47 places, and why to go to each

Guangzhou has been a trading port for two thousand years and still runs on food, commerce and a particular kind of unhurried confidence. Foreigners mostly know it as a transit point to Hong Kong — which is a waste of a genuinely interesting city.

Shenzhen is the proof that China can build a city from nothing. It is home to the Huawei campus, the Design Society museum and a waterfront that looks like it was drawn by an architect with a grudge against Hong Kong.

Fifteen million people on a hilly scrap of coast, running on speed, money and a food culture that never got centralised. It rewards the traveller who moves fast and eats well.

The Bund, the Shikumen lanes, the art scene, the coffee, and an argument with itself about what it wants to be. Shanghai rewards a few days more than any other Chinese city.

A city built around water and horticulture, with a scholarly reputation that goes back a thousand years. Suzhou is where classical Chinese aesthetics stopped being an idea and became a daily way of living.

West Lake has been the subject of Chinese poetry for a thousand years, and it justifies the attention. Hangzhou pairs it with the tea country above the city and the Song-dynasty villages beyond.

Seven centuries of capital, an imperial axis running due north, and hutongs that still hold the city together at street level. Beijing is bigger and louder than most visitors expect, and the Wall is worth the early start.

Sichuan cooking, teahouses that have not changed in a century, and a laid-back pace that most Chinese cities have not managed to keep. Chengdu is also the gateway to Jiuzhaigou.

A national park in the northern Sichuan mountains with lakes the colour of jade, and a forest of pine and birch that turns completely different in October. It is on the UNESCO World Heritage list, and it earns it.

Yangshuo holds the single most photographed karst peak in China, and the landscape around it is the most dramatic in the country. The bamboo raft on the Li River is the single image most visitors carry home.

An ancient city between a lake and a 4,000-metre mountain range, with a working local culture rather than a reconstructed one. Dali has been quietly discovered by travellers who did not want the crowds.

A well-restored old town from the Naxi and Tibetan cultures, in the shadow of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain. Lijiang can be crowded; a short distance outside it, the villages are not.

Hainan’s southern city has the country’s best beaches, the clearest water and a separate visa-free entry policy that makes it one of the easiest places in China for an international visitor to reach.

One of the most pleasant cities in China to walk around, and an island that trains pianists. Xiamen also makes an easy pairing with Hong Kong and the Chaoshan arcades further south.

A municipality of 30 million on the ridges above the Yangtze and the Jialing, with hotpot as a civic institution. It is also where you board the Three Gorges cruise.

A desert oasis town guarding the Mogao caves, the single most important body of Buddhist art in the world, and the western gateway to the Gobi.

The former Portuguese colony on the Pearl River delta has one of the highest concentrations of luxury hotels per square kilometre anywhere in Asia, and a food culture that is its own thing.

Xi’an was the eastern end of the Silk Road and the capital of China for over a thousand years before Beijing existed as a city. What survives is remarkably complete: the Ming-dynasty city wall you can cycle on, a Muslim Quarter that has been trading since the Tang dynasty, and an army of terracotta soldiers that has stood in formation for 2,200 years. Most visitors come for the warriors and leave surprised by how much city there is around them.

China's mild-capital: eternal spring temperatures, a lakeside promenade at Dianchi, and the first or last night of almost every Yunnan route. Kunming is a doorway rather than a destination — but a pleasant one.

The renamed Zhongdian county sits at 3,300 metres on the Yunnan–Tibet border: a Tibetan old town, a working monastery, and the high pasture roads toward the minicultures of the north. The altitude acts like a trailer for Lhasa — come here first.

Three thousand quartzite columns rising out of the subtropical forest of Wulingyuan. It is the landscape from every Chinese scroll painting, made physical — and it photographs even better in mist. Two full days inside the park is the minimum that does it justice.

The Yellow Mountains are the most painted landscape in China: granite towers, cloud seas and pines that grow out of bare rock. Add the Huizhou villages at its foot — Hongcun, Xidi — and this becomes one of China's densest stretches of World Heritage scenery.

China's most improbable city: a Russian-built railway capital at minus twenty degrees, with onion domes on the avenue, frozen river carnivals and an ice festival that rebuilds a city out of light. From December to February nothing else in the country looks like it.

The spiritual capital of Tibet is now reachable by rail or flight, and the reward is the strongest visual culture in China: the Potala above the city, the Barkhor circuit of pilgrims, and the monasteries holding the light. Lhasa pairs naturally with the road west to Everest.

A complete Ming-dynasty county town, walls and courtyards and temple roofs intact, where the first Chinese banks ran the empire's money. Two nights inside the walls — one for the lanes, one for the lanterns — is the difference between a visit and a memory.

The old Northern Wei capital has more fifth-century carving than anywhere on earth: 51,000 Buddhas at Yungang, plus the Hanging Temple on Hengshan and a rebuilt old city that is honest about being a reconstruction. The quiet surprise of northern China.

Guiyang sits at 1,100 metres in a basin of karst hills, which is why it stays cool in a province that bakes in summer. It is a working city rather than a showpiece: night markets, sour-soup kitchens, and the gateway to Huangguoshu, Libo and the Miao villages.

The Huangguoshu fall drops 67 metres across 101 metres of travertine — wide rather than tall, and loud enough to hear from the car park. The scenic area holds eighteen falls in one river system, which is why a half day here undersells it.

Xiaoqikong — the Small Seven Arches scenic area — is a seven-kilometre valley where the river runs over travertine steps in a colour that photographs badly because it looks edited. The surrounding Maolan karst forest is the other half of the story.

Xijiang Qianhu Miao Village is the largest Miao settlement in China: wooden stilt houses climbing both sides of a river valley, and a nightly population of visitors that the village absorbs better than most heritage sites. Stay overnight and the tour groups vanish at five.

