The Most Beautiful Places in Beijing
6 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Beijing are National Centre for the Performing Arts, Beijing, Forbidden City and Temple of Heaven. The list covers 6 places. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Beijing has been the capital of China for most of the last seven centuries, and the Ming and Qing emperors designed it as a cosmic diagram. The imperial palace sits on a north-south axis at the centre, altars to heaven and earth surround it at the cardinal points, and gardens and lakes were laid out for the court. The city keeps that ceremonial core while adding some of the boldest contemporary buildings in Asia.
The Forbidden City, the palace of twenty-four emperors, is the largest surviving ensemble of traditional wooden buildings in the world, its yellow-tiled halls rising behind courtyard after courtyard. To the south, the Temple of Heaven holds the round Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests under three tiers of blue roof tiles, where emperors prayed for good harvests. In the northwest, the Summer Palace arranges pavilions, bridges and a long painted corridor around Kunming Lake and Longevity Hill.
Modern Beijing answers with its own landmarks. The National Centre for the Performing Arts, a dome of titanium and glass designed by Paul Andreu, appears to float on a surrounding pool. The CCTV Headquarters by Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren bends into a continuous loop of two leaning towers joined at the top, one of the most recognisable structures of the twenty-first century.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | National Centre for the Performing Arts, Beijing | Opera house | |
| 2 | Forbidden City | Palace | ✓ |
| 3 | Temple of Heaven | Temple | ✓ |
| 4 | Yonghe Temple | Palace | |
| 5 | Summer Palace, Beijing | Palace | ✓ |
| 6 | CCTV Headquarters, Beijing | Skyscraper |
01 National Centre for the Performing Arts, Beijing
People's Republic of China · 0.9 km from Beijing39.903° N 116.384° E
Aurelio Asiain from HIrakata-shi, Osaka, Japan · CC BY-SA 2.0 The National Centre for the Performing Arts rises beside Chang'an Avenue as an enormous shell of titanium and glass floating on a lake. The French architect Paul Andreu, best known for his airport terminals, designed it as a single ellipsoidal dome that holds three separate theatres.
Did you know? The total floor area is about 219,400 square metres, roughly half of it in the main building.
More about National Centre for the Performing Arts, Beijing →
02 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 For almost five centuries the Forbidden City was the physical centre of the Chinese state.
Did you know? Giant stone slabs were probably dragged to the site on sledges along paths of ice slicked with well water.
03 Temple of Heaven
People's Republic of China · 2.4 km from Beijing39.882° N 116.407° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by ccxcn from Pixabay The Temple of Heaven is less a single temple than a walled ceremonial landscape in the south of central Beijing, laid out so that architecture itself would read as a statement about the cosmos.
Did you know? The Jiajing Emperor, who gave the complex its present name, also built matching altars to the Sun, Earth and Moon on Beijing's east, north and west sides.
04 Yonghe Temple
People's Republic of China · 5.2 km from Beijing39.947° N 116.411° E
Image by llsheri1994 from Pixabay The tallest figure in Yonghe Temple, the Lama Temple of Beijing, rises 18 metres under the roof of the last great hall: a standing Maitreya, the Buddha of the future, carved from one trunk of white sandalwood, with roughly another eight metres of the same log sunk into the ground to hold it upright.
Did you know? The future Qianlong Emperor was born inside the compound in 1711.
05 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 Summer Palace is a landscape painting made with water, earth and timber. 9 square kilometres is Kunming Lake, a body of water dug by hand, and the spoil was heaped up to shape Longevity Hill, about 60 metres high, along its northern shore.
Did you know? The grounds hold over 3,000 historic structures and a collection of more than 40,000 objects, from bronzes and porcelain to furniture.
06 CCTV Headquarters, Beijing
People's Republic of China · 5.6 km from Beijing39.915° N 116.457° E
HoweyYuan · CC BY-SA 4.0 Seen from Beijing's East Third Ring Road, the headquarters of China Central Television refuses to behave like a skyscraper.
Did you know? Some 75 elevators serve the building's offices, newsrooms and studios.
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 places in Beijing?
- On our list, National Centre for the Performing Arts, Beijing ranks first, followed by Forbidden City and Temple of Heaven.
- How old is the Forbidden City?
- The Forbidden City was built between 1406 and 1420 under the Ming Yongle Emperor and remained the imperial palace until the end of the Qing dynasty in 1912.
- Why is the Temple of Heaven round?
- In traditional Chinese cosmology heaven was round and earth was square, so the halls and altars where emperors worshipped heaven are circular, set within square enclosures.
- What is the Summer Palace in Beijing?
- It is a vast imperial garden of the Qing dynasty, built around Kunming Lake and Longevity Hill. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Beijing?
- In our collection, the places in Beijing are most often palaces (3), temples (1), theatres (1) and opera houses (1).
- How many places are on this list in Beijing?
- The list covers 6 places.