Beijing has been a capital for eight centuries, and the layers are still readable street by street. This route follows them in order: Ming and Qing ritual sites, then the ruins and legation walls of the 1800s, then the hutongs where the empire's last families lived.
Ming and Qing emperors performed the winter solstice sacrifice here from 1420; the triple-eaved Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests was rebuilt in 1890 after a lightning strike. Park opens 06:00, halls 08:00-17:00.
Bronze armillary spheres and a celestial globe stand on a Ming watchtower platform of 1442, where Jesuits Ferdinand Verbiest and Adam Schall von Bell redesigned the Qing court's instruments in the 1670s. Closed Mondays.
Founded in 1302 under the Yuan, the temple holds 198 stone stelae carved with the names of 51,624 men who passed the imperial exams. Next door, Qianlong lectured from the moated Biyong Hall in 1785.
Kublai Khan founded the city's timekeeping centre here in 1272; the present towers date from 1420 and 1745. The 63-tonne Yongle bell once marked the hours for the whole capital from 69 steps up.
Opened in 1959 and rebuilt in 2011 into the largest museum in the world by floor area, 200,000 m². The Ancient China galleries in the basement run from Peking Man skulls to the fall of the Qing in 1912.
Beijing's foreign legation street after the 1860 treaties, besieged for 55 days during the Boxer summer of 1900. Still standing along the lane: the grey-brick Dutch legation, St Michael's Church of 1902 and the old Yokohama Specie Bank.
The Qing emperors' 350-hectare garden palace, looted and burned by Anglo-French troops in October 1860. The Xiyang Lou European-style ruins, designed by the Jesuit Giuseppe Castiglione, are deliberately left unrestored.
The 1920s Yenching University campus, laid out by Henry Murphy on a Qing princely garden; the Boya Pagoda is a water tower disguised as a Liao-style stupa. The university's older Shatan campus was the cradle of the May Fourth Movement in 1919.
Built in 1777 for Heshen, Qianlong's favourite minister, forced to hang himself for corruption in 1799, and granted to Prince Gong in 1851. Nine courtyards, a 22-metre indoor opera house and the Fu character stele carved by Kangxi.
A Yuan-dynasty lane grid laid out around 1267 and never redrawn. Turn west into Mao'er Hutong for number 35, the family home of Wan Rong, who left it in 1922 to marry Puyi and became China's last empress.
Sun Yat-sen's widow lived here from 1963 until her death in 1981, in a Qing princely garden that was Prince Chun's estate and the birthplace of the last emperor Puyi in 1906. Her study, desk and Steinway stand as she left them.
Beijing's oldest surviving commercial lane, named for the Qing-era shops that sold tobacco pipes to Manchu bannermen. At its western end the Silver Ingot Bridge has separated Qianhai from Houhai since the Yuan grain canal ran through here.