China: Ten Attractions and Natural Wonders

The scale of the place

China is a continent-sized country with several thousand years of continuous civilisation, and its attractions match that scale: a wall system whose sections, taken together, span over 21,000 kilometres, the largest preserved palace complex, one of the biggest archaeological finds in history. It also has landscapes — karst, sandstone pillars, granite peaks — that shaped Chinese painting for a millennium. Travel is fast (the high-speed rail network is enormous), but the distances are still huge.

The ten below cluster around Beijing, Xi'an, the karst south, and the Yangtze delta, with Tibet as an outlier. Spring and autumn are the most comfortable seasons; the major holidays (early October, Lunar New Year) bring domestic crowds in the tens of millions.

1. The Great Wall

The Great Wall is not one wall but many, built and rebuilt over more than 2,000 years from the 7th century BC; the brick-and-stone version most people picture is Ming (1368–1644), strongest near Beijing. A 2012 Chinese government survey measured the Ming wall at 8,850 kilometres, and all the surviving sections of every period together at about 21,196 kilometres. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Day trips from Beijing go to the restored, easy, and crowded Badaling and Mutianyu, or the wilder, steep Jinshanling and Simatai, where walkers can go for hours among far fewer people. Badaling, the first section opened to the public, drew nearly 10 million visitors in 2018 and now has a daily cap.

2. Beijing and the Forbidden City

The Forbidden City, at the heart of Beijing, is the largest preserved royal palace complex in the world — 980 surviving buildings inside a moated wall, the seat of imperial power for over 500 years (1420–1924), and since 1925 the Palace Museum. A single axis runs through its throne halls from the Meridian Gate to the imperial garden.

It lies on the Beijing Central Axis, itself UNESCO-listed, which also runs through Tiananmen Square and past the Temple of Heaven; with the Summer Palace and its Kunming Lake in the northwest of the city, that is enough to fill several days, along with the hutong lanes of the old city.

3. The Terracotta Army, Xi'an

Discovered by farmers digging a well in 1974, the Terracotta Army is a buried force of an estimated 8,000 life-size clay soldiers, plus horses and chariots, made to guard the tomb of Qin Shi Huang, who unified China in 221 BC. The faces appear to be different for each figure, and traces of paint survive on some. The pits lie under vast roofed halls, with Pit 1, holding more than 3,000 figures, the marching phalanx everyone photographs.

Xi'an itself, the eastern end of the Silk Road, has an intact Ming city wall of 1370, a long-established Hui Muslim community, and the Giant Wild Goose Pagoda, begun in 652.

4. The Li River and Guilin

In the far south, the Li River winds from Guilin to Yangshuo between hundreds of sugarloaf limestone peaks — a karst landscape so quintessentially "Chinese" that it appears on the 20-yuan note and in centuries of scroll paintings. The classic outing is a boat cruise from Guilin to Yangshuo, long a hub for foreign visitors, or a trip on the quieter Yulong River.

Around Yangshuo: cycling through the fields, rock climbing on crags such as Moon Hill, and, further north, the Longji rice terraces of Longsheng.

5. Zhangjiajie

In Hunan Province, Wulingyuan (which includes Zhangjiajie National Forest Park) is a maze of more than 3,000 quartz-sandstone pillars, many over 200 metres tall, rising from ravines that are usually full of mist. It has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1992, and after Avatar (2009) one pillar was renamed "Avatar Hallelujah Mountain"; the area now has cable cars, the 326-metre cliffside Bailong Elevator, and, at the nearby Zhangjiajie Grand Canyon, a glass-bottomed bridge opened in 2016.

It is crowded and heavily engineered, but the pillars themselves, seen from the higher trails at dawn, are genuinely extraordinary.

6. Huangshan

The Yellow Mountains in Anhui — granite peaks, gnarled pines rooted in bare rock, hot springs, and frequent seas of cloud below the summits — have drawn visitors since the Tang dynasty named them in 747, inspired more than 20,000 poems, and gave their name to a school of painting. Tens of thousands of stone steps and cable cars link the peaks; many people stay in a summit hotel to catch the sunrise above the clouds.

At the foot of the range, the old merchant villages of Hongcun and Xidi (a UNESCO site since 2000) preserve classic Huizhou architecture.

7. The Potala Palace, Lhasa

The Potala, rising 13 storeys up a hill in the Tibetan capital, was the residence of the Dalai Lamas from 1649 until 1959 — a labyrinth of more than 1,000 rooms, chapels, and tombs, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1994. In Lhasa's old town, the Jokhang Temple, the most sacred in Tibet, and the pilgrim circuit of the Barkhor around it are the spiritual heart of the city.

Foreign visitors need a Tibet Travel Permit and must join a package tour run by a licensed agency; tourist sites have at times been closed, as during the 2008 unrest.

8. West Lake, Hangzhou

A short fast-train ride from Shanghai, West Lake is a freshwater lake ringed by willow-lined causeways, arched bridges, pagodas, temples, and tea plantations — a designed landscape that has influenced garden design in China, Japan, and Korea, and a UNESCO World Heritage cultural landscape since 2011. Its "Ten Scenes", each a named view, date from the Song dynasty.

It is best walked or cycled early, before the day's crowds; boats cross to the lake's islands.

9. Shanghai

Shanghai is one of China's biggest and most cosmopolitan cities, and its signature view is the contrast across the Huangpu: the Bund, a curve of historic banks and trading houses from the city's treaty-port heyday (1860s–1930s), facing the science-fiction skyline of Pudong's Lujiazui, developed since the opening of Pudong in 1990. Between them: the classical Yu Garden, the former French Concession's plane-tree streets, and world-class museums.

It makes an easy pairing with the "water towns" of the Yangtze delta — Zhujiajiao, Tongli, Wuzhen — canal villages a short trip away.

10. Chengdu and the pandas

The city of Chengdu, in Sichuan, is the base for seeing giant pandas: the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding, founded in 1987 with six rescued pandas, now keeps dozens, and they are most active and feeding in the early morning. Chengdu is also famous for its teahouses, its face-changing opera, and some of the spiciest food in China.

Sichuan's wider highlights include the 71-metre Leshan Giant Buddha, the tallest stone Buddha in the world, the sacred mountain of Emei Shan, and the multicoloured lakes of Jiuzhaigou, reopened with limited access after a 2017 earthquake.

China is best split into regional loops linked by high-speed rail: Beijing and the Wall; Xi'an; the karst south; the Yangtze delta cities. Add Sichuan, Yunnan, or Tibet for a longer trip. Allow more time than the map suggests — the sites themselves are big, and so are the crowds.