China

Landmarks with genuine weight

The Great Wall snaking across misty ridgelines is every bit as cinematic as it looks. In Beijing, the Forbidden City delivers imperial scale and extraordinary detail in equal measure. In Xi'an, the Terracotta Warriors have a stillness and magnitude that tends to stay with visitors long after they've left. These aren't just checklist sights; they carry a genuinely unforgettable kind of presence.

Landscapes, neighbourhoods, and food worth travelling for

Beyond the headline icons, there's a quieter side that's easy to fall into: morning markets, teahouses, river towns, and old lanes where the pace drops right down. The scenery shifts dramatically from region to region, with the karst peaks around Guilin and the Li River looking pulled straight from ink paintings, while Sichuan's mountains and Yunnan's highland valleys offer something else entirely. The food, which changes completely from province to province, is reason enough to keep moving.

Getting around a continent-sized country

China's high-speed rail network is one of the genuine pleasures of travelling here: fast, punctual, and covering distances that would take days by road in a matter of hours. Bullet trains connect the major cities with quiet efficiency, while domestic flights open up the more remote corners. Planning around the rail network is often the simplest approach, and the stations themselves are worth seeing.