Chinese civilisation was born on the banks of the Yellow River (Huang He), whose fertile but treacherous silt sustained the first farming villages of the Neolithic. The river changed course and flooded countless times, earning it the nickname 'China's sorrow'. Around 1600 BC the first historically documented dynasty appeared, the Shang, famous for its ritual bronzes and its 'oracle bones': ox shoulder blades and turtle shells that diviners heated to read the future, and on which the oldest signs of Chinese writing appear.
Around 1046 BC, the Zhou dynasty overthrew the Shang and introduced an idea that would run through all of Chinese history: the Mandate of Heaven. The ruler governed by heavenly will, but that mandate could be lost if he reigned unjustly; a defeated dynasty had, by definition, lost it. This theory legitimised every change of dynasty for the next three millennia.
When Zhou power crumbled, China entered centuries of war between rival states: the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods. Paradoxically, that chaos was a golden age of thought, the age of the 'hundred schools'. This was when Confucius (551-479 BC) lived, a teacher whose insistence on order, hierarchy, family and moral duty became the backbone of Chinese ethics. Alongside Laozi's Taoism and Legalism, Confucianism would shape how government and society were thought about until the 20th century.
In 221 BC, after defeating the six rival kingdoms one by one, the king of the state of Qin proclaimed himself Qin Shi Huang, 'First Emperor'. For the first time a single man ruled what we recognise as China, and according to the most widely accepted etymology, his dynasty (Qin, pronounced 'chin') gave the country its Western name.
His reign was very short but foundational. Guided by Legalist doctrine, which trusted harsh laws over virtue, he standardised the whole empire in one stroke: a single script, a single currency, unified weights and measures, and even a standard axle width for carts so the roads would work everywhere. He divided the territory into commanderies run by appointed officials rather than hereditary nobles, inventing the model of the centralised bureaucratic state that China would keep for two thousand years. That power came at a brutal cost: mass forced labour, and a notorious burning of books and persecution of scholars.
To defend the northern frontier against nomadic peoples, he had the walls already built by the old kingdoms joined up and extended. This was the first great forerunner of the Great Wall (the one tourists admire today is mostly much later, from the Ming dynasty). And for his own eternity he had a colossal mausoleum built near present-day Xi'an, guarded by an army of some 8,000 life-size terracotta warriors, each with a different face, discovered by chance by farmers in 1974. The Qin empire, however, did not outlive its founder: it collapsed into war a few years after his death in 210 BC.
From the ashes of the Qin, the Han dynasty arose in 206 BC. It would rule for four centuries and leave such a deep mark on the country's identity that China's ethnic majority still calls itself 'Han' today. The Han kept the Qin's centralised state but softened its Legalist harshness by adopting Confucianism as the official ideology. Officials began to be selected for their training in the classics, the seed of the future imperial examination system, which for centuries allowed, in theory, a peasant's son to rise into government on merit.
Under Emperor Wu (141-87 BC), the empire expanded enormously towards the south, Korea and Central Asia. This was when the trade routes opened that the German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen would name the Silk Road centuries later: a network of caravans that set out from the capital Chang'an, crossed the deserts of Central Asia and, passing from hand to hand, reached the Roman Empire. Silk, lacquer and paper (a Chinese invention of this period) travelled out along it, while horses, glass, ideas and, later, Buddhism came in.
The Han dynasty was contemporary with Rome and comparable to it: two huge empires at opposite ends of Eurasia, each almost entirely unaware of the other. Its fall, around AD 220, amid peasant revolts and fighting between warlords, opened one of the longest periods of fragmentation in Chinese history.
After the fall of the Han, China split into the Three Kingdoms period (Wei, Shu and Wu), an age of wars between warlords that later literature turned into a national epic in the novel 'Romance of the Three Kingdoms'. It was followed by almost four centuries of division, with nomadic invasions in the north and short-lived dynasties in the south, a stretch usually called the Six Dynasties or the Northern and Southern dynasties.
It was a politically harsh era but a culturally fertile one. The great event of the period was the spread of Buddhism, which arrived from India along the Silk Road. In just a few centuries it went from a foreign religion to a central force in Chinese life, transforming art, philosophy and the landscape. The nomadic peoples who ruled the north, far from rejecting it, embraced it with fervour: the Northern Wei dynasty, of Xianbei origin, sponsored the carving of gigantic Buddhist sanctuaries into the rock, such as the Yungang Grottoes near Datong and the Longmen Grottoes beside Luoyang.
This process shows a pattern that would repeat itself in Chinese history: rather than imposing their own culture, the conquerors from the north ended up being assimilated into the civilisation they ruled, adopting its administrative language, its bureaucracy and its customs. China absorbed its invaders. Reunification came at the end of the 6th century with the brief Sui dynasty, which rebuilt the centralised state and began digging the Grand Canal, the waterway that would link the north and south of the country.
