A Survey of Beijing

Beijing is situated in the northwestern part of the North China Plain between the rivers Yongding He (Hunhe) to the southwest and Wenyu He to the northeast, at an elevation of 43.5m above sea level.To the west, the northwest and the south, the city is surrounded by mountain ranges. Mountain passes in the northwest lead to the Mongolian Plateau, in the north, up into the northeastern mountains and in the east, along the coast into Manchuria. The Beijing Plain thus always worked as an natural link between China and her neighbors to the north.

The climate in Beijing is of the continental type, with cold and dry winters, due to the Siberian air massses that move southward across the Mongolian Plateau. The summers are hot owing to warm and humid monsoon winds from the southeast bringing Beijing most of its annual precipitation. January is the coldest month with an average temperature of -4¡æ, July the warmest with an average of 26¡æ. Winter usually begins towards the end of October with cold, dry northwesterly winds. They sweep across Beijing until the end of March. Nasty sand storms, mostly towards the end of the winter, are not at all unusual. In all, there is frost for a period of approximately 80 days. There usually is a rapid change from spring to summer. The summer months, June to August, are wet and hot with about 40% of the annual precipitation.

Beijing has a whole area of 16808 square kilometres, stretching 160 kilometres from east to west and over 180 kilometres from north to south. It has 18 districts and counties. They are Dongchen, Xichen, Xuanwu, Chongwen, Chaoyang, Haidian, Fengtai and Shijingshan in the surburbs and Fangshan, Mengtougou, Changping, Tongxian, Shunyi, Daxing, Huairou, Miyun, Pinggu and Yianqing in the outer suburbs.

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