Ancient Capitals

The Qing court's lakeside retreat: a 700-metre painted corridor, a marble boat, and Kunming Lake frozen solid for skating in January.

Ruins of the European-style palaces burned by Anglo-French troops in 1860, left deliberately unrestored as a national memory.

The surviving grey-brick lane grid around Shichahai and Nanluoguxiang, best explored by bicycle at dusk.

Thirteen Ming emperors under a ring of hills, approached by a 7 km spirit road of stone officials and beasts.

The Qing summer capital: a 5.6 km² walled park ringed by outlying temples copying Tibetan and Mongolian architecture.

A small town with four Tang and Song pagodas and the Longxing Temple's 21-metre bronze Guanyin.

Song-dynasty halls near Taiyuan with 43 painted clay attendant figures that are among China's finest sculpture.

A Han emperor's tomb shown from glass walkways over the open pits — thousands of small nude figurines, and far quieter than the Terracotta Army.

Confucius's home town: the temple, the family mansion, and a forest cemetery where his descendants have been buried for 2,500 years.

The Northern Song capital, buried under Yellow River silt and partly rebuilt, with an excellent night market and an iron pagoda from 1049.

The last Shang capital and the site where oracle-bone script — the ancestor of written Chinese — was excavated.

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

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

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

Ming walls, a pontoon bridge that opens each afternoon, and the Teochew cooking that Hong Kong's best restaurants are built on.

Home of Lady Dai — a 2,100-year-old Han body preserved so well her joints still flex — and the Mawangdui silk manuscripts.

The Manchu court's palace before they took Beijing in 1644, mixing Manchu, Mongol and Han architecture.

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

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

Bronze masks with protruding eyes and a 4-metre bronze tree from a Bronze Age culture with no written record and no obvious parallels.

Chengdu's Shu-culture gold sun-bird and the Three Kingdoms shrine to Zhuge Liang, next to Jinli street.

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