Cities for every pace.

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.

Dali sits between Erhai Lake and the Cangshan range, and people who came for two days stay for two weeks. Cycle the lake, walk the mountain, do very little.

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 landscape on the twenty-yuan note. Use Guilin city as the gateway, drift down the river, and stay in the countryside around Yangshuo.

Hangzhou is the lake and the hills around it. Two days lets you walk the lake, cycle to the tea villages and drink a lot of Longjing.

Xiamen is the gentlest city on the south-east coast: a walkable island of arcaded streets and seafront paths, with Gulangyu, a car-free island of colonial villas, five minutes away by ferry. Come for the pace, not a checklist.

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.

Lijiang is three Naxi towns on a plain under Jade Dragon Snow Mountain. Dayan, the famous one, is beautiful and overrun; Shuhe and Baisha next door are the same architecture at a fraction of the volume.

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.

Yangshuo is the countryside south of Guilin where the karst peaks stand in rice fields and every road is worth cycling. The town is noisy; the villages along the Yulong River, ten minutes away, are the slowest days in China.

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.

Shenzhen was a county of villages and oyster beds until the zone was drawn in 1980; it now holds eighteen million people, almost none of them born here. Give it two days: one for the coast and the old walled towns the city grew around, one for markets, art and the crossing to Hong Kong.