Go To beijing

The brash modernity of BEIJING comes as a surprise to many visitors. Traversed by more than a hundred flyovers and spiked with high-rises, this vivid metropolis is China at its most dynamic. For a thousand years, the drama of China's imperial history was played out here, with the emperor sitting enthroned at the centre of the Chinese universe, and though today the city is a very different one, it remains spiritually and politically the heart of the country.

 First impressions are of an almost inhuman vastness, conveyed by the sprawl of apartment buildings, in which most of the city's population of fifteen million are housed, and the eight-lane motorways that slice it up. It's a notion that's reinforced on closer acquaintance, from the magnificent Forbidden City, with its stunning wealth of treasures, to the concrete desert of Tian'anmen Square, geographical and psychic centre of the city. Qianmen, a noisy market area south of here, is a bit more alive, and ends in style with one of the city's highlights, the Temple of Heaven. Outside the centre, the scale becomes more manageable, with parks, alleyways and historic sites such as the Yonghe Gong and the Ancient Observatory offering respite from the city's oppressive orderliness. To the east, the Sanlitun area is a ghetto of expat services including some good upscale restaurants and plenty of bars. An expedition to the outskirts is amply rewarded by the Summer Palace, the best place to get away from it all.

Contemporary Beijing has an international flavour reflecting its position as the capital of a major commercial power. As the front line of China's grapple with modernity, it is being ripped up and rebuilt at a furious pace. Students in the latest fashions while away their time in Internet cafés, hip-hop has overtaken the clubs, and schoolkids carry mobile phones in their lunchboxes. Rising incomes have led not just to a brash consumer-capitalist society Westerners will feel very familiar with, but also to a revival of older Chinese culture – witness the re-emergence of the teahouse as a genteel meeting place and the interest in imperial cuisine.