Urumqi is the practical hinge of any Xinjiang trip: the flights, the museum, the Grand Bazaar, and the first proper plate of lamb kebabs. It is also a modern Chinese city of four million, so treat it as a gateway with good food rather than a destination in itself.

Turpan sits in a depression 154 metres below sea level, where summer temperatures pass 45°C and a 2,000-year-old network of underground channels (karez) keeps the oasis alive. Ruined Silk Road cities, Buddhist cave murals and grape trellises, all within an hour.

Kashgar is where the Karakoram Highway starts and where the Sunday livestock market still sells yaks and camels. The old town was largely rebuilt after 2010, and is more stage-managed than it was — but the craft streets, the tea houses and the mountains three hours south are real.

Quanzhou was the eastern terminus of the maritime Silk Road, and UNESCO listed it in 2021 for a harbour heritage that includes China’s oldest mosque, Hindu carvings in a Buddhist temple, and a bridge built in 1053. It is a working city with an old soul and very few foreign visitors.

The tulou are communal rammed-earth buildings — round, square, some four storeys high — built by Hakka and Minnan clans between the twelfth and twentieth centuries. Thirty of the finest, in Nanjing and Yongding counties, are UNESCO listed.

Yichang is where the river leaves the gorges and where the dam holds it back. Most travellers only pass through on a cruise, but the dam itself, the ship locks and the 1950s river town on the bank are worth the extra day.

Hulunbuir is the largest prefecture-level city on earth by area, and almost all of it is grass, river and birch forest. Kazakh herders, Russian-influenced border towns and a horizon that stays flat for an hour at a time.

Xining was a garrison town on the edge of the empire for two thousand years, and it still feels like a frontier: Hui bakers, Tibetan pilgrims off the bus from Lhasa, and the smell of cumin lamb on Mojia Street. For travellers it is the practical base for Qinghai Lake and Kumbum, with the only international five-star in the province.

A saline lake the size of a small sea — 4,400 square kilometres ringed by grassland, rapeseed fields and snow ridges. In July the shore turns yellow with rapeseed; in winter the shallows freeze into blue ice. The classic traveller’s loop runs the south shore to Heimahe for sunrise, out to the mirror of Chaka Salt Lake, and back along the north shore.

The Giant Buddha at Leshan is the largest stone Buddha in the world — 71 metres of Tang-dynasty sandstone sitting where the Min, Dadu and Qingyi rivers collide. It was carved to calm the currents that were sinking boats at the confluence, which is why the best view is from the water: the rock face only makes sense from a boat, and the stairway that descends beside the Buddha only makes sense after it.

Emei Shan is one of the four sacred Buddhist mountains of China — 3,077 metres of temple, cloud and subtropical forest, with a 48-metre golden statue of Samantabhadra on the summit. The modern way up is civilised: shuttle buses and two cable cars, which leaves the energy for the ancient parts — Wannian Temple, the monkey troops on the middle slopes, and hot-spring resorts at the foot of the mountain.

Guilin is the city of the classic karst panorama — the towers rise straight out of neighbourhoods. Two rivers and four lakes ring the old town, the Sun and Moon pagodas light up over the water at night, and every boat to Yangshuo leaves from a dock an hour downstream. It is the proper first and last night of any Li River route.

The Longji — Dragon’s Backbone — terraces climb from 300 to 1,100 metres up the mountains of Longsheng, engineered by Zhuang and Red Yao farmers over six hundred years. The two great areas are Ping’an, with the classic Nine Dragons Five Tigers and Seven Stars Accompanying the Moon viewpoints, and Dazhai in the Jinkeng valley, whose Golden Buddha Summit gives the 270-degree panorama. Staying overnight is the point: the day crowds leave at four, and the terraces at dawn belong to whoever slept there.

Changbai Shan — the Ever-White Mountain — is a dormant volcano straddling the Chinese–North Korean border, with Heaven Lake (Tianchi) filling the crater at 2,190 metres. In winter the mountain becomes a snow destination that international travellers have not found yet: rime-ice forests, the frozen Changbai Waterfall, hot springs that cook eggs in the outflow, and a ski resort with Asia’s longest runs, ski-in from the hotel door.

Nanjing was the capital of six dynasties, the first capital of the Ming, and the capital of the Republic — and it carries all three layers without showing off. The Ming city wall still circuits the old town for 35 kilometres, the Purple Mountain holds Sun Yat-sen’s mausoleum and the first Ming emperor’s tomb in one forest park, and the Qinhuai River lantern district has been the city’s evening out since the Tang. It sits midway on the Beijing–Shanghai high-speed line, which makes it the easiest serious-history stop on China’s busiest corridor.

Zhuhai was drawn up in the 1980s as the calm alternative to Shenzhen, and it kept the brief: low-rise, green, and arranged along a fifty-kilometre waterfront. The Lovers’ Road runs the whole coast beneath the Fisher Girl statue, the offshore islands count above a hundred, and Chimelong Ocean Kingdom on Hengqin is the largest marine park in Asia. It is also the mainland anchor of the Hong Kong–Zhuhai–Macau Bridge — and the Gongbei border crossing puts Macau a walk away, which makes the city the natural three-territory base of the Pearl River delta.

Chongzuo is the far southwest of Guangxi, where the karst country runs up against Vietnam and the rivers cut through it. Two sights carry the prefecture: Detian Falls, a three-tier cascade that straddles the border itself, and the Mingshi valley, where sugar cane and rice are farmed between the peaks and the rivers bend slow enough to mirror them. The crowds that fill Yangshuo four hours east have not arrived here; the trade-off is that this is driver country — a private car from Nanning and two unhurried days is the correct shape for a visit. Staying inside the karst rather than day-tripping is what makes the dawns work.