Tours in China

China does not arrive all at once. It comes in layers, and the trick to seeing it well is accepting that you will only get through a few of them on any single trip. Beijing gives you the wide, formal China, the one built around axes and gates, where the Forbidden City sits behind walls that took a full morning to walk past and the Great Wall unspools over hills an hour or two outside town. Shanghai gives you the other China, the one that stopped waiting for permission somewhere in the last few decades, all glass towers along the Bund facing down the old stone banks across the river.

Then there is the China that moves at a slower pitch. Xi'an, where the buried terracotta army still stands in ranks underground, or Guilin, where the karst hills rise out of rice paddies like something a painter invented and then discovered was real. Guangzhou and its river deltas, Chengdu with its teahouses and its habit of never quite hurrying. Each of these places has its own weather for a visitor, its own rhythm of morning markets and evening walks, and no single itinerary covers them all.

Chengdu deserves a slower look than most travellers give it, and not only for the food, though the food is reason enough. It is also where you go to see giant pandas without a zoo enclosure getting in the way. The panda base outside the city keeps them in wooded, misted grounds that feel closer to a forest than an exhibit, and a morning spent watching them eat, climb and generally ignore you is one of the more purely pleasant hours you can spend in the country. A guide who knows the base well can get you past the crowds and the confusing paths straight to where the pandas actually are, and fill the walk with the sort of detail about their habits and breeding that turns watching a panda eat bamboo into something closer to a story.

Beyond Chengdu, China rewards travellers who ask around. If there is a temple, a market street or a stretch of old town that catches your eye and we do not yet have a tour for it, a local guide can usually be found to take you there anyway.