Zhengzhou

Capital of Henan, transport hub of central China, and gateway to the Shaolin Temple, the Yellow River, and the Buddhist cliff carvings of Longmen.

Zhengzhou is the capital of Henan province, the geographic and historical centre of China, and one of the busiest rail junctions in the country. The Beijing-Guangzhou high-speed line and the Shanghai-Xi'an high-speed line cross here; combined with regional lines, this makes Zhengzhou a place that an enormous number of people pass through on their way somewhere else. Most of them are correct to keep moving: the city's historical core was comprehensively destroyed by Yellow River flooding and wartime damage in the twentieth century, and the modern city has been rebuilt as an industrial and administrative centre without significant heritage architecture.

The reason to stay a night or two is access to an unusually rich set of day trips. The Henan Museum, in the city centre, is one of the premier provincial museums in China: its collections of Shang and Zhou dynasty bronzes reflect the fact that Henan was the cradle of the Central Plains civilisation. The Sanmenxia dragon bone relics, the famous Chinese bronze vessels from Anyang, and the painted pottery from Yangshao culture are all represented. A stop here before visiting the outlying sites contextualises what you are seeing.

The Shaolin Temple at Mt Song (Songshan), 70 kilometres southwest, is the founding monastery of Chan (Zen) Buddhism and the origin point of the Shaolin martial arts tradition. The site itself is substantial: main temple complex, pagoda forest, a cable car to the mountain ridge, and the surrounding Songyang Academy. The martial arts performances are theatrical rather than spiritual, but the historical and religious significance of the place is real — it has been an active monastery for 1,500 years.

Luoyang, 40 minutes west by high-speed rail, is a separate base for the Longmen Grottoes (UNESCO), where 2,345 caves and niches contain over 100,000 Buddhist carvings from the Northern Wei to the Tang dynasty. The largest figure, the Vairocana Buddha, is 17 metres tall and was patronised by Empress Wu Zetian.

The Yellow River Scenic Area, on Zhengzhou's northern edge, provides a view of one of the more peculiar geographical phenomena in China: the Yellow River, heavily silted and hemmed by levee banks, flowing above the level of the surrounding plain — a consequence of millennia of sediment deposition and engineering interventions that have made the river its own raised feature in the landscape.