The East (Shanghai & the Yangtze)7 places
- Huangshan (Yellow Mountains)The granite peaks that Chinese landscape painting has drawn for a thousand years: jagged summits, gnarled pines rooted…
- Hangzhou & West LakeThe lake that a thousand years of Chinese poets and painters agreed was the loveliest in the country: willow causeways…
- Longmen Grottoes (Luoyang)Two riverside cliffs honeycombed with over 2,000 caves and 100,000 carved Buddhas, presided over by a seventeen-metre…
- ShanghaiChina's showcase megacity, where a curved waterfront of 1920s European banks stares across the river at a wall of…
- SuzhouThe old "Venice of the East": a canal city where retired scholars spent centuries building the most refined private…
- Wudang MountainsThe sacred mountain of Taoism and the legendary birthplace of tai chi: misty peaks strung with Ming-dynasty temples, a…
- ZhangjiajieThousands of sheer quartzite pillars, some 300 metres tall, rising out of the mist in a forested park in Hunan, the…
The North (Beijing & the Great Wall)6 places
- The Great WallNot one wall but many, built and rebuilt over two thousand years and running for thousands of kilometres across…
- BeijingThe imperial capital, laid out on a grand ceremonial axis, where you cross the enormous walled Forbidden City the…
- Chengde Mountain ResortThe Qing emperors' summer capital: an enormous walled garden-palace of lakes, meadows, and pavilions, ringed by…
- Datong — Yungang Grottoes & the Hanging TempleFifty-odd caves cut into a sandstone cliff in the fifth century, holding tens of thousands of Buddhas, from a colossal…
- Mount Tai (Taishan)The most revered mountain in China, climbed for three thousand years by emperors, pilgrims, and poets up a granite…
- PingyaoThe best-preserved walled town in China: a complete Ming-era city wall enclosing a grid of grey-brick courtyard houses…
The Northwest (the Silk Road)6 places
- Kanas Lake & the AltaiA milky-turquoise lake held in dark Siberian taiga at the top corner of China, where Kazakhstan, Russia and Mongolia…
- Dunhuang & the Mogao CavesAn oasis at the desert edge of the old Silk Road, where hundreds of cliff caves hold a thousand years of Buddhist…
- KashgarThe westernmost city of China and one of the oldest oasis towns on the Silk Road, closer to Kabul and Bishkek than to…
- The Terracotta Army, Xi'anAn entire army of life-size clay soldiers, thousands of them, each with a different face, buried in battle formation to…
- Xiahe & Labrang MonasteryOne of the great monasteries of Tibetan Buddhism, home to hundreds of maroon-robed monks and the world's longest…
- Zhangye Danxia (Rainbow Mountains)Hills painted in stripes, rust red, ochre, cream, and green, laid down as mineral-stained sediment, tilted on end, and…
The Southwest (Sichuan & Yunnan)6 places
- Emeishan & the Leshan Giant BuddhaOne of China's four sacred Buddhist mountains, temples and monasteries climbing through cloud forest to a golden summit…
- Guizhou — Miao & Dong VillagesChina's poorest, greenest province, terraced hills strung with wooden Miao and Dong villages, silver-costumed…
- JiuzhaigouA remote valley in the Sichuan highlands filled with lakes so clear and so vividly coloured, turquoise, jade, cobalt…
- Tiger Leaping GorgeOne of the deepest river gorges on earth, where the young Yangtze roars through a two-kilometre-deep slot between snow…
- Yuanyang Rice TerracesWhole mountainsides carved into thousands of curved rice terraces by the Hani people over more than a thousand years…
- Chengdu & the PandasThe relaxed capital of Sichuan, famous for teahouses, mouth-numbing hotpot, and the breeding base on its edge where you…
The South (Guangzhou & the karst)2 places
- Quanzhou (Zayton)The port Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta both called one of the greatest in the world — and one of the very few Chinese…
- Guilin & YangshuoThe landscape from the back of the twenty-yuan note come to life: hundreds of steep, rounded limestone peaks rising…
The Northeast (Manchuria)1 place
- Harbin & the Ice FestivalEvery winter, a whole city of buildings, towers, and slides is cut from blocks of frozen river and lit from within in…
Tibet & the Plateau1 place
- Lhasa & the PotalaThe historic heart of Tibetan Buddhism, high on the plateau at 3,650 metres, where the vast white-and-red Potala Palace…