Changsha

Capital of Hunan and the home of Hunan cuisine. Hot, humid, gastronomically aggressive, with the Mawangdui tombs and a vibrant night-market food scene.

Changsha is the capital of Hunan province, a city of around ten million on the Xiang River, and one of the more energetic provincial capitals in central China. It carries two distinct reputations that pull equally: as the formative city of Mao Zedong, and as a food city whose cuisine is among the most aggressively flavoured in China.

The Mao connection is pervasive. He was born in Shaoshan, a village 100 kilometres west, but he studied at the Hunan First Normal School in Changsha and lived here through his formative years. The school, now a museum, is preserved in the old city. Yuelu Academy on Yuelu Mountain across the Xiang River is one of China's four great ancient academies, founded in 976 CE; Mao studied here as well. The Orange Isle (Juzizhou), a long sandbar island in the Xiang River, features a large monumental portrait of young Mao gazing northward — an unusual sculptural tribute that is worth seeing for the sheer scale of Chinese political iconography.

The Hunan Provincial Museum is the intellectual centrepiece of any visit to Changsha. The Mawangdui finds, excavated in the early 1970s from a Han dynasty tomb dating to around 168 BCE, include one of the most remarkable archaeological discoveries of the twentieth century: the body of Lady Dai, the wife of the Marquis of Dai, so well preserved by anaerobic conditions over 2,100 years that her skin retains suppleness and her joints still flex. The tomb goods accompanying her — painted silk garments, lacquerware, manuscripts on silk and bamboo strips, and an extraordinary cosmological diagram — are displayed in an adjacent gallery. This is not peripheral regional content; it is one of the outstanding museum collections in China.

The food is the city's most visible daily offer. Hunan cuisine (Xiang cai) is distinguished from Sichuan food by its use of fresh and pickled chillies rather than the numbing Sichuan peppercorn, combined with smoked meats, intense fermentation, and generous garlic. The result is hot without the anaesthesia — you feel everything. Changsha's night-market culture concentrates on Pozi Street and the surrounding area: stalls selling stinky tofu (the dark, deeply fermented Changsha version is quite different from the Shaoxing style), Mao-style red-braised pork, fish-head preparations with chopped chillies, and various regional snacks. The scene is noisy, crowded, and genuinely good.