Essential
Beijing
Beijing has been the capital of China, on and off, since Kublai Khan built Dadu here in 1267. The consequence is a city planned as a…
Where to go in China
China has 22 provinces, five autonomous regions and four direct-administered municipalities. You will not see them all. These guides tell you what each place is genuinely good at, how many days it deserves and how to reach the next stop.
Essential
Shanghai
Shanghai is the easiest major Chinese city for a foreign visitor: the most English, the best international food, the most walkable historic…
Essential
Xi'an
Under its Tang dynasty name of Chang'an, Xi'an was the largest city in the world — a million people inside a walled grid, the terminus of…
Essential
Chengdu
Chengdu is the capital of Sichuan, a city of 21 million in a fertile basin under near-permanent cloud, and the place most travellers say…
Guilin & Yangshuo
Karst is limestone that has been dissolving in rain for 300 million years, leaving behind isolated towers, sinkholes and caves. Guangxi has…
Zhangjiajie
Zhangjiajie's quartz-sandstone pillars — around 3,000 of them, some over 200 m tall — formed as water eroded a plateau along vertical…
Hangzhou
Hangzhou was the capital of the Southern Song from 1138 to 1276, and Marco Polo — whether or not he actually went — described it as the…
Suzhou
Suzhou grew rich on silk and canals, and its wealthy retired officials spent that money building gardens. Between the 11th and 19th…
The Great Wall
Most of what visitors see was built by the Ming dynasty between the 14th and 17th centuries — brick and stone battlements running along…
Yunnan
Yunnan borders Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam and rises from 76 m in the tropical south to over 6,700 m on the Tibetan frontier. On 4 per cent…
Tibet
Foreign nationals cannot travel independently in the Tibet Autonomous Region — though the Tibetan areas outside it need no permit at all.…
Chongqing
Chongqing is a municipality of 32 million people built across steep hills at the confluence of the Yangtze and Jialing rivers. Nothing is…
Hong Kong
Hong Kong is part of China but operates as a separate customs, immigration and currency territory. For a traveller this has concrete…
Datong & Pingyao
Shanxi is the province most travellers skip and most China specialists return to. It was wealthy twice — first as the frontier region where…
Huangshan
Huangshan is the mountain in the paintings. Granite peaks rising abruptly from a valley, pines growing horizontally out of rock faces, and…
Xinjiang & Kashgar
Xinjiang is a sixth of China's land area — larger than Iran — and shares borders with eight countries. Historically it is the Tarim Basin…
Harbin
Harbin grew out of the Chinese Eastern Railway, built by Russia in the 1890s, and for decades had a large Russian population — including…
Guangzhou & the Pearl River Delta
Guangzhou — Canton to the 19th-century traders — has been China's principal southern port since the Tang dynasty, and was for a long period…
Nanjing & Qingdao
Nanjing The "southern capital" was the seat of the early Ming dynasty, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, and the Republic of China. It is a…
Hainan & Sanya
Hainan sits at the same latitude as Hawaii, has genuine white-sand beaches and coral, and functions as China's domestic tropical resort. It…
Quanzhou
For three centuries Quanzhou was the busiest port in the world. Arab, Persian and Indian merchants settled here; Marco Polo passed through…
Kaifeng
Under the Northern Song, Kaifeng — then called Dongjing — was the administrative and commercial centre of the richest state on earth, and…
Jianshui
Jianshui sits in the far south of Yunnan, closer to Vietnam than to any major Chinese city, in country that the imperial centre spent…
Yinchuan
Between the Song in the south and the steppe in the north, a third state held the Gansu corridor and the Ordos loop for nearly two…
Dunhuang
Dunhuang was the last Chinese town on the road west, the place where the Silk Road split around the Taklamakan and where merchants and…
Wuhan
Wuhan is not one city but three, joined where the Han river meets the Yangtze: Wuchang on the east bank, Hankou and Hanyang on the west.…
Changsha
Changsha is the capital of Hunan, a province with an outsized reputation for chilli, stubbornness and revolutionaries — and in raw heat…
Xiamen
Xiamen is a prosperous island city on the Fujian coast, mild for most of the year, walkable in the parts that matter, and built around a…
Luoyang
Luoyang was the capital of thirteen dynasties, which is the kind of statistic that stops meaning anything. The version that matters to a…
Shenzhen
Shenzhen turns up on twenty-two pages of this site and never once as a destination. It is the city named when the point is that indoor…
Guizhou
Guizhou appears on thirteen pages of this site and on none of them as somewhere to go. The ethnic minorities page recommends it twice —…
Kunming
The Yunnan guide gives Kunming one night and calls it pleasant rather than compelling, a place most travellers use as an arrival point. As…
Macau
Read enough of this site and you meet the same sentence over and over. Hong Kong and Macau run their own warning systems. Hong Kong and…