The Tang dynasty (618-907) is remembered as the peak of Chinese splendour. Its capital, Chang'an (present-day Xi'an), had more than a million inhabitants and was for a long time the largest and most cosmopolitan city in the world. As the eastern end of the Silk Road, its streets were shared by Persian merchants, Indian monks, Central Asian musicians and Christian, Jewish and Muslim communities. It was an era of tolerance, of immortal poetry (Li Bai, Du Fu) and of a China confident in itself and open to the world. It even had, briefly, the only reigning empress in its history, Wu Zetian.
After a period of division, the Song dynasty (960-1279) began something different: not an expansive military empire, but an economic, technological and cultural power unmatched in its time. Under the Song, inventions flourished that would change the world: movable-type printing, gunpowder applied to weapons, the magnetic compass for navigation, and paper money, the first in history. Cities grew to a million inhabitants, a sophisticated commercial economy flourished and the imperial examination system reached its classic form.
Militarily, however, the Song were always on the defensive. Under pressure from peoples in the north, they lost their capital and the northern half of the country in 1127 and withdrew south. There the Southern Song made Hangzhou their capital and the Yangtze delta the economic heart of China, a position the region would never lose again. It was a brilliant and wealthy empire, but a besieged one, and on the horizon rose a threat unlike anything the world had known.
In the 13th century, the northern steppes gave birth to the largest land empire in history. Under Genghis Khan and his successors, the Mongols conquered everything from the Sea of Japan to Eastern Europe. China was one of their greatest prizes. The Southern Song held out for decades, but in 1279 the last child emperor died, thrown into the sea at the Battle of Yamen, and all of China came under the rule of a foreign people for the first time.
Genghis's grandson, Kublai Khan, proclaimed himself emperor and founded the Yuan dynasty (1271-1368), setting up his capital at Dadu, present-day Beijing. It was a moment of unprecedented connection between Asia and Europe: according to his famous account, the Venetian Marco Polo travelled the safe roads of the Mongol empire and described to an astonished West the fabulous wealth of Kublai's court and of cities such as Hangzhou.
The Mongols ruled as a minority military elite over an overwhelmingly Chinese population, which they pushed down the social hierarchy. They never achieved full legitimacy in Confucian eyes, and their regime weakened quickly after Kublai's death through succession disputes, corruption, paper-money inflation, natural disasters and epidemics. In the mid-14th century, peasant revolts, among them the Red Turban rebellion, shook the country. Out of one of them emerged a former mendicant monk turned rebel leader who would drive out the Mongols and found a new native dynasty.
In 1368 the peasant and former monk Zhu Yuanzhang drove out the Mongols and proclaimed himself the first emperor of the Ming dynasty, restoring native Chinese rule after almost a century of foreign domination. The Ming (1368-1644) left some of China's most iconic images. They rebuilt and extended the Great Wall into the monumental stone and brick form we know today, to shield the frontier against another Mongol return. And the Yongle Emperor moved the capital to Beijing, where he had the Forbidden City built, the colossal palace complex that would be the seat of imperial power for five centuries.
In its early decades, Ming China looked boldly to the sea. Between 1405 and 1433, the eunuch admiral Zheng He led seven gigantic naval expeditions, with fleets of hundreds of ships (some far larger than European caravels) that reached Southeast Asia, India, Arabia and the east coast of Africa, decades before the Portuguese voyages. At the time, China had the most powerful navy on the planet.
And yet, around the middle of the 15th century, the court halted those expeditions and turned towards isolation, a change of course historians still debate. Just as Europe was beginning its age of ocean exploration, China turned its back on the sea. The Ming declined amid fiscal crises, famines, revolts and pressure from a new people from the north, the Manchus. In 1644 a rebel army took Beijing, the last Ming emperor hanged himself on a hill behind the palace, and the Manchus crossed the Great Wall to 'restore order', then kept the whole empire for themselves.
The Qing dynasty (1644-1912), founded by the Manchus from the northeast, was China's last imperial dynasty and the second of foreign origin. Like the Mongols, they were an ethnic minority ruling over a vast Han majority. Unlike the Mongols, they managed to last. They adopted the Confucian bureaucracy and the examination system and presented themselves as the legitimate heirs of the Chinese tradition, while still preserving their Manchu identity: they forced Han men to wear the queue (the braid) as a sign of submission, and reserved key posts for their own people.
Under three great emperors, Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong, whose reigns spanned more than a century and a half, the Qing reached its height. The empire doubled its territory by taking in Mongolia, Tibet, Xinjiang and Taiwan, reaching the greatest extent in Chinese history and roughly defining the borders that today's China claims. The population tripled to more than 400 million, and the Chinese economy was still one of the largest in the world.
But behind that splendid façade, tensions were building up: population pressure on the land, corruption in an enormous bureaucracy and a growing rigidity in the face of a world that was changing at full speed. The imperial court, convinced that China was the self-sufficient and superior 'Middle Kingdom', treated Europeans as tributary barbarians and restricted their trade to the single port of Canton. That confidence was about to crash into the cannons of the Industrial Revolution.
