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Capital: Beijing
Population: 1.4 billion+
Language: Putonghua, based on Mandarin is the official language. Cantonese, Wu, Hokkien and Hakka are major regional languages, and Tibetan, Uyghur, Mongolian and Zhuang are among the recognised minority languages.
1 – Great Wall of China (also above)
Shanhai Pass
The Great Wall of China is not one wall but a defensive system built, rebuilt and abandoned over some two thousand years, and a 2012 official survey put the total length of everything counted as Great Wall at 21,196 km, while the Ming-era wall, with its trenches and natural barriers, measures about 8,850 km.
Badaling near Beijing is the most restored stretch of the Great Wall, Mutianyu and Jinshanling give ridgeline walking, and at Shanhai Pass the wall meets the Bohai Sea at Laolongtou, the Old Dragon’s Head, where Japanese forces seized the pass in January 1933 before the wall’s last great battles that spring.
Shanhai Pass was known as the First Pass Under Heaven, and in May 1644 the Ming general Wu Sangui opened it to the Manchu Qing army to fight the rebel Li Zicheng, so the Great Wall was not breached but unlocked, and the Qing ruled China until 1912.
2 – Forbidden City
The Forbidden City was built in 1406–20 when the Ming moved the capital to Beijing, and it was home to 24 emperors of two dynasties until the last, Puyi, was expelled in 1924, with about 980 buildings across 72 hectares behind a 10 m wall and a 52 m-wide moat.
Visitors enter the Forbidden City from the south through the Meridian Gate, cross the Outer Court with its three great ceremonial halls, then pass into the Inner Court, where the emperors lived, ending in the Imperial Garden.
The Forbidden City became the Palace Museum in 1925, and from 1933 its treasures, about 13,500 crates, were moved south and west ahead of the Japanese advance, with 3,824 crates later shipped to Taiwan in 1948–49, which is why there is a second Palace Museum in Taipei.
3 – Summer Palace, Beijing
The Summer Palace is an imperial retreat of lake, hill and pavilions northwest of Beijing, rebuilt for the Empress Dowager Cixi from 1886 after British and French troops burned it in 1860, then damaged again by Eight-Nation Alliance troops in 1900 and restored from 1902.
Kunming Lake covers about three-quarters of the Summer Palace, with Longevity Hill behind it, joined by the Long Corridor, 728 m of covered walkway painted with more than 14,000 scenes, while the Seventeen-Arch Bridge runs out to an island and a stone boat sits at the shore.
The Summer Palace’s Marble Boat, given a two-storey Western-style superstructure in Cixi’s rebuilding, became the symbol of a famous charge, that she paid for the work partly with money meant for the Beiyang Fleet, which Japan destroyed in 1894–95, though historians debate how much was diverted.
4 – Heaven Lake
Heaven Lake is a crater lake at about 2,190 m in the caldera of Changbaishan, a volcano on the North Korean border, and treaties of 1962 and 1964 split it, leaving North Korea a little over half, while at up to 373 m deep it is China’s deepest lake.
The Chinese side of Changbaishan is a nature reserve, with Heaven Lake’s summit often lost in cloud, and below it lie a waterfall, hot springs and a forest growing in a deep collapsed valley.
The volcano at Heaven Lake produced the Millennium Eruption of late 946, one of the most violent of the last 2,000 years, which threw out about 100 km³ of ash and pumice as far as Japan, and the same mountain, called Paektu, is the sacred peak of Korean national myth.
5 – Terracotta Army
In March 1974, farmers digging a well near Xi’an struck fired clay, and what they had found was the Terracotta Army, the buried guard of the mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of a unified China, who died in 210 BC.
Three pits of the Terracotta Army hold an estimated 8,000 figures, with horses and chariots, every face individually finished, and their bronze blades are remarkably well preserved, which a 2019 study credits to the soil rather than to the chromium coating long thought responsible.
The emperor’s own tomb mound, rising about 50 m near the Terracotta Army, has never been opened, and Sima Qian wrote that it held rivers of mercury, while soil above the mound shows unusually high mercury levels.
6 – Pingyao
Pingyao is a walled city on the Shanxi plateau, its walls about 6 km long with 72 watchtowers, built around 1370 under the first Ming emperor, and UNESCO listed it in 1997 as an exceptionally well-preserved Han Chinese city of the Ming and Qing.
Within Pingyao’s walls stand the old county government office, temples, long streets of Ming and Qing shopfronts and the courtyard houses of merchant families, and the whole circuit of the walls can be walked.
Pingyao gave China its first draft bank, Rishengchang, founded in 1823 from a dye business, whose drafts carried secret coded characters for dates and sums to stop forgery, and at their peak a large share of China’s draft banks had their headquarters in the town.
7 – Mogao Caves
The Mogao Caves are some 735 caves, 492 of them decorated, cut into a cliff near Dunhuang in Gansu on the Silk Road, carved from AD 366 to the 14th century, with about 45,000 m² of murals and more than 2,000 painted sculptures.
