Eastern Beijing

The city's most famous thoroughfare, Chang'an Jie, heads east from Tiananmen Square into the city's major commercial district: the shopping street of Wangfujing is one focus of interest. Further east, to the Third Ring Road and beyond, are numerous five-star hotels and smart shopping centres, plus some of the city's most exciting nightlife.

Eastern Beijing (largely encompassed by Chaoyang District) is the economic heart of the modern capital, home to scores of embassies and the diplomats who staff them. It is also the area in which, in the past, international journalists were required to live, and in which most still do. ­Beijing’s first modern office building – the Citic Building – was built here soon after Deng Xiaoping started his economic reforms, and the area is now home to the China headquarters of hundreds of companies from around the world.

A major area of interest is in and around Wangfujing, the glitzy shopping street where Beijing's consumer boom first flourished.

Further east is the Central Business District occupies an area of roughly 4 sq km (1½ sq miles), set to double by 2017, centred roughly on the iconic CCTV headquarters east of the Third Ring Road and overlooked, since 2009, by the 330-metre (1100ft) World Trade Centre Tower III. The uniform, boxlike home/office complex is a major landmark doubtlessly poised to serve as a backdrop for business deals that will shape the future of Beijing and the world.

Only a few scattered remnants of the past remain in these parts (Ritan Park and the Ancient Observatory are two), offering few sites for visitors beyond marvelling at the new, gleaming buildings and perhaps stumbling upon a back alleyway where pockets of a more traditional and humble lifestyle live on in the shadows of the 21st-century capital.

To the north, the embassy district of Sanlitun has exploded into a neon-lit and ever-expanding zone of entertainment and hedonism where Martinis are glugged down by Chinese professionals whose parents would never have set foot in a bar. Entrepreneurs from around the world dip a toe into the restaurant trade, creating a cornucopia of foreign cuisines; some are successful, while others fall foul of the whims of spoilt diners and city bureaucrats and end up facing huge financial losses.

In the northeast, the huge green expanse of Chaoyang Park offers some respite and room to breathe away from the congested city-centre roads, with plenty of facilities to keep children entertained. Further out to the northeast a once loosely knit community of penniless artists has thrived and morphed almost unrecognisably into the 798 Art District, a venue for international galleries, the exhibition spaces of China’s new generation of super-rich creative talent and stopping point for busloads of camera-wielding art tourists from home and abroad.