Reuters Business Traveller

Beijing – Overview

Once a walled fortress for emperors and mandarins, Beijing has expanded into a gargantuan city of long, straight avenues and spider-web lanes. The majority of offices and hotels are close to the two main embassy compounds: Sanlitun, inside the eastern section of the third ring road, and Jianguomenwai (‘Jianwai’), east of Tiananmen Square. The Financial Street District in western Beijing also has a growing number of offices and hotels.

The Forbidden City, home to 24 successive emperors, was off-limits to Beijing’s citizens and visitors for more than 500 years. Now, along with Tiananmen Square, it’s the place to be. In the past 20 years, China’s capital has been supercharged as multinationals and entrepreneurs seek to crack open the world’s biggest consumer market.

Punishingly hot in the summer, numbingly cold in the winter, and often covered in a pall of choking pollution, Beijing is nonetheless fast becoming one of Asia’s hippest cities with a booming art scene, gorgeous boutiques and heavenly food.

Beijing’s energetic nightlife and busy business scene make it look every inch the Olympic boom town, but take the time to scratch under its surface and delve into the old city — the maze of hutong lanes near Houhai, for example — where you’ll find life is lived at a very different pace.

No matter whether you meet the city’s earthy, charismatic old self or its brash new persona, you’ll find Beijing welcoming, direct and, overall, fun.

-Money: Renminbi Yuan (CNY; symbol ¥). Notes are in denominations of ¥100, 50, 20, 10, 5 and 1.

China is still a largely cash-based economy, and major credit cards are not widely accepted outside of the more top-end hotels, restaurants and shops. ATMs can be unreliable, hard to use with a foreign card and difficult to locate.