China: A riveting jumble of diversity
Visiting the world’s most populous country is more than a holiday; it is an adventure and a learning curve.
China. The name alone makes you want to get packing. It’s going places, so jump aboard, go along for the ride and see where it’s headed.
Breathtaking antiquity
Its modern face is dazzling, but China is no one-trick pony. The world’s oldest continuous civilisation isn’t all smoked glass and brushed aluminium and while you won’t be tripping over artefacts – three decades of roundthe-clock development and rash town planning have taken their toll – rich seams of antiquity await. Serve it all up according to taste: collapsing sections of the Great Wall, temple-topped mountains, villages that time forgot, languorous water towns, sublime Buddhist grottoes and ancient desert forts. Pack a well-made pair of travelling shoes and remember the words of Laotzu: ‘‘A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step’’.
Stupendous scenery
Few countries do the Big Outdoors like the Middle Kingdom. China’s landscapes span the range from alpha to omega: take your pick from the sublime sapphire lakes of Tibet or the impassive deserts of Inner Mongolia, island-hop in Hong Kong or bike between fairy tale karst pinnacles around Yangshuo; swoon before the rice terraces of the south, take a selfie among the gorgeous yellow rapeseed of Wuyuan or hike the Great Wall as it meanders across mountain peaks; get lost in green forests of bamboo or, when your energy fails you, flake out on a distant beach and listen to the thud of falling coconuts.
Cuisine
The Chinese live to eat and with 1.4 billion food-loving people to feed, coupled with vast geographic and cultural variations in a huge land, expect your tastebuds to be tantalised, tested and treated. Wolf down Peking duck in Beijing, melt over a Chongqing hotpot or grab a seasoned roujiamo (shredded pork in a bun) before climbing Hua Shan. Gobble down a steaming bowl of Lanzhou noodles in a Silk Road street market, raise the temperature with some searing Hunan fare or flag down the dim sum trolley down south. Follow your nose in China and you won’t want to stop travelling.
Diversity
China is vast. Off-the-scale massive. A riveting jumble of wildly differing dialects and climatic and topographical extremes, it’s like several different countries rolled into one. Take your pick from the tossed-salad ethnic mix of the southwest, the yak-butter-illuminated temples of Xiahe, a journey along the dusty Silk Road, spending the night at Everest Base Camp or getting into your glad rags for a night on the Shanghai tiles. You’re spoilt for choice: whether you’re an urban traveller, hiker, cyclist, explorer, backpacker, irrepressible museum-goer or faddish foodie, China’s diversity is second to none.
China’s top 10 1. Forbidden City
Not a city and no longer forbidden, Beijing’s enormous palace is the be-all-and-end-all of dynastic grandeur with its vast halls and splendid gates. No other place in China teems with so much history, legend and good old-fashioned imperial intrigue. You may get totally lost here but you’ll always find something to write about on the first postcard you can lay your hands on. The complex also heads the list with one of China’s most attractive admission prices and almost endless value-for-money sightseeing.
2. Great Wall
Spotting it from space is both tough and pointless: the only place you can truly put the Great Wall under your feet is in China. Select the Great Wall according to taste: perfectly chiselled, dilapidated, stripped of its bricks, overrun with saplings, coiling splendidly into the hills or returning to dust. The fortification is a fitting symbol of those perennial Chinese traits: diligence, mass manpower, ambitious vision and engineering skill (coupled with a distrust of the neighbours).
3. The Bund, Shanghai
More than just a city, Shanghai is the country’s neon-lit beacon of change, opportunity and modernity. Its sights set squarely on the not-too-distant future, Shanghai offers a taste of all the superlatives China can dare to dream up, from the world’s highest observation deck to its fastest commercially operating train. Whether you’re just pulling in after an epic 44-hour train trip from Xinjiang or it’s your first stop, you’ll find plenty to indulge in here. Start with the Bund, Shanghai’s iconic riverfront area.
4. The Li River and Cycling Yangshuo
It’s hard to exaggerate the beauty of Yangshuo and the Li River area around Yangshuo, renowned for classic images of mossy-green jagged limestone peaks providing a backdrop for tall bamboo fronds leaning over bubbling streams, wallowing water buff aloes and farmers sowing rice paddies. Ride a bamboo raft along the river and you’ll understand why this stunning rural landscape has inspired painters and poets for centuries. Another popular way to appreciate the scenery is a bike tour along the Yulong River.
5. Dunhuang
Where China starts transforming into a lunar desert-scape in the far west, the handsome oasis town of Dunhuang is a natural staging post for dusty Silk Road explorers. Mountainous sand dunes swell outside town while Great Wall fragments lie scoured by abrasive desert winds, but it is the magnificent grottoes at Mogao that truly dazzle. Mogao is the cream of China’s crop of Buddhist caves, and its statues are ineffably sublime and some of the nation’s most priceless cultural treasures.
6. China’s Cuisine
Say zaijian (goodbye) to that Chinatown schlock and nihao (hello) to a whole new world of food and flavour. For Peking duck and dumplings galore, Beijing’s a good place to start, but you don’t have to travel far to find that China truly is your oyster, from the liquid fire of a Chongqı`ng hotpot to the dainty dim sum of Hong Kong. You’ll see things you’ve never seen before, eat things you’ve never heard of and drink things that could lift a rocket into orbit.
7. Hiking Longji Rice Terraces
After a bumpy bus ride to northern Guangxi, you’ll be dazzled by one of China’s most archetypal and photographed landscapes: the splendidly named Longji (Dragon’s Backbone) Rice Terraces. A region that’s a beguiling patchwork of minority villages and layers of waterlogged terraces climbing the hillsides, you’ll be enticed into a game of village-hopping. The most invigorating walk between Pı´ng’an and Dazhai villages offers the most spine-tingling views. Visit after the summer rains when the fields are glistening with reflections.
8. Terracotta Warriors
Standing silent guard over their emperor for more than two millennia, the terracotta warriors are one of the most extraordinary archaeological discoveries ever made. It’s not just that there are thousands of the life-sized figures lined up in battle formation; it’s the fact that no two of them are alike – each one is animated with a distinct expression. This is an army and one made up entirely of individuals.
Gazing at these skilfully sculpted faces brings the past alive with a unique intensity.
9. Zhangjiajie
Claimed by some to be the inspiration behind Pandora’s floating mountains in the hit film Avatar, Zhangjiajie’s otherworldly rock towers do indeed seem like they come from another planet. Rising from the misty subtropical forests of northwest Hunan, more than 3000 karst pinnacles form a landscape so surreal it is, arguably, unmatched by any other in China. Raft along a river, hike to your heart’s content, walk along a petrifying glass walkway, or just spend hours filling up the memory card on your camera.
10. French Concession, Shanghai
The French Concession is Shanghai sunny-side up, at its coolest, hippest and most alluring. Once home to the bulk of Shanghai’s adventurers, revolutionaries, gangsters, prostitutes and writers – though ironically many of them weren’t French – the former concession (also called Frenchtown) is the most graceful part of Puxi. The Paris of the East turns on its European charms to maximum effect here, where leafy streets and 1920s villas meet art deco apartment blocks, elegant restaurants and chic bars.
Reproduced with permission from Lonely Planet China 15th Edition, 2017 Lonely Planet.