When Marco Polo arrived in Beijing, which he called Cambaluc (“The City of the Khan”), he declared himself incapable of giving a description that would do it justice. “You must know,” he said, “that the city of Cambaluc has such a multitude of houses, and such a vast population inside the walls and outside, that it seems quite past all possibility.”

If words failed even the world’s most well-known travel writer, I wondered how I would fare on a whirlwind two-day tour of the 20 million-person metropolis. I discovered Polo knew what he was (or wasn’t) talking about as my husband and I pedaled up to an enormous intersection near Tiananmen Square during the morning rush hour.

Hundreds of commuters seated on bicycles to our right and left — some in business attire, others with their bike racks precipitously stacked with goods — waited for the traffic signal to change. When the light turned green, we set off together with the collective whir of thousands of spokes.

Though Beijing has undergone numerous transformations since the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan established his winter palace here, the city maintained a larger-than-life landscape through the ages, from the 9,999-room Forbidden City and vast Soviet-style spaces to the $40 billion makeover following the city’s successful Olympic bid.

Nowadays, skyscrapers designed by the world’s top architectural firms jostle for space with ancient hutong alleyways, and the city’s skyline can change practically overnight. With this in mind, we took to the streets on a blustery November morning to explore by bike the rapidly disappearing traditional neighborhoods at Beijing’s heart.

No sooner had we cycled past The Forbidden City than one of my husband’s pedals snapped. Dodging traffic on the wide boulevard, we pulled the hobbled bike to a garage where three old men sat surrounded by parts. They laughed and clucked their tongues as we approached, and one of them held up a calculator with his fee: 50 yuan, roughly a quarter of the bike’s retail cost. My husband sputtered and shook his head, but the mechanic only grinned.

After accepting his extortionate rate, we soon found ourselves pedaling past a series of ponds bordered by elaborate homes, trendy shops and courtyard cafés. When we stopped to rub feeling back into our gloved fingers, we spotted a number of stout, Speedo-clad men dog-paddling to the center of one icy lake.

Eschewing the expensive — but delicious-looking — pizzerias and wine bars, we opted for lunch at one of the bustling, family-style Chinese restaurants. Though the English menu offered such intriguing dishes as “steamed leather jacket,” “gastronomy frog” and “fried bloody noun,” we dined on sautéed string beans, peppered bacon and thin-sliced pumpkin wedges fried in egg batter.

For dessert, my husband was intent on finding the market where scorpions are famously fried and impaled on sticks. But after an hour of searching the labyrinthine streets in vain, we decided to speed back toward Chairman Mao’s mausoleum on the south side of Tiananmen Square, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Great Helmsman’s body while we still had a shot at making it through the line.

Although the Chinese Communist Party admits Mao was officially “30 percent wrong” in his policies and thinking, visiting his embalmed body is still a life-affirming pilgrimage for many Chinese, and the line of bouquet-bearing well wishers can be several hours long. (More than once I was tempted to tell an elbow-throwing grandmother, “No cuts.”)

Inside, the guards keep visitors moving at a brisk pace, making it impossible to determine whether the body in the case is a wax replica or the real deal. According to historians, Mao’s inexperienced doctors pumped his corpse so full of formaldehyde that his face temporarily swelled up like a beach ball.

On the opposite end of the windswept, football field-sized plaza, Chinese tour groups in matching hats take turns posing in front of Chairman Mao’s iconic portrait, permanently affixed to the south gate of The Forbidden City. Sunburned beggars from China’s far-flung provinces sell trinkets and mill around among the tourists, their children grabbing at strangers’ hands.

Though the square is best known for the 1989 pro-democracy demonstrations that left hundreds of students dead, you’ll find no mention of the event in the history display at Tiananmen Gate: Photographs with that date depict ebullient citizens watching a fireworks display. These days, plainclothes police officers keep an eye out for dissidents on the square — of which there are none.

The next morning, we rose before dawn to join a tour of The Great Wall at Simatai, about a two-hour drive outside the city. After scrounging for breakfast in the dark streets — steamed dumplings and milk tea at one of the only open restaurants — we were ushered into a tour bus outside our hotel.

We learned that we would be dropped at Simatai while the rest of the group traversed there from Jinshanling, a section of the wall 10 kilometers away. We disembarked with Barbara, an elderly woman whose daughter remained on the bus to Jinshanling to be with a guy she’d just met, and began the steep scramble toward the first watchtower. Barbara laughed good-naturedly about not being able to keep up; however, I couldn’t help but feel guilty abandoning her when the path grew too rough for her to continue.

A fine layer of snow made the wall’s 70-degree angles even more precarious, and in some areas we slid, seated, down the path rather than risking a sprained ankle. Ahead and behind us, the wall snaked along the leafless ridge for miles, cutting across hillsides that seemed to have been brushed with cinnamon. In the distance we could see the other group picking their way toward us like an invading band of well-kempt marauders.

We returned to the city just before sunset and, famished, made a beeline for an inviting restaurant we’d noticed while wandering the hutong, full of heavy wooden tables and black-and-white photography. Warming our toes next to the heater, we feasted on cashew chicken, spicy Chinese eggplant and Tsingtao beer. “It’s not exactly scorpions,” my husband said, and for this I was thankful.

While we were mopping up the last of our dessert — fried bread served with sweetened condensed milk — the owner of the restaurant alighted upon us with a grin. Noticing my SLR camera, he pulled out an ancient Holga and snapped a photo of us from across the table. In broken English, he introduced himself as Jia Yong (a well-known local photographer, as we later learned) and invited us upstairs for a mostly mimed tour of his photography studio.

Perhaps foreseeing the slow extinction of the neighborhood he grew up in, Yong began chronicling life in the hutong when he was a teenager and now spends all his spare time taking photos and hosting exhibits in the area. His encyclopedic body of work was spilling over in stacks, prints of crumbling courtyards and dumpling shops tacked to the wall above shelves of antique and digital cameras.

As he silently unveiled a number of glossy portraits — one of a boy with his grandfather, another of a bicycle repairman — his excitement for the city was palpable. I couldn’t help but notice that his broad, smiling face and close-set, twinkling eyes lent him a striking resemblance to Kublai Khan, whose passion for his people is what ultimately loosened Marco Polo’s tongue.

Aman at Summer Palace, Beijing
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China National Tourist Office
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Grand Hyatt Beijing
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Made in China
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Maison Boulud
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The Westin Beijing Financial Street
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