Morning - a city that writes rules rather than prices
Beijing's financial role differs from every other Chinese city's. It is not primarily a trading floor; it is where the rules are written. The central bank, the two regulatory commissions and the foreign-exchange administration all sit here, and so do the head offices of the large state banks, insurers and brokerages. Financial Street itself is startlingly small for the weight it carries: a core area of 2.59 square kilometres holding more than 1,900 financial institutions. Across the city, financial-sector assets exceed RMB 220 trillion - about half the national total - and asset managers based in Beijing run roughly 30 per cent of the country's assets under management. In 2025 the sector added RMB 866.82 billion of value, up 8.7 per cent on the year, 16.6 per cent of the city's GDP, and contributed 1.5 percentage points of the capital's economic growth. Your guide opens the day with that distinction between a management centre and a market centre, because the rest of the itinerary turns on it.
Late morning - the exchange built for small companies
The Beijing Stock Exchange was created to do a specific job: give innovative small and medium-sized enterprises a route to public capital that the main boards do not easily provide. At the end of 2025 it listed 288 companies with a combined market capitalisation of RMB 869.44 billion; by March 2026 that had grown to 298 companies and over RMB 900 billion, with more than 9.8 million qualified investors. Set beside it, the city's wider capital base is larger still - 481 Beijing-based companies listed domestically at the end of 2025 and 807 onshore and offshore cumulatively, the highest of any Chinese city, with more than RMB 6 trillion raised directly through the capital markets over the five years to 2025. Your guide walks through how the exchange positions itself against Shanghai, Shenzhen and Hong Kong, and what listing on it actually requires of a company.
Lunch
A restaurant in the Xicheng district.
Afternoon - the old city, and where wealth used to come from
The afternoon changes register deliberately. You drive north to Shichahai and walk the hutong lanes to Prince Gong's Mansion, a Qing princely residence whose admission is included in this programme. The house was built on imperial favour and held by it; the fortune behind it existed because a court decided it should. Standing in those courtyards after a morning spent among regulators and listing rules is the point of the itinerary - eighteenth-century Chinese wealth was allocated by proximity to power, twenty-first-century capital is meant to be allocated by disclosed rules and open markets, and the distance between the two is the actual subject of the day. Your guide closes with a short briefing on that comparison, and then you are returned to your hotel.
On access, plainly
Regulators, exchanges, banks and securities firms are working institutions, not attractions, and this programme does not claim entry to any of them. It combines publicly reachable streets, the district itself and figures from published official sources. If your delegation needs a briefing, a meeting or a specific institution's time, tell us when you enquire and we will make the approach properly - and give you a straight answer about whether it can be arranged and on what terms.
Meals
Lunch
Accommodation
Day programme - no hotel night included.
