Things to Do in Beijing in December

The Mutianyu section of the Great Wall sits roughly ninety minutes northeast of central Beijing, a serpentine run of stone watchtowers draped along a mountain ridge that in December is bare and tawny against that enormous dry sky. A private tour means your driver collects you from your hotel before the tour buses mobilize, and by the time you reach the wall the only sound is wind scraping across the crenellations and the crunch of frost under your boots. On a clear December morning, and most December mornings in Beijing are clear, the visibility stretches to ridgelines you cannot see in summer haze, and the wall itself seems to extend without end into the brown hills.

The high-speed rail from Beijing South to Xi'an North covers over a thousand kilometers in roughly four and a half hours, and the ride itself is part of the experience, the flat Hebei plain giving way to loess hills, the landscape turning drier and more ochre as you push west. At the other end waits Emperor Qin's buried army: row upon row of terracotta soldiers standing in their original pits beneath an aircraft-hangar-scale shelter, each face distinct, the earthen pigment faded but still faintly visible on a shoulder plate or a topknot. The scale is numbing. You smell cool clay and dust, you hear the shuffling reverence of visitors on the elevated walkways, and you realize that photographs never convey the sheer spatial weight of six thousand figures standing at attention underground.

This all-inclusive format removes every logistical friction point from a Mutianyu visit: hotel pickup in central Beijing, entrance fees, cable car, lunch at a village restaurant at the base of the wall, and a guide who walks the wall with you rather than waiting at the bottom. That last detail matters. A knowledgeable guide on the wall itself can point out where original Ming-dynasty stonework ends and twentieth-century restoration begins, the older sections rougher, their mortar crumbling to reveal the rammed-earth core, while the restored stretches are smooth and almost too perfect. In December the surrounding chestnut and walnut orchards are leafless, which opens up views down into the valley that the summer canopy hides entirely. The air tastes of nothing but cold.

Combining Mutianyu with the Summer Palace in a single day sounds ambitious. But the December thinning of crowds makes it workable in a way that July never could. You spend the morning on the Great Wall, the now-familiar cold clarity, the stone underfoot, and the afternoon at Kunming Lake, where the frozen surface stretches flat and pale beneath the Tower of Buddhist Incense perched on Longevity Hill. The Summer Palace in winter is a different animal from its summer incarnation: the painted Long Corridor is quiet enough to hear your own footsteps echo off the ceiling beams, and the colors of the painted panels, greens, reds, golds depicting scenes from Journey to the West and Romance of the Three Kingdoms, are vivid against the bare grey branches outside. The lake ice creaks occasionally, a low groaning sound that carries across the grounds.

When it is minus five outside and the wind is cutting down the hutong lanes, there is a particular pleasure in learning to fold Beijing-style jiaozi from a professional chef without leaving your kitchen, or your hotel room. This online class, led by Chef Sunflowerli, walks you through the dough, the fillings (pork and napa cabbage is the classic. But lamb with cumin and Sichuan pepper appears in some sessions), and the pleating technique that seals each dumpling into a crescent with a ruffled spine. The instruction is precise enough that you smell the toasted sesame oil and chopped ginger as you work, and when you bite into your first homemade dumpling, the wrapper tender, the filling releasing a spurt of savory broth, you will understand why dumplings are the comfort food Beijing returns to every winter.

Five kilometers on the Great Wall is a different proposition from a cable-car-up, photo, cable-car-down visit. This guided hike uses the uphill cable car to reach the wall at a mid-point, then walks east along a stretch that grows progressively wilder, the paving stones giving way to rougher footing, the watchtowers less restored, the crowds nonexistent. In December the hike has an edge to it: the air is thin and biting, the stone steps can be slick with frost in shaded sections, and you feel the altitude in your lungs on the steeper inclines. But the payoff is a kind of solitude that the Great Wall almost never offers. You hear nothing but the wind and your own breathing. The wall narrows in places to barely two meters, the drop on either side falling away into scrub oak and wild walnut, and on a clear day, which is nearly every day in Beijing this month, the panorama extends to a horizon of folded brown ridges under that immense dry sky.