Great Wall — Mutianyu

UNESCO

3d · Three full days in Beijing covering the Forbidden City, Great Wall at Mutianyu, the Temple of Heaven and the hutong lanes — the absolute core of the capital for visitors with limited time.

3d · Three days in Beijing covering the Forbidden City, Great Wall at Mutianyu and the Temple of Heaven — the irreducible core of the capital, managed at a pace that avoids pure exhaustion.

4d · Forbidden City, Wall, Temple of Heaven, hutongs, museums.

5d · Beijing's big three sights, a flight south, and two days navigating Shanghai's contrasts.

UNESCO · UNESCO-listed pair of Ming-Qing Huizhou merchant villages in southern Anhui, renowned for whitewashed walls, inky horsehead gables and moon-shaped ponds.

A seven-storey Ming Dynasty pagoda standing on the bank of the Yangtze River in Anqing, considered one of the finest riverside pagodas in southern China and long used as a navigation landmark by Yangtze river pilots.

UNESCO · UNESCO-listed archaeological site in Hangzhou preserving the remains of a 5,000-year-old city with a sophisticated water-management system, jade ritual culture and social hierarchy — regarded as one of the earliest state-level societies in East Asia.

UNESCO · UNESCO-listed capital cities and royal tombs of the Koguryo Kingdom in Jian, Jilin — the Chinese portion of a transnational heritage property shared with North Korea, representing one of the most powerful states of ancient East Asia.

UNESCO · UNESCO-listed collection of private gardens in Suzhou — four inscribed in 1997 and five more added in 2000 — representing the pinnacle of Chinese garden design through the refined integration of architecture, water, rock and plant.

Clusters of ancient stone watchtowers rising above Tibetan village complexes in the Dadu River valley, said to be among the oldest surviving examples of Tibetan defensive architecture.

Yuan-dynasty drum and bell towers that kept official time for imperial Beijing. Climbable; daily drum performances.

UNESCO · 2,300-year-old irrigation system on the Min River. Still in use. UNESCO-listed jointly with Mt Qingcheng. Engineering rather than architecture, but one of the great works.

UNESCO-listed pair of Ming-Qing Huizhou merchant villages in southern Anhui, renowned for whitewashed walls, inky horsehead gables and moon-shaped ponds.

UNESCO-listed archaeological site in Hangzhou preserving the remains of a 5,000-year-old city with a sophisticated water-management system, jade ritual culture and social hierarchy — regarded as one of the earliest state-level societies in East Asia.

UNESCO Natural World Heritage site in Inner Mongolia — the third largest desert in China, featuring some of the world's tallest stationary dunes and a unique network of freshwater and saline lakes sustained by a still-unexplained subterranean water system.

UNESCO-listed capital cities and royal tombs of the Koguryo Kingdom in Jian, Jilin — the Chinese portion of a transnational heritage property shared with North Korea, representing one of the most powerful states of ancient East Asia.

UNESCO Natural World Heritage site — a serial property of six Danxia landscapes across six provinces, representing China's defining red-cliff-and-pillar sandstone landform type, including Danxia Mountain, Zhangye, Taining and Langshan.

UNESCO-listed collection of private gardens in Suzhou — four inscribed in 1997 and five more added in 2000 — representing the pinnacle of Chinese garden design through the refined integration of architecture, water, rock and plant.

UNESCO-listed Suzhou garden organised symmetrically around a central residence. Less crowded than the four most-visited gardens.

Once the largest monastery in the world (10,000+ monks). 8 km west of Lhasa. Active Gelugpa monastery; debating courtyard sessions in the afternoon.