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Baoding became the capital of Zhili in 1669 and kept the office of the governor-general, the first of the Qing empire's eight great governorships. The surviving yamen on West Street shows how a province was administered, and the city lost the rank within a century of the empire's fall.
The Ding kilns stood at Jianci village in Quyang County, west of Baoding, and worked from the eighth century to the fourteenth. They fired bowls upside down with coal, which gave the glaze its ivory tone, and their carved white ware was counted among the five famous kilns.
The Western Qing tombs fill a valley under the Yongning mountain in Yi County, south-west of Beijing, with four imperial mausoleums laid out from 1729 into the twentieth century. The site is the western half of the single World Heritage property inscribed in 2000 with the Eastern tombs.
Baiyangdian is the largest freshwater lake in northern China, a shallow basin where more than 3,700 channels connect 146 stretches of water. Its fishing villages weave mats from the reed beds, and the same reeds once hid a guerrilla squadron from Japanese columns.