I stayed in a hotel very near to the Forbidden City, and under an hour's walk away was "SUHU - QianMen", an exclusively vegan, all-you-can-eat buffet-style restaurant:
(tofu, various vegetables, noodles, steamed buns)
Under an hour's walk from my hotel in a different direction was another branch of SUHU, "SUHU - Fulllink Plaza", which was also exclusively vegan, but a more traditional, formal restaurant setting:
(assorted fruit and sprouting beans, served as a starter)
(tofu and mushrooms in a vegetable broth)
(green beans and chilli - quite spicy!!)
(green leaf filled steamed buns)
Very close to my hotel was a wonderful vegetarian restaurant, "Fu Hui Ci Yuan". From the outside, it looked unremarkable:
However, the food and environment were fantastic (I went back quite often; the following pictures are from a number of trips!). The restaurant is linked with a Buddhist organisation and most of the dishes on the menu were actually vegan:
(a spicy tofu dish with rice)
(green beans with a black bean sauce)
(assorted veg, fake meat, and noodles)
(vegetable pancakes, soy roasted aubergine, watermelon juice)
(noodles and veg)
(lotus flower tea - very refreshing and apparently very good for the health!)
I would also recommend "Vegetarian Dumpling", a vegetarian restaurant specialising in dumplings. Quite a few dishes on the menu contained egg, but they also had a fair number of vegan options:
(tofu and chopped green veg; dumplings containing peanuts and Chinese cabbage)
For a special treat (since it is quite a lot more expensive than other restaurants - but there was a live harpist performing!), the "King's Joy" vegetarian restaurant is a delight:
(strawberries to start with)
(chopped avocado with beans and salad)
(thin noodles in vegetable broth)
(boiled rice with seaweed and cubed roasted aubergine)
(mushrooms on 'popped' rice of some kind)
Aside from these specifically vegetarian and vegan restaurants, 'normal' restaurants always seemed to have vegan-friendly options on their menus, for example, here is a selection of the vegan dishes I found in various random places:
(broad beans and mushrooms)
(tofu and assorted veg)
(spicy tofu dish, with Chinese cabbage in vinegar dressing and white rice on the side)
All in all, as you can see from the above, I did not go hungry!
I found it interesting that linguistically, there is not a separate word in Mandarin for "vegan"; the phrase for "I am vegan" is "我吃纯素" ("wo chi chun su"), which literally means something along the lines of "I eat pure, simple/plain/clean food" - whereas "I am vegetarian" is just "我吃素" ("wo chi su") - i.e. being vegan is just expressed to be being "pure" vegetarian.
Perhaps because of this, perhaps because many Buddhists (of whom there are a fair number in China) follow a plant-based diet, being vegan did not feel as "other" as it does in the UK. Chinese food does not customarily use dairy, and meat and eggs can easily be avoided. Tofu and vegetable-based dishes (especially using aubergine, mushrooms, green beans, and/or Chinese cabbage) are very commonly found on menus; I did not once need to order something special or off-menu. Serving staff, and Chinese people I met and chatted with, did not seem to raise their eyebrows when I explained I did not eat meat, eggs, or dairy, but often went out of their way to suggest possible dishes I could have.
All in all, it was a great trip, and I look forward very much to returning sometime! I'll sign-off with a few other photos from my visit, to give a flavour of the sights that Beijing - a huge, crazy, and diverse city - has to offer:
