China

Chinese civilisation is among the oldest continuous in the world, with written records going back more than three thousand years. A sequence of dynasties — Qin, which first unified the empire in 221 BC and standardised its script and measures; Han; Tang; Song; Yuan under the Mongols; Ming; and Qing under the Manchus — governed through a centralised bureaucracy staffed, from the Song onward, by scholars chosen in written examinations.

The Qing collapsed in 1911 after a century of defeats, unequal treaties, and internal rebellion, and China became a fractured republic. Decades of warlordism, civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists, and the brutal Japanese invasion of 1937–45 followed. The Communists won the civil war, and Mao Zedong proclaimed the People's Republic in 1949; the defeated Nationalists withdrew to Taiwan.

Mao's rule brought land reform but also the famine of the Great Leap Forward, which killed tens of millions, and the upheaval of the Cultural Revolution. After his death in 1976, Deng Xiaoping's reforms opened the economy, beginning four decades of growth that lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty and made China a global power. The Party has retained a monopoly on political power throughout, and under Xi Jinping since 2012 has tightened control at home.

Traditional Chinese culture blends Confucian ideas about family, hierarchy, and education, Daoist attitudes to nature and balance, and Buddhism, which arrived from India two thousand years ago. Ancestor respect, the importance of the family name, and the concept of guanxi — networks of reciprocal obligation — still shape social life.

The written character script, shared across mutually unintelligible spoken languages, is a unifying thread, along with calligraphy, ink painting, classical poetry, and a cuisine treated as a serious art. Festivals follow the lunar calendar, above all Spring Festival, when hundreds of millions travel home in the world's largest annual human migration.

Regional identity is strong — a Sichuanese, a Cantonese, and a northeasterner will describe themselves as quite different in temperament, food, and language. Officially atheist, China nonetheless has large populations of Buddhists, Daoists, Christians, and Muslims, and folk religion is widespread.

More than half of China's roughly 1.4 billion people live in cities, many of them built or rebuilt in the last thirty years into dense high-rise landscapes linked by metro and high-speed rail. Hundreds of millions of rural migrants power the factories and services of the coastal cities while their household registration, the hukou, often remains in the countryside.

Daily life is highly digital: a single super-app handles payments, messaging, transport, deliveries, and government services, and cash has all but vanished from the cities. Long working hours are common, competition for school places and jobs is intense, and property is the main household asset and anxiety.

The gap between the wealthy eastern cities and the poorer inland and western regions remains large, though it has narrowed, and an ageing population and a sharp fall in births are the central long-term concerns.

There is no single "Chinese food" but a set of great regional cuisines. Sichuan cooking is known for the tingling heat of its peppercorns and chillies, in dishes like mapo tofu and hotpot; Cantonese cooking prizes freshness and light seasoning, and gave the world dim sum; northern food centres on wheat — noodles, dumplings, and steamed breads — rather than rice.

Other traditions include the sweet-and-savoury "red-braising" of the lower Yangtze, the sour and smoky food of Hunan, the lamb and hand-pulled noodles of the Muslim northwest, and the seafood of the southeast coast. Meals are shared, with several dishes and a starch placed at the centre of the table.

Tea is the everyday drink, from green and oolong to pressed pu'er, and baijiu, a strong grain spirit, is the toast at formal dinners. Street food — from Xi'an's lamb "burgers" to Shanghai's soup dumplings — is a cuisine in itself.

Beijing holds the classic first-visit sights: the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, the Temple of Heaven, the Summer Palace, and day trips to the Great Wall at Mutianyu, Jinshanling, or the wilder unrestored sections. Xi'an, an ancient capital, has the Terracotta Army and an intact Ming city wall.

For landscape, the karst pinnacles along the Li River between Guilin and Yangshuo, the mist-wreathed sandstone columns of Zhangjiajie, the rice terraces of Longsheng and Yuanyang, and the sacred peaks of Huangshan and Emei are the best known. Chengdu is the base for giant panda centres and Sichuan food; Zhangye has its striped "rainbow" hills.

Shanghai offers the colonial Bund and a hyper-modern skyline across the river; Hong Kong and Macau, run under separate systems, add their own draws. Farther afield lie the Tibetan plateau's monasteries and mountains, the Silk Road oasis towns and Buddhist caves of the northwest, and the water towns of the Yangtze delta.