East China
4 cities
✦ Guide is live Hangzhou
A free UNESCO lake at midnight, Longjing tea on misty hills, a 1,700-year-old temple in the forest, and canal-side bars where a cocktail costs less than a London coffee.
Read the Hangzhou guide →
✦ Guide is live Nanjing
392 steps to Sun Yat-sen's tomb, a lantern-lit Qinhuai River cruise, duck five ways before lunch, and the longest ancient city wall on Earth — all at mid-tier Chinese prices.
Read the Nanjing guide →
✦ Guide is live Shanghai
A free colonial waterfront facing a sci-fi skyline, soup dumplings eaten in the right order, plane-tree streets made for an aimless bike, and 23-minute bullet trains to UNESCO gardens.
Read the Shanghai guide →
✦ Guide is live Suzhou
Nine UNESCO gardens, 800-year-old canal streets, a I.M. Pei masterpiece, Kunqu opera at dusk, and Squirrel Fish at a 260-year-old restaurant — all 25 minutes from Shanghai.
Read the Suzhou guide →South China
4 cities
✦ Guide is live Guangzhou
Three-hour breakfasts of shrimp dumplings, a glass lift up the 600m Slim Waist, a Pearl River cruise past a candy-stick skyline — and a bullet train to kung-fu temples 20 minutes away.
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✦ Guide is live Guilin
Cruise through karst mountains printed on China's money, cycle rice paddies in Yangshuo, eat ¥5 noodles that ruin you for noodles forever, and sleep in a 660-year-old rice terrace village.
Read the Guilin guide →
✦ Guide is live Shenzhen
The world's biggest electronics bazaar, a 547m sky deck, 13km of bay boardwalk with Hong Kong across the water — and a land border you walk across in 15 minutes.
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✦ Guide is live Xiamen
A car-free UNESCO island, the prettiest campus in China, satay shacha noodles, a seaside bike road, and Hakka earth-fortresses a day-trip away.
Read the Xiamen guide →Southwest China
3 cities
✦ Guide is live Kunming
Eternal spring weather, a 270-million-year-old stone labyrinth, Asia's largest flower market at midnight, and wild mushroom hotpot you can only eat four months a year.
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✦ Guide is live Chengdu
Pandas at sunrise, face-changing opera at night, numbing-spicy hotpot in between — and an afternoon doing nothing in a 100-year-old teahouse.
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✦ Guide is live Chongqing
A monorail through a 19-storey tower, Hongya Cave lit up gold over the river, a 4-minute cableway across the Yangtze, and hotpot served the way the dock porters first cooked it — at the city that invented it.
Read the Chongqing guide →
