Beijing Trivia
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49 free Beijing trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Beijing has been Ji, Yanjing, Zhongdu, Dadu, Beiping and finally the Northern Capital, and this quiz walks through all of them. It covers Peking Man, Kublai Khan's Khanbaliq, the Yongle Emperor's Forbidden City, the fall of the Ming in 1644, the burning of the Old Summer Palace, the Boxers, the Marco Polo Bridge, Mao on the gate in 1949 and the Red Guard rallies of 1966. The landmarks follow: the 9,999 rooms and 24 emperors of the Forbidden City, the Gate of Heavenly Peace and what stands on the square, Zhongnanhai, the nail-free Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests, Kunming Lake and Cixi's naval silver, the Great Wall sections, hutongs and siheyuan, China Zun and the 798 Art Zone. There are questions on the subway that replaced the city wall, Daxing airport, the Bird's Nest, 2008's 48 gold medals, Peking duck's oldest restaurant, Tsinghua and Peking universities and the sandstorms off the Gobi. Easy questions ask what Beijing means and what the Olympic stadium is called; hard ones want the year Bianyifang opened and who took the city forty days before the Manchus. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the city and its sites, and each question carries the sentence that supports it. Try our China and Great Wall quizzes next.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What does the name Beijing mean in Chinese?
Northern Capital
Northern Capital sets it against Nanjing, the 'Southern Capital': the name was given in 1403 so that the two Ming seats of government could be told apart.
Q 02As of 2020, Beijing held which record among the world's national capitals?
Most populous national capital
Most populous national capital: more than 21 million people live in the municipality, against about 14 million in Tokyo's, yet Beijing is not even the biggest city in its own country.
Q 03Which Beijing skyscraper, a giant angular loop of glass and steel, do locals call 'Big Pants'?
CCTV Headquarters
CCTV Headquarters is not a tower but a loop: two leaning legs bridged at the top, which is why Beijingers gave it the trouser nickname.
Q 04The 'Peking Man' fossils found near Beijing belong to which early human species?
Homo erectus
Homo erectus: villagers had long dug the hill's 'dragon bones' for medicine before scientists arrived, and the original fossils vanished during World War II while being sent abroad for safekeeping.
Q 05Which Mongol ruler built Dadu (Khanbaliq) on the site of Beijing as his Yuan dynasty capital?
Kublai Khan
Kublai Khan raised Dadu beside the ruins of Zhongdu, the Jin capital that his grandfather Genghis had besieged, looted and burned about fifty years earlier.
Q 06Which Ming emperor, sponsor of Zheng He's treasure fleets, moved the capital to Beijing and built the Forbidden City?
Yongle
Yongle had seized the throne from his nephew after a three-year civil war fought from his northern base, then moved the court from Nanjing to the city where his own power lay.
Q 07Who was the last emperor to live in the Forbidden City, which he left in 1924?
Puyi
Puyi had abdicated in 1912 at the age of six, but the new republic let him keep his title and live on in the palace for another twelve years.
Q 08Why was Beijing's palace called the Forbidden City?
Commoners were barred
Commoners were barred for the five centuries that emperors ruled from inside its walls; today tens of thousands of visitors walk through its gates every day.
Q 09Which institution has administered the Forbidden City since 1925?
The Palace Museum
The Palace Museum opened in 1925, the year after the imperial family moved out; the pick of its collection was shipped to Taiwan during the civil war, which is why Taipei has a National Palace Museum too.
Q 10Tiananmen Square is named after the gate on its north side, whose name means what?
Heavenly Peace
Heavenly Peace is the usual English rendering of Tian'anmen, once the front gate of the imperial palace grounds; the square before it was enlarged to four times its original size in the 1950s.
Q 11On what date did Mao Zedong proclaim the People's Republic of China from Tiananmen?
1 October 1949
1 October 1949 is still kept as China's National Day, and the square below the gate where Mao spoke fills each year for the anniversary.
Q 12China's national legislature meets each March in which building beside Tiananmen Square?
The Great Hall of the People
The Great Hall of the People was built for the People's Republic's tenth anniversary; its main auditorium seats more than 10,000 and its banquet hall 5,000.
Q 13Which walled compound west of Tian'anmen has housed China's top leadership since 1949?
Zhongnanhai
Q 21When the Kuomintang moved the capital to Nanjing in 1928, Beijing's name was changed to what?
Beiping
The name means 'Northern Peace' and had also been used by the early Ming before Beijing was made capital in 1403.
