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.

Dunhuang is a small town at the end of the Hexi Corridor, with the Mogao Caves on one side and the singing dunes on the other. It is far from everywhere and worth the journey.

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.

Suzhou's gardens are small, perfect and best seen one or two at a time. Stay a night in the old town rather than day-tripping, and see them at opening before the groups.

Pingyao is the best-preserved walled town in China, a grid of grey courtyards inside a six-kilometre wall. Sleep inside the walls and the evenings are yours.

Nanjing was the capital six times and keeps the scale of one: a thirty-kilometre city wall, boulevards under plane trees, and Purple Mountain rising at the east gate. An hour from Shanghai, and a different tempo.

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.

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.

Datong was a Northern Wei capital in the fifth century, and the caves they carved at Yungang are the earliest great Buddhist art in China. Add two Liao-dynasty monasteries in the old town and the Hanging Temple an hour away.

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.

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.

Linfen spans the Fen River basin and Yellow River edge, linking early-state archaeology, major Buddhist architecture, migration memory and Hukou Waterfall. Sites lie across a large prefecture rather than one downtown circuit. Base plans on geography and conservation access, not on squeezing every landmark into a day.