Audioguides Pékin

Beijing has been the capital of China for most of the past 800 years. The Forbidden City, the imperial palace complex at the center of everything, was built between 1406 and 1420, covers 72 hectares, and contains 980 buildings. Ordinary people were not permitted to enter it for five centuries. Now it is the world's most visited museum. Walk through the southern Meridian Gate into the first courtyard and the scale of what was once exclusive performs itself in the open air: the distances are designed to dwarf.

The hutong neighborhoods, the narrow alley networks connecting traditional courtyard houses, are the other Beijing, the one that feels like the city people actually lived in.

They developed during the Yuan dynasty (13th-14th centuries) and spread across the city until the 20th century began demolishing them. Thousands of hutongs remain, concentrated in the neighborhoods north of the Forbidden City around Nanluoguxiang and Gulou, and in the area around Liulichang in the south. They narrow until two bikes cannot pass each other, open into small courtyard houses, and give you the scale that the imperial monuments deliberately denied.