The East

The easiest canal town — 40 minutes from central Shanghai on Metro Line 17, with a 72-metre Ming stone bridge.

A basilica on Shanghai's only hill, and beside it the Shimao Wonderland hotel built down the face of a flooded quarry.

A Grand Canal salt-merchant city with a narrow willow-lined lake, a five-pavilion bridge, and the best breakfast dim sum in the north.

The two original canal towns near Suzhou — stone bridges, whitewashed gables and Ming merchant houses on the water.

Source of the eroded limestone in every classical garden, plus an 88-metre bronze Buddha at Lingshan.

Rock-cut royal tombs of the Chu kings with jade burial suits and a pit of miniature terracotta soldiers.

An island sacred to Guanyin, the bodhisattva of compassion — monasteries, beaches and a 33-metre seaside statue.

The quietest and grandest canal town: silk-merchant mansions with imported Belgian glass and private libraries.

Lu Xun's home town, black-awning canal boats, and the yellow rice wine that has been brewed here for 2,500 years.

A volcanic geopark of spires, sea caves and a 190-metre waterfall, with a nightly acrobatic show on a cliff face.

1,078 forested islands in a 1959 reservoir, with two intact Ming towns preserved 30 metres underwater.

Huizhou-style villages among rapeseed fields that turn brilliant yellow in late March — the most photographed spring in China.

A cloud-wrapped summer hill station of European villas, waterfalls, and 1,500 years of poetry about not seeing the mountain for the mist.

The porcelain capital for a thousand years, with imperial kiln excavations and a thriving young ceramics scene.

Granite pillars and cliff-edge boardwalks in a Daoist range, less crowded and nearly as beautiful as Huangshan.

The birthplace of religious Daoism, with red Danxia cliffs and 2,600-year-old hanging coffins winched into caves.

Marco Polo's Zayton, the greatest port in the medieval world, with mosques, Hindu carvings and Manichaean remains side by side.

A preserved quarter of whitewashed Ming and Qing scholar-official houses in the middle of a modern provincial capital.

A Ming coastal fortress and the Hui'an women, whose distinctive headscarf-and-bare-midriff working dress is still worn.

A 1.5 km Song-plan shopping street of Huizhou shopfronts, and the gateway town for Huangshan and the villages.

The Buddhist sacred mountain of Ksitigarbha, with 90 working temples and several mummified monks on display.

A bagua-planned Ming village and a row of seven Qing memorial archways, both nearly empty of visitors.

1,776 km from Beijing to Hangzhou, dug from the 5th century BC and still carrying freight. Best seen at Yangzhou, Suzhou or Huai'an.

A 5,300-year-old walled city with hydraulic works and extraordinary jade, pushing Chinese urban history back a millennium.

Stone fishing villages built from granite blocks, blue-tear bioluminescence in spring, and China's closest point to Taiwan.

An abandoned Ming stele, still attached to the bedrock, that would have weighed 31,000 tonnes had anyone worked out how to move it.

Seaweed racks, bamboo poles and fishing boats on tidal flats — one of Asia's most sought-after landscape photography locations.