Beijing Travel Guide: History and Position Today

Dated from around 1000 BC, Beijing developed as a frontier trading town for the Mongols, Koreans and tribes from Shandong and central China. It had grown to be the capital of the Yan Kingdom in the Warring States Period. During the Liao Dynasty Beijing was referred to as Yanjing ( capital of Yan ) which is still the name of Beijing's most popular beer.

Burnt to the ground by Genghis Khan in 1215 AD, the resurrected city was passed on to Kublai Khan (Genghis's grandson) as Dadu, or Great Capital.

The mercenary Zhu Yanhang led an uprising in 1368, taking over the city and ushering in the Ming Dynasty. The city was renamed Beiping( northern peace ) and for the next 35 years the capital was shifted south to Nanjing.

In the early 1400s Zhu's son Yong Le shuffled the court back to Beiping and renamed it Beijing (Northern Capital). Many of the structures like the Forbidden City and Tiantan were built in Yong Le's reign.

Manchu invaded and established the Qing Dynasty in the 17th century. Beijing was thoroughly renovated and expanded. Under them, and particularly during the reigns of the emperors Kangxi and Qianlong, Beijing was expanded and renovated, and summer palaces, pagodas and temples were built.

In the last 120 years of the Manchu Dynasty, Beijing and subsequently China were subjected to power struggles, invaders and the chaos created by those who held or sought power: the Anglo-French troops who in 1860 marched in and burnt the Old Summer Palace to the ground; the corrupt Regime under Empress Dowager Cixi; the Boxers; General YuanShikai; the warlords; the Japanese who occupied the city in 1737; and the Kuomintang after the Japanese defeat.

With Mao Zedong's proclamation of a 'People's Republic of China' to an audience of about 500,000 citizens in Tiananmen Square in 1949, the Communists stripped back the face of Beijing. Down came the commemorative arches, along with several outer walls, in the interests of solemnity and traffic circulation. Later, the reform of the 1980s and 1990s have changed Beijing dramatically. Nowadays, Beijing is increasingly becoming a modern and prosperous city.

These days, Beijing's youth are more interested in MTV then Mao; the rhetorical slogans of the Cultural Revolution have given way to herniated English splashed across designer-copy T-shirts; and experts, tourists, foreign investors and a cellular phone-toting hipoisie mix it up with the bureaucrats.

Beijing's temples, parks, and historic sites all sing wonderfully and powerfully of the dream that was Old Cathay, but in the same hallowed space there's a new Beijing taking shape.

Matching the international hotel sector and its glittering array of 254 homes-away-from-home, Beijing municipal authorities have built, and continue to add to, their network of highways, airport facilities and other elements of the infrastructure, bringing their city into the 21st century after only a brief stop in the 20th.

Coupled with the rapid development of cultural, economic and technical exchanges between China and the world has come an ever-increasing demand over the past decade for international meetings and specialized activities to be held in China's big cities.

Nor does it stop there. Tourism authorities recently unveiled plans to make Beijing one of the world's top tourist destinations and event hosts early in the new millennium. Over the next 15 years, they will invest time, effort and hundreds of millions of US-dollar equivalent funds developing and building scenic, historic and archaeological locales and upgrading its urban infrastructure. They will also build tourism sector by tightening the implementation of industry regulations and standards.