At the start of the 19th century, Britain was buying huge quantities of tea, silk and porcelain from China, but China wanted almost nothing in return, and the imbalance was draining British silver to Asia. The British merchants' solution was as lucrative as it was devastating: smuggling in opium grown in India. Addiction soared among the Chinese population and the flow of silver reversed. When the Qing government tried to stop the trade by seizing and destroying opium in Canton, Britain responded with war.
The First Opium War (1839-1842) ended in a crushing Chinese defeat. The Treaty of Nanjing, the first in a long series of 'unequal treaties', forced China to open ports to foreign trade, pay indemnities and cede Hong Kong to Britain. The Second Opium War (1856-1860), with France joining in, was even more humiliating: Anglo-French troops occupied Beijing and looted and burned the Old Summer Palace.
So began what Chinese historians call the 'century of humiliation'. Defeats abroad were joined by disasters at home: the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864), one of the bloodiest wars in all of human history, with an estimated death toll in the tens of millions; defeat by Japan in 1895, which took Taiwan from China; and the Boxer Rebellion (1899-1901), crushed by a coalition of eight foreign powers that imposed a crippling indemnity. European powers, Russia, Japan and the United States carved out spheres of influence, concessions and extraterritorial privileges. The empire that had believed itself the centre of the world was on its knees.
Humiliated by foreigners and discredited by its failure to modernise, the Qing regime lost its Mandate of Heaven in the eyes of a new generation of reformers and revolutionaries. On 10 October 1911, a military mutiny in Wuchang sparked the Xinhai Revolution, which spread across the whole country within a few months. On 1 January 1912 the Republic of China was proclaimed, with the doctor and revolutionary Sun Yat-sen as provisional president; in February the last emperor, the child Puyi, abdicated. So ended more than two thousand years of imperial rule.
But the republic was born weak. Power soon passed to General Yuan Shikai, who even tried to proclaim himself emperor before dying in 1916, and the country broke up into the 'warlord era', with military strongmen fighting over entire regions. In that climate of national humiliation, on 4 May 1919, a student and cultural movement erupted against the clauses of the Treaty of Versailles that handed former German concessions in China to Japan. The May Fourth Movement was far more than a protest: it was an intellectual shake-up that challenged old Confucianism, called for science and democracy, and opened the door to new ideologies.
From that ferment came the two forces that would define China's century: the Kuomintang (Nationalist Party), reorganised by Sun Yat-sen and later led by Chiang Kai-shek, and the Communist Party of China, founded in Shanghai in 1921. At first they were allies in reunifying the country and defeating the warlords, but they soon became mortal enemies.
The alliance between Nationalists and Communists broke down in 1927, when Chiang Kai-shek launched a violent purge of Communists in Shanghai. A long civil war began. Cornered, the Communists set out on the Long March in 1934-1935, an epic retreat of thousands of kilometres to the north, from which Mao Zedong emerged as the party's undisputed leader.
The conflict was put on hold by a greater threat: the Japanese invasion. After the occupation of Manchuria in 1931 and the full-scale invasion in 1937, China endured eight years of atrocious war, with episodes such as the Nanjing Massacre. It cost millions of lives and is a central part of the Second World War in Asia. When the war ended in 1945 with Japan's defeat, Nationalists and Communists went back to fighting each other. This time the Communists won: on 1 October 1949, Mao proclaimed the founding of the People's Republic of China from Tiananmen Square. Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist government withdrew to Taiwan, where the Republic of China survives to this day, the origin of the conflict that still divides the Strait.
The Mao era transformed China from the roots up, at an immense human cost. Land reforms and political campaigns cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Two episodes mark its extremes. The first was the Great Leap Forward (1958-1962), a plan of forced collectivisation and industrialisation that caused a catastrophic famine, with death toll estimates that range, depending on the source, from about 15 million to more than 40 million. The second was the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), a political upheaval launched by Mao to purge his rivals, which plunged the country into chaos, destroyed cultural heritage, persecuted intellectuals and left, according to estimates, between one and two million dead. Mao's death in 1976 closed an era and opened a struggle over his legacy.
After Mao's death, Deng Xiaoping came out on top, a veteran who had been purged twice during the Cultural Revolution. From 1978 he launched 'reform and opening up', the shift that would transform China more deeply than any revolution. The communes were dissolved and peasant families were once again allowed to farm their own land and sell their surplus; 'special economic zones' such as Shenzhen were opened to attract foreign investment and trade; private enterprise was tolerated. Summed up in pragmatic sayings attributed to Deng —'it doesn't matter whether the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice'—, the direction was clear: growth. And China grew like no other country in history, lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in just a few decades.
