An imperial palace built for an empire, a wall built to keep one out, a hutong home that opens its door.

Beijing has been a fortified northern seat of power in some form since antiquity, but its present shape dates to Kublai Khan’s Mongol Yuan dynasty, which built the walled city of Dadu here in 1267 on a strict north-south axis aligned with the pole star — a plan the Ming and Qing dynasties inherited rather than replaced. When the Yongle Emperor moved the Ming capital north from Nanjing, he rebuilt that axis around the Forbidden City, a walled palace complex of nearly a thousand buildings completed in 1420 that housed 24 emperors across the Ming and Qing dynasties for close to five centuries, guarded so completely that ordinary subjects who entered it uninvited could be executed. The same emperor’s court completed the Temple of Heaven that same year, an altar complex built not for worship of a god but for the emperor’s own annual rites to secure a good harvest — a role so central to the dynasty’s legitimacy that its principal hall was, for centuries, rebuilt in near-exact replica after fires.

The Great Wall sections most visitors now walk near Beijing — Badaling, Mutianyu, Jinshanling and Simatai among them — are mostly Ming-dynasty reconstructions of far older fortifications, rebuilt in stone and brick from the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries to hold off incursions from the north; the wall as a whole spans some two thousand years of intermittent building by a dozen different dynasties, not one continuous project. The Summer Palace tells a rather more embattled story: substantially destroyed by British and French forces in 1860 during the Second Opium War, then rebuilt from 1886 using funds controversially diverted from the imperial navy’s budget under the regent Empress Dowager Cixi, only to be looted and burned again during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 and rebuilt a second time from 1902 — the lakes, pavilions and marble boat visitors see today are largely that late-Qing reconstruction, not the eighteenth-century original. The city’s more recent transformation has been just as deliberate: the 2008 Summer Olympics gave Beijing the steel lattice of the National Stadium, nicknamed the Bird’s Nest, and the bubble-wrapped National Aquatics Center beside it, a single engineered gesture built to announce a very different kind of capital to the rest of the world.