Cities

If you have seen China’s national tourism emblem — a bronze horse at full gallop, one hoof resting on a flying swallow — you have already seen Wuwei. The figure…

Cross the Qinling tunnel south of Xi’an and Shaanxi changes completely. The loess plateau gives way to a green river basin of paddy fields, bamboo and tea, ringed by mountains…

The two oldest written characters for “China” are not in Beijing or Xi’an. They are cast inside a bronze wine vessel in a museum an hour west of Xi’an, in…

Most people crossing Sichuan go Chengdu to Chongqing and never look north. Two hours up the Jialing River there is a city of six million that almost no foreign visitor…

Fifty minutes north of Chengdu by high-speed train, Mianyang is Sichuan’s second city and its least-visited one — a place of research institutes, riverside parks and enormous bowls of rice…

Stand on the embankment at Wuzhou in the late afternoon and you can see the join: the Gui River arrives clear and green from the karst country upstream, the Xun…

Zhongshan is the Pearl River Delta city that most itineraries skip, which is exactly why it works. An hour from Guangzhou and, since the Shenzhen–Zhongshan Link opened in 2024, barely…

Say “Hakka house” to most travellers and they picture the round earthen towers of Fujian. Meizhou, three hours inland from Guangzhou in the hills of eastern Guangdong, builds something different…

Most foreign travellers meet Hengyang as a name on a departure board somewhere between Changsha and Guangzhou, and stay on the train. That is a mistake worth correcting. Ninety minutes…

The name means “sun shines first” — 日照 — and it comes from an old line about this stretch of coast being the first part of the province to catch…