Write a 5 pages paper on beijing topography. The mountains surround Beijing both to the southern and northern directions. The surrounding plains, mountains give Beijing a beautiful scene that draws visitors from all over the world to visit as tourists. The mountains surrounding the city play a very significant role in shielding the agricultural land from encroaching semi-arid. Though the city is on flat ground it lays on the land that is elevated several feet above the sea level and opens to the eastern and southern direction. There are eight city districts within the municipality and two rural counties (Pao-chün and Ssu-tʻien Li 14). The municipality terrain is around 35% fat and about 60% mountainous. It covers a total area of approximately 16, 800 kilometers square. The city is located 150 km from the Bohai Sea from the direction of the Tianjin municipality. Hebei province borders Beijing from all of its sides and at some point comes in between Beijing and Tianjin.

History has it that Beijing way the boundary between the pastoral community to the north and the agricultural areas to the south, and that was the reason behind the building the Great Wall of China which was meant to guard the southerners against the nomadic invasions from the north (Pao-chün and Ssu-tʻien Li 14). A semicircular basin is formed at the mountains shielding Beijing from steppes invasion from the north and it is responsible for catching Beijing’s air pollution. The air pollutants are prevented from escaping by the humid hot air pressure from monsoons in the south resulting in regular adverse smog problems. During winters, the smog is less severe because during this period the wind direction is moving in the opposite direction bringing with it dry air from Siberia. The city’s climate is characterized by hot, humid summers and cold, windy, and dry winters.

Beijing plain was once a shallow bay, commonly referred to as the Gulf of Beijing. Sediments carried down by Yongding River filled the bay and other rivers in the area and it filled the bay resulting in the current land surface. Beijing plain is one of the regions that are prone to earthquakes in China. The July 1976 earthquake struck Tangen, which is a region few kilometers southeast of Beijing.