The process had a political limit that was tragically exposed in 1989. That year, student protests calling for reform and against corruption occupied Tiananmen Square, in Beijing, for weeks. On the night of 3 to 4 June, the government sent in the army to clear the square by force. The death toll was never officially established and estimates vary widely, from several hundred to more than a thousand; the subject remains heavily censored within China. The regime's message was unmistakable: economic opening yes, political opening no.
That formula —state capitalism under the iron grip of the Communist Party— defined the decades that followed. China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, became the 'factory of the world' and, by around 2010, the second-largest economy on the planet. Under Xi Jinping, in power since 2012-2013, the country has reaffirmed the central role of the Party, projected its global influence through initiatives such as the New Silk Road and tightened its internal control, while tensions persist over Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang and Hong Kong. From the humiliation of the 19th century to the world stage of the 21st, today's China is once again, as it was for much of its history, one of the great powers of the world.
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Northern China is, quite literally, where it all began. On the plains watered by the Yellow River the first dynasties rose, the first characters were carved and the very idea of 'China' was forged. That is why this region holds a density of ancient capitals unmatched anywhere else in the country. Luoyang, on the banks of the river, was the capital of nine dynasties over more than a millennium, among them the Eastern Zhou, the Later Han and several of the dynasties of the period of division.
This primacy had a geographical and agricultural logic: the fertile silt deposited by the Yellow River could sustain dense populations, and the open plains favoured centralised control. But the same river that gave life was also a deadly threat, with floods that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and forced states to organise gigantic hydraulic works. To master the water was to master power.
Travelling through the north is, in a sense, leafing through the first pages of Chinese history: here lie the oldest layers, the oracle-bone script of the Shang, the ritual bronzes, the tombs of the first emperors. Long before Shanghai or Canton were anything more than villages, these northern plains were already the stage where the country's destiny was decided.
Although not as old as Luoyang or Xi'an, Beijing ('northern capital') ended up prevailing as China's definitive political centre. Its rise came with the conquerors from the north: it was the Mongols' capital as Dadu in the 13th century, and its status was sealed when the Yongle Emperor of the Ming dynasty moved the capital there at the beginning of the 15th century and ordered the construction of the Forbidden City, the largest palace complex in the world and seat of Ming and Qing imperial power for almost five centuries.
Around the palace, the city was laid out according to a strict cosmic geometry: the Temple of Heaven, where the emperor performed the rites to ensure good harvests; the ceremonial axes; and the maze of hutongs, the alleys of courtyard houses (siheyuan) where ordinary people lived. Beijing was at once the symbolic navel of the empire and a city of working-class neighbourhoods.
In the 20th century, Beijing was the setting for the great milestones of contemporary China. Tiananmen Square, in front of the old gate of the Forbidden City, was where the May Fourth Movement broke out in 1919, where Mao proclaimed the People's Republic in 1949 and where the 1989 crackdown took place. Capital of the global power China has become once again, the city today combines imperial palaces with Olympic stadiums and the skyscrapers of 21st-century power.
For millennia, northern China was the friction line between two worlds: that of the settled farmers of the plains and that of the nomadic warrior peoples of the steppe —Xiongnu, Mongols, Manchus—. From that constant tension came the country's most famous monument: the Great Wall. It is not a single wall nor from a single era, but a system of fortifications built, destroyed and rebuilt over more than two thousand years, from the first walls of the First Emperor to the imposing stone-and-brick work of the Ming dynasty, which is the one that snakes across the hills north of Beijing today.
Datong, at the far northern end of Shanxi province, embodies that frontier condition like few other cities. It was a key garrison post, a stronghold against nomadic raids and, under the Northern Wei dynasty, even an imperial capital. Around it survive stretches of wall far less visited than those near Beijing, and the landscape keeps the harshness of borderland.
The Wall was never an impenetrable barrier —the Mongols and the Manchus ended up crossing it and ruling China—, but it worked as an early-warning system, a customs control and a projection of power. More than a militarily infallible wall, it was a gigantic statement: here the agrarian empire ends and the steppe begins. That geography of fear and defence shaped the whole history of northern China.
When Buddhism arrived from India along the Silk Road, during the centuries of division that followed the fall of the Han, northern China became the great workshop where the new faith was turned into stone. The nomadic dynasties ruling the region, far from rejecting the foreign religion, embraced it and funded the carving of colossal sanctuaries dug into the cliffs.
Near Datong are the Yungang Grottoes, begun by the Northern Wei dynasty around the year 460: 53 main caves with tens of thousands of Buddha images, some almost twenty metres tall, in a style that still shows influences from Central Asian and Greco-Buddhist art. When that same dynasty moved its capital to Luoyang, it continued the work at the Longmen Grottoes, above the Yi River, where over the centuries more than a hundred thousand Buddhist images were carved, including the majestic 7th-century figure of Vairocana.
