On and off the map of “the world republic of letters,” literary Beijing, from exotic configurations to multivalent self-portraits, has unfolded, historically and geopolitically, as an ancient capital of traditional China, a Republican city of new thoughts and everlasting memories, a fallen city under Japanese military control, a socialist capital of Maoist ideology, and a rejuvenated and cosmopolitan megacity in the post-Cold War era and the new millennium. This chapter situates Beijing writing in the intertwined contexts of Chinese literature and World Literature in terms of evidenced influences, implicit connections, and paralleled representations. The methods of imagining Beijing have formed in the multilayered city-texts by writers across different historical times, which entailed variegated genres, ideas and trends, places and spaces, emotions and materiality, and cultural chronotopes. Entangled with Beijing narratives created by authors across the globe, the city’s imageries in Chinese literature prompt intriguing dialogues, in both visible and invisible ways, with World Literature. Together, this tapestry of urban writing encodes and decodes Beijing as a real, imagined, mythical, metaphorical and semiotic city surviving barbarianism, exoticism, Orientalism, (mis)understanding, (over)interpretation, and (un)translatability.