By the time you finish reading this, something about Beijing will have changed. So much about the centuries-old landscape is new that even the city’s taxi drivers get lost, searching for addresses that didn’t exist a week before. The enormous cranes hanging over every part of the metropolis — from the red-brick walls of the Forbidden City to the cedar gardens and tiled spires of the Temple of Heaven — are a testament to the transformations shaping China’s capital. The Olympics are coming to Beijing in 2008, and the Chinese have promised wider streets, cleaner skies and greener pastures (the days when grass was condemned as bourgeois are long gone) for their guests. But the real reason for Beijing’s facelift is China’s emerging status as a world economic power.

I felt that sense of ambition the moment I arrived at Beijing’s massive Capital International Airport (PEK). Bigger than 70 football fields, Beijing’s airport is always crowded and always under construction: two additional highways and a light rail system are slated for completion in time for the Olympics. Still, I had no difficulty locating my bags, meeting up with friends or finding a taxi to head downtown. Once I got used to the scale of the place, I found that getting around was a lot easier than I’d expected.

Before arriving, I’d asked a flight attendant who lived in Beijing what to do while visiting her city. Without hesitation, she replied, “First day: Tiananmen Square, Forbidden City, Temple of Heaven, Pearl Market. Second day: Great Wall, Beijing Opera. Rest of time, shop.” Her advice worked well — if I substituted “weeks” for “days” — as an introduction both to the Beijing of old and the one that’s just beginning to appear.

Like many Americans, I associate Tiananmen Square with the 1989 massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators by government troops. For Beijing residents, however, the 100-acre public square is the heart of the city, containing its best-known monuments to communism: the People’s Committee Building, Mao Tse-tung’s mausoleum and the “Gate of Heavenly Peace” (Tiananmen) with its famed portrait of Mao. The square is packed with capitalists: souvenir hawkers, street hustlers and persistent pedicab drivers, which struck me as ironic. The Chinese don’t see it that way. As far as they’re concerned, free enterprise and democracy are not necessarily a package deal.

History is a living thing in Beijing. The Forbidden City is a walled complex, bigger than the Pentagon, where Manchu emperors lived in seclusion for 500 years. Its 9,999 buildings filled with ornamental carvings, silk tapestries and rock gardens make it Beijing’s biggest tourist attraction. But it’s more than just a museum. It also serves as art gallery, concert hall and office space. Beijing’s temples continue to serve as unofficial centers of worship, and they can be breathtaking (the towering Temple of Heaven), tranquil (the ornate, incense-filled Lama Temple) or downright scary. Statues at Dongyue Miao commemorate, in graphic detail, the Taoist pantheon of spirits, including the Department of Monsters, the Department of the Hell, and the Department for Implementing Fifteen Kinds of Violent Death.

What’s most amazing about Beijing’s historic sites is the sense of peace and tranquillity that prevails. While some sections of the Great Wall have been enlarged, commercialized and overrun with tourists, the Wall at Simatai has been left largely untouched for the last 500 years. Standing on its crumbling gray ramparts, looking across the valley to what once was Mongolia, with the morning mists swirling about my feet, I was nearly overwhelmed by the weight of silence. I felt much the same while resting in a grove of 300-year-old cedars within the emperor’s ancestral temple, beside the Forbidden City. It seemed impossible that a city of noise and traffic could exist just beyond its thick red walls.

There’s beauty in bustle and traffic too, as I discovered when I toured the huto ng: walled, mazelike neighborhoods exclusive to Beijing. Many of the hutong have already been bulldozed, victims of an insatiable demand for high-rise luxury condominiums and streets wide enough to accommodate Humvees and SUVs. Those that remain are a last glimpse of the Beijing that used to be: winding corridors of shops, schools and traditional Chinese neighborhoods. Most homes consist of four buildings surrounding a courtyard, with residents equally proud of the tree jutting through the middle of their roof and the color television beside it.

I didn’t ask whether the television was “real” or “fake.” In Beijing, the question is almost meaningless. “If we want something of a particular brand or quality, we go to a department store,” one taxi driver told me. “Otherwise, we go to the market.” It takes a keen eye to distinguish the genuine article from knockoffs at Beijing’s markets, which specialize in pearls, silks, sandalwood and jade as well as electronic goods, designer clothes and “antiques.” It also takes nerves of steel — or at least a healthy sense of humor — to master the bargaining process, which is equal parts business negotiation and friendly conversation. By the time I left, I had stopped trying to figure out which rugs and carvings were “real,” and had begun wondering why I ever paid so much for anything at home.

I also wondered how I could ever enjoy “Chinese food” in the United States again after feasting in Beijing. There are other culinary options in Beijing — Nam Nam on Sanlitun Street has terrific Vietnamese food, and I had great experiences with Indian, Japanese, Korean barbecue and even pizza — but after sitting down at a few of the city’s Sichuan restaurants, I wondered why. I still dream about the meal I had at Hua Jia Yi Yuan on Dongzhimen Street: shuizhe niurou, that spicy beef with the Sichuan peppercorns that made my tongue numb and my brain do somersaults. And yuxiang qiezi (fish-flavored eggplant). And ganbian dou (to call it merely a “spicy green-bean dish” would be like calling filet mignon a piece of beef). And then there’s tea, particularly jasmine, the sweet, flower-scented drink for which Beijing is known.

Dining in Beijing is a wonderfully communal affair, in which you honor your hosts by eating directly from the serving plate and responding to their requests to ganbei (drink up). This can be perilous when the drink in question is baijiu, a clear sweet liquid that tastes like airplane fuel and packs the same wallop. There’s plenty to do after dinner, from clubs to cafes to bowling: I thought opera was dull until I saw Beijing Opera’s combination of stylized dances, swordfights and acrobatics. However, my favorite late-night activity was talking, arguing and laughing the evening away with a large group of friends, both old and new.

Most Beijingers feel the same way. “Why would I ever go to another city in China?” one taxi driver asked. “Here, I know one person in the police department, another in the army. If anything happens to me, they’ll look after me. It’s the same thing if I travel: I’d never go on vacation with less than 10 people. You want someone to watch your back for you.” That model seems to apply in business as well as pleasure. Many Chinese admire Americans for their forthright, independent, personal style. However, Americans who try to establish themselves in the Chinese economy without a local partner often doom themselves to failure. In Beijing, relationships are much more important than capital when it comes to getting a business off the ground.

“Compared with 10 years ago,`foreigners have to be willing to spend more effort in order to be able to work in China,” said Ken Tang, director of sales and marketing for the Renaissance Beijing Hotel. “There are still a lot of opportunities here, but there is also a lot more competition, and people have to be willing to put that much more effort into it.”

Western politicians often claim that Chinese businesses are unwilling to “play by the rules” of international commerce. After walking through crowds of Beijing street vendors selling high-quality copies of CDs, DVDs and video games, I can understand their concerns. As China’s economy continues to grow, however — it is currently the sixth-largest in the world, with an average yearly growth rate of 10 percent throughout the 1990s — its business leaders are likely to resist the notion that the West should be allowed to set the rules. For the moment, China is beginning to establish a tradition of copyright law in order to protect its own traditional medicines on the international market.

Beijing is changing so fast that the next time I visit, I might not see the old men fishing by moonlight in the Forbidden City moat, or the children playing badminton on the sidewalk, or the families flying kites together in Tiananmen Square. I wouldn’t have missed any of that for the world.