Cities for every pace.

Most visitors change trains in Zhengzhou without leaving the station. Stay a day and you get one of the country's best provincial museums, 3,600-year-old earth walls running through the middle of town, and the Songshan monuments ninety minutes south-west.

Wuhan is the crossroads of China: every train passes through, and the river that made it is still the point. Come for the breakfast culture, the old concessions of Hankou, the East Lake greenway, and the ferry across the Yangtze at dusk.

Changsha is Hunan's capital and its kitchen: chillies, stinky tofu, crayfish and milk tea, eaten late. By day there is a museum with a 2,100-year-old woman in it and a wooded mountain across the river with a thousand-year-old academy.

Luoyang was capital to thirteen dynasties and keeps the best of it on the edge of town: the Longmen Grottoes along a river cliff, the White Horse Temple, and a museum of what was dug up in between. Ninety minutes from Xi'an by train.

Kaifeng was the largest city in the world a thousand years ago. Floods buried that city metres deep, but the town on top keeps a slow, provincial charm, a great night market, an eleventh-century pagoda, and an old street of bookshops.

Yichang is a Yangtze gateway where the Three Gorges landscape meets modern hydropower, relocated heritage, Qu Yuan traditions and Tujia communities. Dam infrastructure, river cruises, museums and rural scenic areas use different booking and security systems. Choose whether a day is about engineering, landscape or cultural history instead of rushing all three.