Daxing District (Simplified Chinese: 大兴区; Traditional Chinese: 大興區; Hanyu Pinyin: Dàxīng Qū) is a suburb of Beijing, situated to the south of the city.

Daxing District was upgraded from a county to a district with the approval from the State Council on April 30, 2001.^{[citation needed]} Covering an area of 1,012 square kilometers with a population of 671,444, Daxing District is divided into 3 subdistricts of the city proper of Beijing and 14 towns (5 of which are suburbs of the city proper of Beijing). Panggezhuang in Daxing is famous for its watermelons.^{[citation needed]}

Located in the south of Beijing, the area is not as affluent as those that most visitors to Beijing are familiar with, such as Xidan and Guomao. Much of the industry in Daxing is related to distribution of food and consumer goods to service Beijing. There are many self-built communities casually created by the residents themselves, mostly of whom have moved in from the countryside.^{[citation needed]}

There are two major universities located in Daxing District, the Beijing Institute of Petrochemical Technology and the Beijing Institute of Graphic Communication. Both of them are headquartered in Tsingyuan, and have its branch in Kangzhuang. Tsingyuan and Kangzhuang are planned as a university city in the south of Beijing.

Zaha Hadid, CBE (Arabic: زها حديد‎ Zahā Ḥadīd; born 31 October 1950) is an Iraqi-British architect and winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2004.

Hadid was born in 1950 in Baghdad, Iraq. She received a degree in mathematics from the American University of Beirut before moving to study at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London.

After graduating she worked with her former teachers, Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, becoming a partner in 1977. It was with Koolhaas that she met the engineer Peter Rice who gave her support and encouragement early on, at a time when her work seemed difficult to build. In 1980 she established her own London-based practice. During the 1980s she also taught at the Architectural Association. She has also taught at prestigious institutions around the world; she held the Kenzo Tange Chair at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, the Sullivan Chair at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Architecture, guest professorships at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg, the Knowlton School of Architecture, at The Ohio State University, the Masters Studio at Columbia University, New York and the Eero Saarinen Visiting Professor of Architectural Design at the Yale School of Architecture in New Haven, Connecticut. In addition, she was made Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and an Honorary Fellow of the American Institute of Architects. She has been on the Board of Trustees of The Architecture Foundation. She is currently Professor at the University of Applied Arts Vienna in Austria.