The north was also the cradle of one of the most famous Buddhist traditions in the world. In the mountains near Luoyang, the Shaolin Temple is considered the birthplace of Chan (Zen) Buddhism and of the martial arts that bear its name. These sites —Yungang and Longmen are on the UNESCO World Heritage List— show how an imported religion became an essential part of Chinese civilisation and left some of its masterpieces in the rock of the north.
In the heart of Shanxi something remarkable survives: an almost intact Ming-dynasty walled city. Pingyao keeps its 14th-century ring of walls, its street layout, its courtyard houses and its temples, which is why UNESCO listed it in 1997 as one of the best-preserved historic urban ensembles in China. Walking through Pingyao is a glimpse of what a Chinese city looked like before modernisation.
But Pingyao was not just a pretty town: in the 19th century it was the financial capital of the empire. Here, around 1823, Rishengchang ('Sunrise and Prosperity') was born, considered China's first 'piaohao', or draft bank. Its innovation was revolutionary for the time: a merchant could deposit silver at a branch in one city and withdraw it, using a verifiable document, at another branch hundreds of kilometres away, without carrying the metal along bandit-ridden roads. At its peak, Pingyao's banking network handled a huge share of the Chinese economy, with branches all over the country and even in Russia, Mongolia and Japan.
Behind those banking houses were the Shanxi merchants, one of the great trading groups of imperial China, who made fortunes in the salt, tea and textile trade along the routes linking the agricultural heartland with the steppe frontier. Their story is a reminder that the north was not only the cradle of emperors and armies, but also of a sophisticated mercantile and financial culture that predates modern Western banking.
In many ways, southern China is another country within the country. Cut off from the north by mountain ranges and by centuries of history, it was absorbed into the Chinese world later and more gradually: when the Yellow River civilisation was already thousands of years old, much of the south was still inhabited by peoples whom northern chroniclers called 'barbarians'. The expansion and sinicisation of the south was a long process, sped up by waves of Han migrants fleeing the wars of the north.
That different history can still be heard today in the language. The south does not speak the Mandarin of the north, but a patchwork of mutually unintelligible Chinese languages: Cantonese in the Canton and Hong Kong region, as well as Hakka, Min and others. Cantonese, with its six or more tones, keeps features of ancient Chinese that Mandarin lost, and it is the language of a culture with a strong sense of identity, of its own cinema, opera and cuisine.
The landscape is different too: mountainous, subtropical, green, crossed by rivers and covered in terraced rice paddies. Here rice is grown instead of the wheat and millet of the north, and the climate allows two or three harvests a year. With its coast open to the South China Sea and to Southeast Asia, the south was always the part of China most focused on maritime trade and the outside world, and from its ports left most of the millions of Chinese emigrants who filled the 'Chinatowns' of the whole world.
No city embodies the south's trading spirit better than Guangzhou, the old Canton, a great port on the Pearl River. For more than two thousand years it was China's main point of contact with the maritime trade of Southeast Asia, India and the Arab world; as early as the medieval period it had a large community of foreign merchants. When the Qing dynasty decided to restrict trade with Europeans, it concentrated that trade right here: between 1757 and 1842, under the so-called 'Canton System', the port was the only place in all of China where trade with the West was allowed, through the Thirteen Factories where European merchants operated.
It was in Canton, in fact, that the fuse of the Opium Wars was lit. Smuggled opium from India arrived here, and it was here that the imperial commissioner Lin Zexu seized and destroyed thousands of chests of the drug in 1839, the act that triggered the British military response and the start of the 'century of humiliation'.
With revolutionary roots as deep as its trading tradition, Canton was also a seedbed of political movements: the early base of Sun Yat-sen and the Kuomintang, and the scene of strikes and uprisings. And when Deng Xiaoping launched economic reform in the late 1970s, the south was once again the laboratory of change: neighbouring Shenzhen, a fishing village next to Hong Kong, became the first special economic zone and a symbol of the Chinese economic miracle. The Pearl River Delta is today one of the largest manufacturing and technology hubs in the world.
At the mouth of the Pearl River, a handful of islands and a rugged peninsula saw the course of their history changed by war. After defeating China in the First Opium War, Britain obtained Hong Kong Island in the Treaty of Nanjing of 1842. It added the Kowloon peninsula in 1860, after the Second Opium War, and in 1898 leased the so-called New Territories for 99 years. From an almost uninhabited rock, the British built a free port that, over time, became one of the great financial and trading centres of Asia.
Hong Kong thrived as China's capitalist window: a refuge for exiles and capital fleeing war and the communist revolution, a trading platform, a mecca of film and finance. While mainland China went through the upheavals of Maoism, Hong Kong grew into one of the most dynamic economies in the world, with its own Cantonese identity, its rule of law rooted in the British system and its civil liberties.
