nanmu wood brought from the jungles of southwestern China.
02 Potala Palace
People's Republic of China · 2.2 km from Lhasa29.658° N 91.117° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by nrxfly from Pixabay What stands today began in 1645 under the Fifth Dalai Lama, and the pace of the two halves of the project tells its own story. The White Palace — the residential and administrative wing — went up remarkably fast, its exterior finished in about three years.
Did you know? In 1966 the personal intervention of Premier Zhou Enlai spared the palace from damage during the Cultural Revolution.
03 Yonghe Temple
People's Republic of China · 5.2 km from Beijing39.947° N 116.411° E
Image by llsheri1994 from Pixabay The compound began life not as a temple but as a prince's house. Work started in 1694 on a mansion for Yinzhen, the fourth son of the Kangxi Emperor, and the boy who would become the Qianlong Emperor was born here in 1711. When Yinzhen took the throne in 1722 as the Yongzheng Emperor, his old home was raised to the rank of a palace.
Did you know? In 1744 the Qianlong Emperor converted his father's former residence into a monastery of the Gelug school.
04 Summer Palace, Beijing
People's Republic of China · 15.1 km from Beijing39.998° N 116.269° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by hhach from Pixabay The gardens were laid out from around 1749 by the Qianlong Emperor, who dedicated them to his mother's sixtieth birthday and named them the Garden of Clear Ripples; they were completed in 1764 at enormous cost. In 1860, during the Second Opium War, British and French troops sacked and burned both this garden and the neighbouring Old Summer Palace.
Did you know? A bronze statue of an ox, cast in 1755, has lain on the eastern dike of Kunming Lake for more than two and a half centuries.
05 Xi'an City Wall
People's Republic of China · 5.2 km from Xi'an34.253° N 108.942° E
xiquinhosilva · CC BY 2.0 The wall was begun in 1370, shortly after Zhu Yuanzhang founded the Ming dynasty as the Hongwu Emperor, and took some eight years to complete. Its builders did not start from nothing: they raised it on the line of the Tang dynasty imperial city, the palace and government quarter of Chang'an when it was the capital of the Tang.
Did you know? Restoration work in 1986 uncovered the Tang dynasty Hanguang Gate, about 1,400 years old, now preserved as a museum inside the wall.
06 Jiayuguan
People's Republic of China · 7.5 km from Jiayuguan City39.801° N 98.216° E
Image by elvisyu from Pixabay The fort was built early in the Ming period, around 1372, beside an oasis that was then on the far western edge of the empire, and it was strengthened when an invasion by Timur was feared — a campaign that ended with Timur's death on the march. The complex forms a trapezoid with walls about 733 metres around and 11 metres high, enclosing more than 33,500 square metres.
Did you know? Watchtowers, corner towers, beacon towers and the wings of wall running north and south from the fort were added in 1539.
07 Kaiping Diaolou and Villages
People's Republic of China22.262° N 112.521° E
Stefan Fussan · CC BY-SA 3.0 They are the architecture of emigration. From the nineteenth century huge numbers of men from Kaiping went to work in North America, Southeast Asia and Australia, and the money they sent home made the county's families rich enough to attract bandits. Families and whole villages answered by building towers: some communal refuges where villagers could shelter, some residential towers for a single wealthy family, some lookout posts.
Did you know? Bianchouzhu Lou, a seven-storey tower raised in 1903, stands overlooking a village pond.
08 Jinshanling
People's Republic of China40.679° N 117.251° E
Image by Vined from Pixabay The wall here belongs to the Ming dynasty and was largely rebuilt from about 1570 under the direction of General Qi Jiguang, who spent years on this frontier training troops and turning the old defences into a tighter system. The towers stand unusually close together. On steep slopes, short cross walls were built across the walkway so that defenders could keep fighting even if attackers gained the top of the wall.
Did you know? The two-storey Big Jinshan Tower, about 11 metres high, combines a brick lower floor with an upper floor of brick and timber.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful castles, palaces and fortresses in the People's Republic of China?
- On our list, Forbidden City ranks first, followed by Potala Palace and Yonghe Temple.
- How long did it take to build the Forbidden City?
- Construction began in 1406 under the Yongle Emperor of the Ming dynasty and was completed in 1420. It remained the imperial palace until the last emperor, Puyi, left in 1924.
- Where does the Great Wall end in the west?
- Jiayuguan Pass in Gansu province is the western end of the Ming Great Wall. The fortress was built from 1372 at a narrow point of the Hexi Corridor, between the Qilian Mountains and the desert hills to the north.
- What are the Kaiping Diaolou?
- They are fortified, multi-storey towers in the villages of Kaiping in Guangdong, built mostly in the early 20th century by families of emigrants who had made money abroad. They served as defences against bandits and floods and combine Chinese and Western architectural styles.
- How many castles, palaces and fortresses are on this list in the People's Republic of China?
- The list covers 8 castles, palaces and fortresses.