Cities for every pace.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.