The expiry of the lease in 1997 made it necessary to settle its future. In the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984, the two countries agreed to return the whole territory to China, which took effect on 1 July 1997, ending more than a century and a half of British rule. The handover was carried out under the formula 'one country, two systems', which promised that Hong Kong would keep its autonomy, its market economy and its freedoms for 50 years as a Special Administrative Region. The extent to which that autonomy has been preserved is today the subject of sharp international controversy, especially after the large protests of 2014 and 2019 and the legal changes that followed. Hong Kong remains a unique place: deeply Chinese and at the same time shaped by its century and a half of colonial history.
If one image sums up the beauty of the south —one that even appears on the back of the twenty-yuan note— it is the karst peaks of Guilin reflected in the still waters of the Li River. Over millions of years, water eroding the limestone carved thousands of steep-sided conical mountains that rise like a forest of stone above the rice paddies and the river, in one of the most famous landscapes in all of China.
This karst terrain is not just a natural spectacle: it shaped a culture and an economy. The journey along the Li River between Guilin and the town of Yangshuo, past peaks with poetic names and fishing villages where people traditionally fished with trained cormorants, has inspired Chinese landscape painters for centuries; for them, these mountains embodied the very ideal of nature. The region is also home to communities of the Zhuang people —China's largest minority— and other peoples who farm the famous terraced rice paddies in the nearby mountains.
Guilin shows another face of the south: not that of the great trading ports, but that of a rural, agricultural China of ethnic minorities, where geography dictated a way of life. Today, the same landscapes that inspired classical painting support a thriving tourist economy, with Yangshuo now a mecca for backpackers, cyclists and climbers from all over the world.
In the mountainous interior of Hunan province, towards the northwestern edge of southern China, lies one of the most extraordinary landscapes in the country: the more than three thousand quartz-sandstone pillars of Zhangjiajie Forest Park, vertical columns up to two hundred metres high that rise out of the mist and the subtropical vegetation. It was China's first national forest park, created in 1982, and it is part of a UNESCO World Heritage site because of its unique geology.
Its fame went around the world in 2009, when the film 'Avatar' drew on these pillars for the 'floating mountains' of its planet Pandora; one of the peaks was renamed in tribute to the film. Today, vertigo-inducing viewpoints, cable cars and glass bridges hanging between cliffs have made Zhangjiajie one of China's great nature destinations.
Beyond the geological spectacle, this mountainous region is a land of ethnic minorities. The Tujia, Miao and Bai live here, peoples with their own languages, dress, wooden architecture and traditions, who for centuries inhabited these mountains far from central Han power. The deep south of China is thus a patchwork of peoples: a reminder that 'China' was never a single, uniform culture, but the sum of many, united by a shared history yet keeping, in their valleys and mountains, identities of their own that survive to this day.
The Yangtze Delta, the low, waterlogged region where Asia's longest river meets the sea, has been China's economic heart for a millennium. Its warm, humid climate, its alluvial plains and its network of rivers, lakes and canals made it an area of intensive rice farming, able to sustain one of the highest population densities of the pre-industrial world. From here came the surplus grain that fed the capitals of the north.
That link took shape in a colossal work: the Grand Canal, the longest artificial waterway in the world, begun by the Sui dynasty at the start of the 7th century and later extended, which joined the rich rice-growing south with the political and military north over almost 1,800 kilometres. Cities such as Suzhou and Hangzhou prospered as hubs of that commercial artery, filling up with merchants, craftsmen and officials.
The region's wealth was captured in a Chinese saying repeated for centuries: 'Above is heaven; below, Suzhou and Hangzhou'. Here, on the lower Yangtze, the late imperial era concentrated silk production, the textile industry, printing, scholarship and the art of gardens. When China's economic centre shifted for good from north to south, it was to these lands that it came to settle.
Hangzhou's moment of glory came in the 12th century. When invaders from the north seized the Song capital in 1127 and forced the dynasty to retreat south, Hangzhou —then called Lin'an— became the capital of the Southern Song. For more than a century and a half it was the largest, richest and most refined city in the world: it is estimated to have exceeded a million inhabitants at a time when no European city reached a hundred thousand.
The Venetian Marco Polo, who reportedly visited it later under Mongol rule, described it in awe as 'the finest and most splendid city in the world', with its canals, its bridges, its markets and its famous lake. Because the soul of Hangzhou is West Lake (Xi Hu), a sheet of water surrounded by hills, pagodas, causeways and temples that for centuries inspired poets and painters and became the very model of the ideal Chinese landscape, imitated in gardens across the country and East Asia. UNESCO listed it in 2011 as a cultural landscape.
Hangzhou was also a capital of tea: the nearby hills grow Longjing (Dragon Well), one of China's most celebrated green teas. Refined, cultured and devoted to the beauty of the landscape, the city embodies an ideal very different from the martial power of the north: that of a civilisation that had made economy, art and aesthetic pleasure its form of greatness.
