Ninety minutes from Beijing, where the North China Plain runs into the Taihang mountains, a line of tombs lies in a landscape of old pines. These are the Western Qing Tombs, in Yi County of Hebei province, the burial ground of four Qing emperors, including Yongzheng, Jiaqing, Daoguang and Guangxu, along with a crowd of empresses, concubines and princes. The Qing had a second great cemetery, the Eastern Tombs, on the other side of Beijing, and the two were laid out according to feng shui principles with hills behind and open ground in front.
You approach along a long sacred way, an avenue lined with stone guardians, and the dark pines, which were planted in their thousands, give the whole place a hush. Each tomb has a gate, a hall for sacrifices, a stone pavilion with an inscription and a burial mound at the back, and the main buildings have yellow glazed roof tiles, reserved for the emperor. The last emperor to be buried here, Guangxu, died in 1908 under mysterious circumstances, and modern analysis of his remains found a huge quantity of arsenic, which suggests poison. The very last emperor of China, Puyi, did not rest in the imperial cemetery, though his ashes were eventually placed in a private cemetery nearby in the 1990s.
The riding in this area is pleasant, if you can arrange the paperwork. The roads climb gently from the plain into folded hills, with orchards, persimmon trees and small villages, and they offer some of the quieter riding within reach of the capital. Traffic is fairly light away from the main road, though lorries can be a nuisance, and the weather is clear and dry for much of the year. Spring brings blossom, and in autumn the persimmons hang like lanterns on bare branches.
Foreign riders in China need permits and often a guide, so check the regulations before you plan a trip. Local food includes noodles, dumplings and roast duck, and simple restaurants near the entrance serve hearty plates. Summer can be hot and thundery, winter is cold and dry with clear skies, and spring and autumn are best. A morning visit, when the mist is in the trees, is the finest.