The Bustle Beneath

When I arrive in a new city, the first thing I do is go for a walk. It doesn't matter where, or if it's interesting. I walk to get a sense of place, to spot differences and similarities, and to get a feel for the city's rhythm.

Beijing, my home since March, has been the exception. Upon landing, I went straight into quarantine. For two weeks, my view was the central heating plant and car park outside my window, and since my release, a hip problem has curtailed walking.

In some ways, that doesn't matter. Outside of its many parks, Beijing is not really made for walking. Vast and sprawling, it's a place of broad, leafy roads and quiet architecture, of neighbourhoods organised into compounds, where markets have been relocated inside malls and corner vendors to neat, purpose-built food streets.

Couple this with the blank walls and security gates of the compound layout, and the initial impression is of a guarded, slightly cold city. Beijing can feel like an expression of power. The overriding impression is one of deliberate restraint, nothing like the delirious cityscapes of Chongqing, the street life of Chengdu or the neon wonderlands of Shanghai. Buildings are low-rise, solid if worn expressions of communist chic and pared-down modernism that encourage the eye not to linger.

There are exceptions. The Forbidden City, whose proportions — like those of Saint Petersburg — are meant to elicit feelings of insignificance, is architecturally and emotionally overawing, while the nearby government buildings glitter gracefully at night. Similarly, Rem Koolhaas's cantilevered China Central Television Headquarters

Building, MAD Architects' amorphous, almost alien Chaoyang Park Plaza, Zaha Hadid's swooping Galaxy SOHO and Paul Andreu's egglike National Centre for the Performing Arts are delightful bursts of architectural elan.

But for experience, nothing beats Beijing's historic neighbourhoods, the hutongs. Though many have been torn down and the survivors have been nipped and tucked to within inches of their lives, the grey-tiled roofs, painted eaves and wooden doorways are enchanting.

Strolling here, you'll catch glimpses of men playing mah-jong and grandmothers making trays of jiaozi dumplings, the sights and sounds of domestic life still lived as much in the narrow streets as in the courtyard homes. Then there are the pleasures of a more contemporary kind. The cafe culture of leafy Gulou, the serene Temple of Confucius, quiet teahouses and high-end design stores of Guozijian Street, the hipster-friendly breweries and eateries of Baochan and Wudaoying, and the 700-year-old Nanluoguxiang, many of its ancient houses now bustling boutiques popular with tourists, families and chattering teens — slices of overstuffed jianbing in one hand, mobile phone in the other — and the occasional twenty-something, dressed to kill in flowing hanfu finery straight out of the Ming Dynasty.

Here at last, the city comes to life. Just as it does, oddly enough, in its traffic: a constant flow of cars, buses, delivery carts, bicycles, scooters and pedestrians, all of which ignore lights, drive in the wrong direction and turn crossroads into confusions not quite Sri Lankan in their chaos, but anarchic enough to quietly yet refreshingly subvert Beijing's projection of order.

Warren SinghBartlett is an author, editor and journalist newly based in southern Beijing