A short distance from Hangzhou, on the Grand Canal, Suzhou is the delta's other great classical city, famous for its canals —which earned it the nickname 'the Venice of the East'—, for its silk and for its gardens. Founded more than 2,500 years ago, it flourished as a centre of the silk industry: during the imperial era, its looms produced the finest fabrics in the country, which dressed the court and travelled along the Silk Road.
The wealth of its merchants and officials gave rise to its most delicate treasure: the classical gardens of Suzhou, considered the pinnacle of Chinese landscape art. In small spaces, behind discreet walls, master gardeners recreated entire universes —miniature mountains made of Lake Tai rocks, ponds, pavilions, latticed windows framing views like paintings— following the Taoist and Confucian ideal of a cultured retreat in the middle of the city. Nine of these gardens now make up a UNESCO World Heritage site.
Suzhou represents a very particular side of Chinese civilisation: that of the scholar-official who, after serving in the bureaucracy, retired to cultivate poetry, calligraphy and contemplation in his private garden. In contrast to the military epic of the north, an ideal of refined, lettered living was crafted here. Today, this city of canals and gardens sits alongside a modern industrial and technology hub, one of the most dynamic in the country.
For almost all of Chinese history, Shanghai was just a modest fishing and trading town in the delta, in the shadow of illustrious Suzhou and Hangzhou. Its destiny changed abruptly with China's defeat in the First Opium War: the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing opened it to foreign trade as one of the five 'treaty ports'. Within a few decades it became the great city of foreign concessions, a symbol both of national humiliation and of dizzying modernity.
On its bank of the Huangpu River the foreign concessions sprang up: the International Settlement —a merger of the British and American ones in 1863— and the French Concession, territories where foreign residents lived under their own laws thanks to extraterritoriality, outside Chinese authority. Along the waterfront known as the Bund stood banks, trading houses and hotels with monumental European-style façades that still define the city's postcard view today.
That interwar Shanghai was one of the most cosmopolitan and contradictory cities in the world: the financial capital of East Asia, a mecca of jazz, cinema and luxury, but also of workers' misery, opium, gambling and gangs. A refuge for exiles from half the world —including thousands of Jews fleeing Nazism—, it was called the 'Paris of the East' and the 'whore of Asia' with equal ease. In its factories and working-class districts, meanwhile, the discontent that would fuel the revolution was brewing.
It was no coincidence that the Communist Party of China was born in Shanghai, in 1921, in a house in the French Concession: the city, with its huge industrial proletariat and brutal inequality, was the perfect setting. It was also in Shanghai that Chiang Kai-shek unleashed the bloody purge of 1927 that broke the alliance between Nationalists and Communists and opened the civil war. During the war with Japan, the city endured fierce fighting and a long occupation.
After the founding of the People's Republic in 1949, cosmopolitan, capitalist Shanghai was brought under control: the concessions had already been formally abolished, the bourgeoisie emigrated or was expropriated, and the city was left as a grey industrial centre serving the state. For decades, the former 'Paris of the East' lived in a subdued state, though it continued to supply a large share of the country's tax revenue.
The revival came in the 1990s. The government decided to turn Shanghai into the showcase of the new China, and to do so it transformed Pudong, the eastern bank of the Huangpu that until then had been fields and warehouses, into a financial district of futuristic skyscrapers: the Oriental Pearl Tower, the Jin Mao Tower, the Shanghai Tower. Today, the city sets its two banks facing each other like its two eras: on one, the colonial stone Bund; on the other, the skyline of the 21st-century superpower. Shanghai has become once more what it was before the revolution: China's great economic metropolis, looking out to the world.
Few cities in the world carry as much history as Xi'an. Under its old name of Chang'an ('Perpetual Peace') it was the capital of more than ten dynasties over more than a millennium, from the Western Zhou and the First Emperor's Qin dynasty to the Han and the Tang. Nearby lies the mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang with its army of terracotta warriors, discovered in 1974, one of the most astonishing archaeological finds in history.
Its heyday came under the Tang dynasty (618-907), when Chang'an was the largest and most cosmopolitan city on the planet, with more than a million inhabitants inside a perfectly planned walled grid. It was the eastern terminus of the Silk Road: through its gates came caravans from Central Asia, Persian and Sogdian merchants, Buddhist monks and communities of every religion. The Great Wild Goose Pagoda was built to house the Buddhist texts the monk Xuanzang brought back from India after a legendary journey.
That crossroads calling left a lasting mark: Xi'an's Muslim Quarter, with its Great Mosque and the Hui community, descended in part from those Silk Road merchants, is one of the city's defining features. Xi'an also keeps its Ming city wall almost complete, a rare ring of fortification around the historic centre. It is, in many ways, the gateway to China's deepest past.
To the southwest, hemmed in by mountains and sheltered from the rest of the country by natural barriers, lies the Sichuan Basin, one of the most fertile and densely populated regions in China. Its relative isolation always gave it a strong personality: in antiquity it was the kingdom of Shu, one of the three main players of the Three Kingdoms period, and throughout history it often served as a refuge when the rest of the country sank into war.