The paintings of the Mogao Caves span a thousand years of Buddhist art, and because visitors’ breath raises the moisture that threatens the murals, numbers inside the caves are carefully limited.
In 1900, the Daoist caretaker Wang Yuanlu found the Library Cave at Mogao, sealed around the early 11th century with tens of thousands of manuscripts in many languages, and Aurel Stein took away much of it in 1907, among it the Diamond Sutra of 868, the world’s earliest dated printed book.
8 – Kashgar
Kashgar is an oasis city where the Taklamakan meets the Tian Shan in Xinjiang, a key Silk Road hub closer to Baghdad than to Beijing, and while it officially runs on Beijing time, many Uyghurs use unofficial Xinjiang time, two hours behind.
Kashgar’s Id Kah Mosque, dating from 1442 and often described as China’s largest mosque, can hold around 20,000 worshippers at major festivals, in a city with a large Uyghur majority.
From 2009 the authorities demolished and rebuilt most of Kashgar’s old city, citing earthquake safety, with officials saying at least 85% would be demolished, while critics said it erased Uyghur heritage, so much of the old city is a reconstruction.
9 – Potala Palace, Lhasa
The Potala Palace rises 13 storeys on Marpo Ri, the Red Hill, above Lhasa, on a site where King Songtsen Gampo built a palace in the 7th century, and the present building was begun in 1645 under the fifth Dalai Lama, with UNESCO listing it in 1994.
The White Palace held the Potala Palace’s government offices and living quarters, while the Red Palace holds its chapels and the golden reliquary stupas of Dalai Lamas, the fifth’s about 14.85 m tall and covered in some 3,700 kg of gold.
The fifth Dalai Lama died in 1682 before the Potala Palace was finished, and his regent, Desi Sangye Gyatso, kept the death secret for fifteen years, until 1697, while the palace remained the Dalai Lamas’ winter residence until the fourteenth left for India in 1959.
10 – Lake Namtso
Lake Namtso is a salt lake of about 1,920 km² at some 4,718 m beneath the Nyenchen Tanglha range, about 220 km by road north of Lhasa, one of the world’s highest saltwater lakes and one of the three great holy lakes of Tibet.
The road to Lake Namtso crosses a pass of more than 5,100 m before reaching the Tashi Dor peninsula, with its small monastery and meditation caves, and the altitude here is serious.
Pilgrims walk the circuit of Lake Namtso, and walking it in the Tibetan Year of the Sheep, which comes round every 12 years, is believed to bring especially great merit.
11 – Huanglong
Huanglong, the yellow dragon, is a valley in Songpan County in northern Sichuan, where calcium-rich water running down a limestone slope has built thousands of travertine pools along a trail climbing from about 3,000 m to nearly 4,000 m.
A boardwalk climbs Huanglong past the pool terraces to the Five-Colour Pond at about 3,600 m, where the water turns turquoise, green and gold, and a cable car takes some of the strain out of the altitude.
The travertine at Huanglong goes on forming, though more slowly in recent decades, which is why the pools are so fragile and why visitors keep to the boardwalk.
12 – Jiuzhaigou
Jiuzhaigou, the nine-village valley, named after the Tibetan villages along it, holds more than 100 lakes, traditionally counted as 108, in northern Sichuan not far from Huanglong, their blues and greens saturated enough to look retouched.
Walks through Jiuzhaigou pass Five Flower Lake, Pearl Shoal and Nuorilang Falls, which before 2017 stood about 24.5 m tall and 270 m wide, often called China’s widest waterfall, with the forest turning in autumn.
On 8 August 2017 an earthquake of magnitude 6.5 (7.0 on China’s scale) killed 25 people around Jiuzhaigou, cracked Nuorilang Falls and drained Sparkling Lake when its natural dam broke, and the park reopened in stages, fully by 2021.
13 – Giant Buddha, Leshan
The Giant Buddha at Leshan in Sichuan is a 71 m Maitreya cut into a red sandstone cliff where the Min, Dadu and Qingyi rivers meet, begun in 713 by the monk Haitong, and the rock from the carving is said to have filled the riverbed and made the waters safer for boats.
A staircase cut into the cliff beside the Giant Buddha brings visitors level with its ears, each about 7 m long, and the surrounding rock carries many smaller carvings.
Legend says Haitong gouged out his own eyes to prove his sincerity when officials threatened the funds, and he died long before the Giant Buddha was finished in 803, some 90 years after work began.
14 – Guilin and the Li River
Guilin and the Li River in Guangxi are famous for their limestone towers, left as water dissolved the rock around them over millions of years, and a line attributed to the Southern Song official Wang Zhenggong calls Guilin’s scenery the best under heaven.
A cruise of four to five hours runs down the Li River from Guilin to Yangshuo, and Yellow Cloth Shoal near Xingping appears on the back of China’s 20-yuan note.
