Kunming

Capital of Yunnan, the 'Spring City' — at 1,900m elevation it has mild weather year-round. Gateway to the Yunnan loop (Dali, Lijiang, Shangri-La) and to the Stone Forest.

Kunming is the capital of Yunnan province and sits at 1,900 metres on the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau in China's southwest. The elevation has a decisive effect on the climate: while much of China endures brutal summers and bitter winters, Kunming maintains a near-constant mild temperature averaging 15 degrees throughout the year, earning its longstanding nickname Chuncheng — Spring City. The flowers on Kunming's streets bloom in January; visitors arriving from Beijing's winter or Chengdu's grey drizzle experience the effect as something close to a meteorological mercy.

The city is the principal hub for travel into Yunnan province, one of China's most ethnically diverse — twenty-six of China's fifty-six officially recognised minority groups live in Yunnan. Most visitors use Kunming as the entry point for the Yunnan loop: west to Dali (ancient Bai minority town and Erhai Lake), northwest to Lijiang (Naxi old town and Jade Dragon Snow Mountain), further northwest to Shangri-La (Tibetan plateau grasslands), or south to Xishuangbanna (tropical rainforest and Dai minority culture on the Mekong). International trains connect Kunming to Vientiane in Laos via the new Kunming-Laos high-speed rail; border crossings to Vietnam and Myanmar are accessible by road.

Within the city, the Green Lake Park (Cuihu Gongyuan) is the daily social hub: an urban lake park used morning to evening by retirees doing tai chi, couples walking, and the migrating black-headed gulls that arrive each winter from Siberia in numbers large enough to make the lake a regional attraction. Yuantong Temple, beside the park, is an active Buddhist temple with a courtyard filled with carp ponds and a distinctly multicultural religious atmosphere — Theravada, Mahayana, and Tibetan Buddhist elements coexist here in ways that reflect Yunnan's geographic position.

The Stone Forest (Shilin) is the major geological draw: a UNESCO World Heritage karst landscape 90 kilometres southeast, where limestone pinnacles two to thirty metres tall rise from the plateau surface in forms that have been compared — with some justification — to a frozen grey forest. The site is heavily visited, particularly at weekends; going early in the morning or on a weekday reduces the crowd significantly.

Kunming's most distinctive food contribution is crossing-the-bridge rice noodles (guoqiao mixian): a large bowl of very hot broth served alongside an array of thin raw ingredients — pork, chicken, quail egg, vegetables — which you add to the broth sequentially, where they cook instantly. The origin story involves a wife carrying hot broth across a bridge to feed her scholar husband without it cooling. The dish is ubiquitous in Yunnan and particularly good in Kunming. Wild mushroom season (July to September) brings a secondary Yunnan food speciality to every menu: fresh mushrooms collected from the mountains and cooked simply.