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Part of the Beijing University archeology department, the museum’s collection spans 280,000 years, from the Paleolithic era to the Qing dynasty. As well as fossils and bones, it includes beautiful bronzes and fine ceramics.

Close to the Temple of Heaven, south of Tian’an Men Square, this place is worth visiting for the museum building alone, which is the pavilion of a former grand temple complex (see Ancient Architecture Museum).

At the Poly Plaza, a shopping mall on the Second Ring Road, consumerism comes with added culture in the form of this small museum of traditional arts and crafts. Exhibits include Buddhas, bodhisattvas, bronzes, and some exquisite bells decorated with animal faces.

After wandering around the Forbidden City, call by this nearby museum to see all the bits of imperial Beijing that didn’t survive. The walls and gates that once encircled the city, along with literally dozens of vanished temples, are revisited through a great many maps, models, and photographs (see Imperial City Museum).

Visitors to the museum are greeted by paintings of Mao, Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, at least two of whom were fully conversant with the various methods of bringing death and destruction celebrated inside. The ground floor is filled with fighter planes, tanks, and missiles, while displays upstairs chronicle China’s military campaigns (see Chinese Military History Museum).

What the Met is to New York and the British Museum to London, the China National is to Beijing. Unlike the two foreign museums, which are filled with an international haul of spoils, this place contains only national treasures – and impressive they are too. However, only Communist Party groupies are likely to appreciate the propa-gandist Museum of the Revolution, which takes up the north wing of the building (see China National Museum).

Exhibits at this suitably hi-tech looking complex start with ancient science and come bang up-to-date with space capsules and magnetic-levitation trains (see Science and Technology Museum).

There are around 5,000 specimens on display, including a fine collection of models and skeletons of dinosaurs, and other creatures that are even more prehistoric than the Socialist stylings of the museum building (see Natural History Museum).

Housed in the 19th-century former City Bank of New York in the old Legation Quarter, this surprisingly fun museum boasts displays on themes such as the suppression of counter- revolutionaries and drug dealers. Famed police dog Feisheng is here – stuffed and mounted – and there are live transmissions from a roadside traffic camera. An interactive screen poses legal questions and correct answers win prizes: it doesn’t say what the punishment is for those who answer wrongly.

The recently opened Railway Ministry Science and Tech-nology Center has a vast hall displaying 53 old locomotives, including some of the enormous black engines imported by the Japanese when they controlled Manchuria. The museum is some distance from the center of town, but for steam buffs the 30-minute taxi ride is possibly a small price to pay (see China Railway Museum).