Cities for every pace.

The capital is vast, formal and surprisingly gentle once you step off the ring roads. Give it four days: one for the palaces, one for the Wall, two for wandering.

Chengdu is the unhurried capital of China. People sit in teahouses for whole afternoons, dinner takes three hours, and nobody minds. Three days in the city, then the mountains.

Chongqing stacks itself up the hillsides where the Yangtze meets the Jialing. It is disorienting, dramatic and delicious. Two days, and eat hot pot on the first night.

Shanghai is the easy entry point: signage in English, a metro that goes everywhere, and neighbourhoods built for walking. Three days is enough for the city; add Suzhou or Hangzhou as day trips.

The old capital of thirteen dynasties has one world-famous sight and a lot of quieter ones. Two full days covers it; a third lets you slow down.

Guangzhou is Canton: the old trading port at the head of the Pearl River delta, with a food culture that starts at dawn. Skip the skyline, stay in the old west of the city, and eat.

Kunming is the gateway to Yunnan and a good city in its own right, at two thousand metres with weather that never gets extreme. Give it a day or two around Green Lake before heading west to Dali and Lijiang.

Qingdao is the seaside city of the north: a hilly German-built old town of red tiles and granite, beaches along the bay, and Laoshan's Taoist mountain at the end of the coast road. Three hours from Beijing and a different climate.

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.

Quanzhou was the largest port in the world in the Song and Yuan, and the old town keeps the evidence: a Tang Buddhist temple, a Song mosque, Manichaean and Hindu carvings, and a living street culture of temple fairs and noodle stalls. Half an hour from Xiamen and almost no foreign visitors.

Harbin grew up around a Russian railway and still looks it: onion domes, cobbled Central Street, sausage and black bread. In winter the river freezes and the city builds a town out of ice. Summer is green and mild and nobody comes, which is its own argument.

Lanzhou is a long thin city squeezed between hills along the Yellow River, and the place the Silk Road routes west begin. Come for a night on the way to Dunhuang or Xining, eat the noodles, walk the river, and see the museum.

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.

Shaoxing is a canal city of the old Jiangnan kind, twenty minutes from Hangzhou, where people still live along the water. It has the writer Lu Xun's childhood, the calligrapher Wang Xizhi's pavilion, and the wine that carries its name.

Guiyang is the mountain capital of Guizhou, cool in summer and set among green hills, and the gateway to the Miao and Dong villages, the Huangguoshu falls, and a province most travellers still miss. Two days here, then out.

Xining is the doorway to the Tibetan plateau: 2,300 metres up, cool in summer, half Hui Muslim and half Tibetan in its streets and food. Kumbum Monastery is half an hour away and Qinghai Lake a long day out.