On our first full day in Beijing, partly by way of helping me get a feeling for the city’s geography, we climbed up Jingshan, the large artificial hill in the historical dead centre of Beijing, overlooking the Forbidden City. The views are stunning from the pavilion at the top of its highest peak, but it’s one of those spots which somehow manages to attract more locals than tourists. We arrived a little while before sunset to find it crowded, but with a relatively peaceful air.
Once the highest point in the whole city, it is still the highest point for a couple of miles around thanks to strict controls on building height in the city centre. Outside the official city centre seems to be a free-for-all though, with the result that from the Pavilion of Everlasting Spring, you get uninterrupted views over the whole of the oldest part of the city, and beyond it a seemingly unbroken wall of skyscrapers. Beyond those, on a particularly clear day – and this was one of them – you can see rolling hills out to the west.
As the sun goes down, swifts swing lower and lower in the sky till they are swooping right under the arches of the pagoda, chasing the evening’s insects. Big butterflies settle on photographers too focused on distant views to see them.
Once the sun was fully set, we set off down the hill to explore more of old Beijing.
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