The key to its prosperity goes back more than two thousand years: around 256 BC, the engineer Li Bing, in the service of the state of Qin, led the construction of the Dujiangyan irrigation system, which tamed the floods of the Min River and watered the Chengdu plain without the need for dams. The system is still working today —it is on the World Heritage List— and turned Sichuan into a garden that the Chinese have long called 'the land of abundance'.
Its capital, Chengdu, is famous for its unhurried pace, its teahouses, its unmistakable spicy cuisine —one of the country's great culinary traditions— and, above all, for being home to the giant panda, whose habitat in the mountains of Sichuan hosts the most important breeding centres in the world. A historic frontier between Han China and the lands of the Tibetans and the minorities of the southwest, Sichuan is a region of transition, a bridge between the plains of the interior and the heights of Tibet.
Downriver from Chengdu, perched on the hills where the Jialing River meets the Yangtze, Chongqing is a steep, dizzying mountain metropolis that today ranks among the largest urban areas on the planet. Its history is bound to the great river: for millennia it was the port that connected isolated Sichuan with the rest of China via the Yangtze, and it is still the starting point for cruises through the spectacular Three Gorges.
That legendary gorge is also the setting for one of the most colossal and controversial engineering works of modern China: the Three Gorges Dam, the largest hydroelectric power station in the world, completed in 2012. Its construction forced the relocation of more than a million people and flooded entire cities, villages and archaeological sites, sparking a debate about progress, the environment and human cost that sums up many of the tensions of China's development.
Chongqing's most dramatic chapter came during the war with Japan. When Japanese troops occupied the east and the capitals of the Nationalist government fell, Chiang Kai-shek moved his capital to Chongqing, far inland and protected by the mountains. Between 1938 and 1943, the city endured one of the longest aerial bombing campaigns in history, a symbol of Chinese resistance to the invasion. A refuge, battered and eventually turned into a great industrial metropolis of the interior, Chongqing embodies the deep China that held the country together in its darkest hours.
Beyond Sichuan rises the Tibetan Plateau, the 'roof of the world', a vast high plateau more than 4,000 metres above sea level where a unique civilisation developed. In the 7th century, King Songtsen Gampo unified the Tibetan tribes and founded an empire that came to rival Tang China, even briefly occupying its capital. Buddhism, brought from India, was introduced in that period, and over time it merged with local beliefs to give rise to the distinctive Tibetan Buddhism.
After the empire broke apart, Tibet came to be organised around religious power. From the 17th century onwards, the rule of the Dalai Lamas became established: spiritual and temporal leaders of the Gelug school, they made Lhasa their capital. There, on a hill, stands the Potala Palace, the winter residence of the Dalai Lamas and one of the most imposing architectural works in Asia, alongside the Jokhang Temple, the spiritual heart of the city and the goal of pilgrims who travel thousands of kilometres, prostrating themselves along the way.
The historical relationship between Tibet and China is the subject of intense debate. Under the Yuan and Qing dynasties there was a complex bond that China interprets as sovereignty and much of the Tibetan tradition sees as a 'patron and priest' relationship between equals. What is beyond dispute is that, in the first decades of the 20th century, after the fall of the Qing empire, Tibet functioned de facto autonomously, with its own government in Lhasa, though without full international recognition of its independence.
In October 1950, shortly after the founding of the People's Republic, the People's Liberation Army entered eastern Tibet and defeated the Tibetan forces. In May 1951, representatives of the Tibetan government signed the so-called Seventeen Point Agreement in Beijing, under which Tibet came under Chinese sovereignty in exchange for promises of autonomy and of respect for the religious system and the role of the Dalai Lama. The validity of that agreement is disputed: the Tibetan government in exile maintains that its delegates signed it under duress, which Beijing denies.
Tensions erupted in March 1959. Amid fears that the Chinese authorities were going to arrest the 14th Dalai Lama, a popular uprising broke out in Lhasa and was crushed. The Dalai Lama fled to India, where he set up a Tibetan government in exile in Dharamsala and where he remains to this day, followed by tens of thousands of Tibetans. Tibet was fully integrated into the People's Republic, and in 1965 the Tibet Autonomous Region was created.
What happened next remains one of the most sensitive and polarised issues in Asian politics. For the Chinese government, the incorporation of Tibet put an end to a feudal, theocratic system and brought development, infrastructure and material improvements. For the government in exile and many human rights organisations, it meant the repression of Tibetan culture, religion and language, with episodes such as the destruction of monasteries during the Cultural Revolution and the protests crushed in 1989 and 2008. The Dalai Lama himself, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989, has for decades called not for independence but for 'genuine autonomy', a proposal Beijing rejects. It is an open conflict, in which deeply opposed historical accounts exist side by side.
Hardly anything that happened to China happened on its own: these are the histories next door.
