UNESCO Heritages

	The Palace Museum, historically and artistically one of the most comprehensive Chinese museums, was established on the foundation of the palace that was the ritual center of two dynasties, the Ming and the Qing, and their collections of treasures. The Palace Museum was also made a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1987. www.dpm.org.cn

	The Temple of Heaven in the southern part of Beijing is China's largest existing complex of ancient sacrificial buildings. Occupying an area of 273 hectares, it is three times the area of the Forbidden City. The Temple of Heaven was entered into the world cultural heritage list in 1998. www.tiantanpark.com

	The Summer Palace in northwest suburban Beijing is the largest and most complete imperial garden existing in China. It was first built in the 12th century as an imperial palace. Renovation and extension in the following several hundred years till the end of the 19th century led it into the scale we see today, and was officially named Summer Palace. The Summer Palace was added to the world cultural heritage list in 1998. www.summerpalace-china.com

	In December 1929, a Chinese paleoanthropologist named Pei Wenzhong discovered a complete skull of "Peking Man" on Dragon Bone Hill northwest of Zhoukoudian, in the southwest suburbs of Beijing. Later, archaeologists unearthed 40-odd individually fossilized skeletons of "Peking Man", male, female, old and young, all at the same site. Zhoukoudian, therefore, became the most common site for human remains with the most abundant fossils in the world from the same period. The discovery pushed the history of Beijing's civilization back to some 600,000 years. These fossilized remains prove that "Peking Man" was primitive man in an evolutionary process from ancient ape to modern man, and is the ancestor of the Chinese nation. In 1987, the Zhoukoudian caves were listed as one of the world cultural heritage sites. www.zkd.cn

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UNESCO Heritages