Guilin was a base of the US 14th Air Force from 1942 until November 1944, when the airfield was demolished and Japanese forces took the city on 10 November during Operation Ichi-Go.
15 – Huangguoshu Waterfall
Huangguoshu Waterfall in Guizhou, one of China’s largest waterfalls, is about 78 m high and over 100 m wide by official figures, the greatest of a chain of 18 falls in deep karst country.
Huangguoshu Waterfall can be seen from above, from below and from behind, through the Water Curtain Cave, a natural passage 134 m long running through the cliff behind the falling water.
Nearby Doupotang Falls, part of the Huangguoshu group, was used in the closing scenes of the 1986 television series Journey to the West, while in WWII the Palace Museum’s treasures were sheltered not far away at Anshun.
16 – Zhangjiajie National Forest Park
Zhangjiajie National Forest Park in northwestern Hunan holds more than 3,000 quartz-sandstone pillars, rising to over 1,000 m above sea level, some over 300 m tall, and it became China’s first national forest park in 1982, with UNESCO listing the wider Wulingyuan area in 1992.
The 326 m Bailong Elevator, built onto a cliff face, does much of the climbing at Zhangjiajie, where Guinness has listed the area as the world’s largest concentration of sandstone pillars.
Zhangjiajie is widely said to have inspired the floating Hallelujah Mountains of Avatar, though James Cameron also credited Huangshan, and in January 2010 the Southern Sky Column was renamed “Avatar Hallelujah Mountain”, which drew criticism in China.
17 – Huangshan
Huangshan is a granite massif in southern Anhui, traditionally said to have 72 named peaks, with pines growing out of the rock and a sea of clouds below the summits, and the Huangshan school of painting shaped how Chinese art pictured a mountain.
Ridge paths link Huangshan’s summits, the highest being Lotus Peak at 1,864 m, past the Guest-Greeting Pine, whose branch reaches out like a welcoming arm, and UNESCO listed the mountain in 1990.
A popular saying, often credited to the Ming traveller Xu Xiake, runs that once you have seen the Five Great Mountains you need not look at other mountains, but once you have seen Huangshan you need not look at the Five Great Mountains.
18 – Suzhou
Suzhou, a canal city west of Shanghai, was founded in 514 BC when King Helü of Wu built its walls, and from the Song dynasty onwards retired officials built private gardens here, nine of which UNESCO lists as the Classical Gardens of Suzhou.
Suzhou’s Humble Administrator’s Garden is the largest, at about 5.2 hectares, the Lingering Garden and the Master of the Nets are among the most refined, and the Suzhou Museum, opened in 2006, is one of the last major works of the architect I.M. Pei.
The Humble Administrator’s Garden in Suzhou was laid out in the early 16th century by the retired official Wang Xianchen, who named it after a line by the Jin poet Pan Yue, and his son is said to have lost it to gambling debts.
19 – Yu Garden, Shanghai
Yu Garden, a Ming scholar’s garden in Shanghai’s old city, was begun in 1559 by the official Pan Yunduan for his father, Pan En, and completed nearly two decades later, by which time the cost had helped ruin the family.
Rockeries, ponds, zigzag bridges and dividing walls at Yu Garden are arranged so that no view is ever complete, with the Exquisite Jade Rock, about 3 tonnes of stone from Lake Tai, as the centrepiece and the Huxinting teahouse out on the pond.
Yu Garden was the headquarters of the Small Swords Society in its 1853 rising, was badly damaged by Japanese forces in 1942 and repaired in the late 1950s, so much of the garden is restoration work.
20 – Hong Kong
Hong Kong Island was ceded to Britain in 1842 under the Treaty of Nanking, negotiated by Sir Henry Pottinger of County Down, its first Governor, and with Kowloon added in 1860 and the New Territories leased in 1898, Hong Kong returned to China on 1 July 1997.
Hong Kong’s sights run from the Star Ferry and the Peak Tram to Man Mo Temple and the Tian Tan Buddha on Lantau, beneath a skyline that by the mid-2020s held more buildings over 150 m than any other city.
Hong Kong is far greener than its skyline suggests, with about 40% of its land protected as country park and less than a quarter built up, and in December 1941 it fell to Japan, staying under occupation until 1945.
21 – Macau
Macau, about 33 km² at the mouth of the Pearl River, much of it reclaimed from the sea, was settled by Portuguese traders in the mid-16th century, traditionally dated to 1557, and stayed under Portuguese administration for more than four centuries until its return to China in 1999.
The Historic Centre of Macau, listed by UNESCO in 2005, includes the facade of St Paul’s, built in 1602–40 and left standing after the fire of 1835, Senado Square, the Ming-era A-Ma Temple and the Guia Lighthouse of 1865, the first Western-style lighthouse on the China coast.
Neutral under Portugal in WWII, Macau swelled from about 170,000 people to roughly 700,000 as refugees poured in, and in 2006 its casinos overtook the Las Vegas Strip in gambling revenue.