This short documentary is set entirely within Pekin -- today people write it Beijing. It is, with the exception of a 'rich lady', all street scenes, poor people at work, on the Canal, eating lunch, getting their hair cut. It also ends with a funeral process of a 'rich mandarin'.
It's a sensible place to end a documentary: end a life, end a story. Yet to me, aside from that, it appears to be a random collection of clips. Film-making started off as documentary. Today those clips, sixty seconds or less, offered in Lumiere or Edison catalogues are called "actualities". It wasn't until about three years before this movie came out that people really got the idea of applying the editing techniques of story films to reality. Urban's company was already much more sophisticated in editing their science shorts. Why weren't they applying those techniques to travel films?