Q 22Much of Beijing's Ming-era city wall was torn down in the 1960s to make way for what?
The first subway line
The first subway line was planned as much for civil defence as for commuters, and digging it where the wall and moat stood meant far fewer homes had to be cleared.
Q 23The switch in English from 'Peking' to 'Beijing' came with the adoption of which official romanization system?
Pinyin
Pinyin was approved by China in 1958 but little used abroad until 1979, and the old spelling died hard: The New York Times held out until 1986, and the duck is still Peking.
Zhongnanhai was an imperial pleasure garden built around two lakes beside the Forbidden City; the emperors' lakeside retreat became the Communist Party's walled headquarters.
Q 14At the Temple of Heaven, Ming and Qing emperors performed annual ceremonies of prayer for what?
A good harvest
A good harvest was the emperor's own duty as the 'Son of Heaven', go-between for heaven and earth: he came in person and fasted in the temple's Hall of Abstinence.
Q 15The Temple of Heaven's layout reflects an old Chinese belief that the earth is a square and heaven is what shape?
A circle
A circle: that is why the great prayer hall is round yet stands inside a square yard, while its rings of wooden pillars count off the four seasons, twelve months and twelve traditional hours.
Q 16Kunming Lake at Beijing's Summer Palace was laid out in imitation of which famous lake in Hangzhou?
West Lake
West Lake: the Qianlong Emperor had an old city reservoir enlarged in its image in the 1750s, with a long causeway and six bridges copied from Hangzhou's.
Q 17Empress Dowager Cixi reportedly diverted silver from what into rebuilding the Summer Palace?
Upgrading the Qing navy
Upgrading the Qing navy: she is said to have paid for the rebuilding with navy funds, and in the war of 1894-95 Japan routed China's fleet.
Q 18Anglo-French forces looted and burned the Old Summer Palace in 1860 during which conflict?
The Second Opium War
The Second Opium War ended with British and French troops in Beijing; Lord Elgin had the palace burned in reprisal for the torture and killing of captured envoys.
Q 19In 1900 an eight-nation army fought its way into Beijing to end which uprising?
The Boxer Rebellion
The Boxer Rebellion took its name from the martial-arts drills its fighters believed made them invulnerable; they had besieged Beijing's foreign legations for 55 days when the relief force arrived.
Q 20An exchange of fire on 7 July 1937 at which bridge near Beijing triggered the Second Sino-Japanese War?
The Marco Polo Bridge
The Marco Polo Bridge owes its Western name to the Venetian's praise of it; the 1937 shooting began when Japanese troops demanded to search a nearby walled town for a missing soldier.
Q 24The Beijing district of Zhongguancun is often nicknamed China's what?
Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley fits: the high-tech district grew up from the 1980s with government backing, right beside the capital's two most famous universities.
Q 25When it opened in September 2019, Beijing Daxing International Airport was billed as the world's largest what?
Single-structure terminal
Single-structure terminal: Zaha Hadid's firm drew it as a starfish, five arms of gates radiating from one central hall so that the farthest gate is under eight minutes' walk away.
Q 26The Beijing National Stadium, built for the 2008 Olympics, is nicknamed what?
The Bird's Nest
The Bird's Nest has no outer wall: a red concrete seating bowl stands inside a separate, free-standing tangle of silver-painted steel, and the gap between the two is left open to the air.
Q 27Which architecture firm won the 2003 competition to design Beijing's National Stadium?
Herzog & de Meuron
Herzog & de Meuron, the Basel pair who had turned a London power station into Tate Modern, worked with a Chinese design institute and had the artist Ai Weiwei as artistic adviser.
Q 28By hosting the 2022 Games, Beijing became the first city to have done what?
Hosted both Summer and Winter Olympics
Hosted both Summer and Winter Olympics: Beijing beat Almaty by just four votes, promising artificial snow to make up for mountains that see very little of the natural kind.
Q 29Which American swimmer won a record eight golds at the 2008 Beijing Olympics?
Michael Phelps
Michael Phelps broke Mark Spitz's 36-year-old record of seven golds at one Games, and he took the 100 m butterfly by a single hundredth of a second.
Q 30The 2008 Games were the third Summer Olympics held in Asia, after which two cities?
Tokyo and Seoul
Tokyo and Seoul hosted in 1964 and 1988; Beijing's Games opened on the eighth day of the eighth month of 2008 because eight is a lucky number in Chinese tradition.