The Middle Kingdom

Chengdu is one of China's most relaxed and food-obsessed cities — a Sichuan basin capital that has spent centuries perfecting hot pot, tea culture, and the art of taking an afternoon slowly. The morning at the Giant Panda Breeding Research Base is best done early, when the pandas are fed and active; the base holds the world's largest captive population. The rest of the day is Chengdu itself: the Jinli ancient street, the Wuhou Shrine, and the face-changing finale of Sichuan opera in the Shufeng Yayun teahouse.

The high-speed train from Chengdu to Chongqing takes ninety minutes and deposits you in a city unlike anywhere else on Earth. Built upward rather than outward, Chongqing functions in three dimensions where other cities manage two — skyscrapers on ridgelines, a monorail passing through the fourteenth floor of a building, highways stacked four levels high. The Ciqikou ancient town, Hongya Cave, and the old Shibati neighbourhood give the day structure before the night view from Nanshan closes it.

A day excursion into the Wulong Karst southeast of the city — UNESCO-listed geology of collapsed sinkholes, three natural sky bridges, and underground river systems. The Three Natural Bridges span gorges up to 300 metres deep, each a single arch of rock formed when the cave roof above collapsed. A filming location for Transformers: Age of Extinction, with almost no international visitors. In the afternoon, a brief stop at Fengdu Ghost City, a hillside complex of temples dedicated to the afterlife above the Yangtze.

A morning flight southwest to Kunming, the capital of Yunnan and one of the most climatically pleasant cities in China — 1,890 metres of altitude producing a permanent spring temperature. An hour from the city, the Shilin Stone Forest is a UNESCO World Heritage Site: a 400-square-kilometre field of limestone formations carved over 270 million years into towers, columns, and spires between two and thirty metres tall. The Sani Yi people have lived alongside the stone forest for centuries; their embroidery is among the finest folk textiles in Yunnan.

The high-speed train from Kunming to Dali crosses the Yunnan plateau in two hours, arriving below the Cangshan range whose nineteen peaks line the horizon behind the old town. Dali was the capital of two successive independent kingdoms before its incorporation into the Mongol Yuan dynasty. The ninth-century Three Pagodas of Chongsheng Temple stand on the plain between town and mountain. The old town is a grid of stone-paved lanes and Bai minority architecture; an afternoon boat on Erhai Lake, mountains behind and water in front, is the right closing frame.

A morning flight from Dali to Guilin, the karst-mountain city that has been the standard reference for Chinese landscape painting for a thousand years. The afternoon drive north reaches the Longji Rice Terraces — 800-year-old stepped fields cut into the steep hillsides by Zhuang and Yao farmers, climbing from 300 to 1,100 metres — for the last of the afternoon light. Overnight in the Ping'an village guesthouse; the terraces are green in spring and summer, golden from late September.

Back to Guilin and onto the Li River by private boat: four hours downstream through the landscape on the twenty-yuan note, the karst formations rising from the flat river plain in shapes the Chinese classical tradition reads as animals and creatures — the Nine Horses Fresco Hill, the Xingping ancient town. The river shallows and the boat slows; the water is clear enough to watch the riverbed. Yangshuo at the journey's end retains, in its back streets and the nearby Yulong River valley, the pace that made it famous — a bicycle ride along the Yulong, past bamboo groves and stone arch bridges, closes the afternoon.

A high-speed train east from Guilin toward Hunan, then a private transfer to Fenghuang — one of the best-preserved Ming and Qing dynasty towns in China, built along the Tuojiang River on the edge of a canyon, its stilted wooden houses hanging out over the water on teak poles that have been there for three hundred years. Fenghuang means Phoenix, and the town's riverside silhouette — the lanterns, the water reflections, the old city walls — suggests how the name was earned. Cross the river by stepping stones and walk the upper town in the morning before the day-trippers arrive.

Zhangjiajie National Forest Park is a place where the photographs are not an exaggeration. More than three thousand sandstone columns, up to 300 metres tall, rise from a floor of subtropical forest — the real landscape Avatar photographed as the reference for Pandora; one column was officially renamed the Avatar Hallelujah Mountain in 2010. Day 9 opens with the Bailong Elevator, the world's tallest outdoor lift (326 metres in 66 seconds), to the Yuanjiajie plateau and the First Bridge Under Heaven. Day 10 turns to Tianmen Mountain: a 7.5-kilometre cable car, the naturally formed Tianmen Cave, and the glass skywalk extending from the cliff face over empty air.

A morning flight northeast to Xi'an, the capital of unified China for eleven dynasties and the eastern terminus of the Silk Road. The Terracotta Army, discovered by farmers digging a well in 1974, is the funerary guard of the First Emperor Qin Shi Huang: 8,000 life-size figures buried in three pits in 210 BC, each face individually modelled and originally painted in vivid colour. Pit 1 is the size of an aircraft hangar. The detail — the rank insignia, the different hairstyles of different units, the individually articulated fingers — is the reason the site earns full-day attention.

Xi'an is not only the terracotta warriors. The city walls — 14 kilometres of Tang-era fortifications still intact and walkable by bicycle — give the full scale of the ancient capital. The Muslim Quarter, home to the Hui Muslim community that arrived along the Silk Road and never left, is the most genuinely atmospheric street food district in China: lamb skewers, roujiamo (the original hamburger, documented here since the Qin dynasty), and the Great Mosque of Xi'an — founded in 742 AD, its architecture entirely Chinese, the prayer hall facing Mecca from behind a succession of traditional garden courtyards. A Tang Dynasty dinner show closes the evening.

A morning high-speed train north to Beijing: five hours through the North China Plain, arriving in early afternoon. The Forbidden City, begun in 1406 and completed in 1420, is 72 hectares of palace complex — 980 buildings, 8,700 rooms, the largest collection of preserved wooden imperial architecture in the world. The afternoon is for the hutong neighbourhoods around the Drum Tower and the Shichahai lakes — the narrow alley districts that are the residential fabric of old Beijing, navigated on foot or by rickshaw.

No account of China ends without the Great Wall. The Mutianyu section, 70 kilometres north of Beijing, balances accessibility with relatively restrained crowds and sufficient length to walk a serious stretch across the forested ridge. The restored sections give way within a few hundred metres to unrestored masonry — roofless watchtowers, crumbling parapets, the wall continuing along the ridge as far as the eye follows. Transfer to Beijing Capital International Airport for onward international flights.