This dataset contains hourly and 24-hour mean concentrations of CO, NO2, O3, SO2, PM2.5 and PM10 in 2016 in Beijing, China, from 35 air quality monitoring stations operated by the Beijing Municipal Ecological and Environmental Monitoring Center (BJMEMC).The BJMEMC publishes real-time air quality data on its website (https://air.cnemc.cn:18007), but does not allow assess to historical data. The provisional real-time data is archived and made publicly available by Xiaolei Wang at https://quotsoft.net/air/. However, both the repository and the data are in Chinese. This dataset contains data which are fetched from the repository, translated into English and reformatted into a single spreadsheet. Meta information including the Chinese names and spatial coordinates of the monitoring stations is also provided.