Where will China take you?
Every province has its own landscape, food, and pace. Click a province on the map to preview its highlights, or browse the full guides below.
Explore by province
Beijing
Beijing
Beijing, the capital municipality of China, has been the seat of power for most of the last eight centuries. Imperial palaces, temples and the Great Wall on its northern ridges sit beside Olympic parks and glass towers — the country’s political heart and its deepest well of monuments.
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Chongqing
Chongqing
Chongqing is a province-level municipality in southwest China — a mountain megacity where the Yangtze meets the Jialing River. Once the wartime capital, it now sprawls across steep hills as the gateway to the Three Gorges and the home of numbing, incendiary hotpot.
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Gansu
Gansu
Gansu is the Silk Road corridor: a thousand-kilometre passage between mountains and desert, strung with oasis towns, rainbow rock formations and the greatest Buddhist cave art on earth at Dunhuang’s Mogao Caves.
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Guizhou
Guizhou
Guizhou is China’s best-kept secret — a cool, green plateau of waterfalls, karst villages and Miao and Dong minority culture, laced together by some of the world’s highest bridges. Few foreign travellers make it here; those who do rarely stop talking about it.
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Shaanxi
Shaanxi
Shaanxi is where Chinese history runs deepest: thirteen dynasties made Xi’an their capital, the Silk Road began at its gates, and the Terracotta Army still guards the First Emperor. Come for the archaeology, stay for the noodles.
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Shanghai
Shanghai
Shanghai is China’s showcase municipality: the colonial-era Bund facing the neon towers of Pudong across the Huangpu River, plane-tree avenues in the former French Concession, and a restless appetite for whatever comes next. It is the country’s financial engine and most cosmopolitan city.
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Sichuan
Sichuan
Sichuan is the heartland of spicy food, giant pandas and misty sacred mountains. Chengdu, its laid-back capital, is the gateway to the Tibetan plateau in the west and the karst gorges of the east — and home to the boldest cuisine in China.
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Yunnan
Yunnan
Yunnan packs snow peaks, tropical rainforest, rice terraces and two dozen ethnic cultures into China’s southwest corner. From Lijiang’s old town to the Yuanyang terraces and the tea mountains of Xishuangbanna, it is the classic offbeat circuit.
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BeijingBeijing
Beijing
China’s capital packs the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, the Temple of Heaven and the best-restored stretches of the Great Wall into one vast grid. Between the monuments, the surviving hutongs and their courtyard homes are where the old city still breathes.
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SichuanChengdu
Chengdu
The laid-back capital of Sichuan, Chengdu runs on teahouses, mahjong and mala. It is the home of the giant panda breeding base, a launchpad for the Tibetan borderlands to the west, and a UNESCO City of Gastronomy where even breakfast noodles are a serious business.
ExploreChongqingChongqing
Chongqing
Built across steep hills where the Jialing pours into the Yangtze, Chongqing is a city best explored by cable car, monorail and river ferry. Come for the night skyline over the water, the fog that earns it the nickname “Fog City”, and hotpot so numbing it has its own museum.
ExploreShanghaiShanghai
Shanghai
Shanghai pairs the riverfront Bund and its 1920s banking houses with Pudong’s forest of supertall towers. Wander the leafy lanes of the former French Concession, ride the Maglev in from the airport, and eat your way through xiaolongbao dumplings and late-night street food.
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