Historic Sites in China

The Great Wall is not one wall but many, built and rebuilt over 2,000 years; the brick-and-stone sections people picture are Ming, mostly from the 15th and 16th centuries. Near Beijing you choose a section by how much restoration and how many people you can stand.

• Mutianyu: the best all-rounder, about 1.5 hours north-east of the city, fully restored with watchtowers every few hundred metres, a cable car or chairlift up and a toboggan run down. Busy from 10am but manageable.
• Badaling: the closest and most crowded, reached by high-speed train from Beijing’s Qinghe station to Badaling station, cut deep inside the mountain. Real-name booking with your passport is required, and on holidays the wall is shoulder to shoulder.
• Jinshanling: about 2.5 hours away, partly restored, with long views over towers marching along the ridge. It is the classic photographers’ section and the start of a good half-day walk.
• Simatai: steep and dramatic, with a section open at night, booked together with the Gubei Water Town resort below it.

Away from Beijing, the wall meets the sea at Shanhai Pass in Shanhaiguan, the “First Pass Under Heaven”, about two hours by train. The western end of the Ming wall is the fort at Jiayuguan in Gansu, a mud-brick fortress with the snowy Qilian Mountains behind. Unrestored “wild wall” such as Jiankou looks spectacular but is crumbling and officially closed; people are injured there every year.

Xi’an was the capital for 13 dynasties, and its surroundings hold more major sites than anywhere else in China. The Terracotta Army is about an hour east of the city by metro line 9 and a short bus or taxi. The ticket, about 120 yuan (around $17), covers the three excavated pits, the bronze chariots hall and the burial mound park of Qin Shi Huang’s tomb, linked by shuttle. Allow three to four hours, start in Pit 1 before the tour groups arrive, and ignore station touts selling cheap tours that end in jade shops.

In the city, the 14th-century Ming wall is the most complete city wall in China, about 13.7 km round, wide enough to ride a rented bicycle along the top; the loop takes around two hours. Inside it, the Bell Tower marks the centre. North of the walls, the Daming Palace heritage park covers the site of the Tang emperors’ main palace.

The Tang and Han emperors are buried across the plain to the north-west. Qianling, about two hours out, is the joint tomb of Emperor Gaozong and Wu Zetian, China’s only empress regnant, approached by a spirit road of stone horses, winged beasts and 61 headless foreign envoys. Han Yang Ling, near the airport, lets you walk on glass above pits of small Han dynasty figures. The Neolithic village of Banpo on the east side of town is a covered excavation of a 6,000-year-old settlement. For Xi’an’s Buddhist sights such as the Giant Wild Goose Pagoda, see our temples guide.

Beijing’s historic core is the axis that runs north through Tiananmen Square, Tiananmen gate and the Forbidden City, which has its own section in our palaces guide. At the south end of the square, Zhengyangmen is one of the few surviving gates of the old city wall, and the Chairman Mao Memorial Hall and the Monument to the People’s Heroes stand in the middle. North of the palace, the Drum and Bell Towers look over the hutong lanes.

The Temple of Heaven, where emperors prayed for good harvests, is the finest piece of Ming ritual architecture in the country and a park full of morning tai chi. The Ming Tombs, 13 imperial burials in a valley about 50 km north of the city, combine easily with Badaling or Mutianyu on the same day. Walk the Sacred Way of stone animals, then visit Changling, the grandest hall, and Dingling, the one tomb excavated, where you descend into the stone vaults of the underground palace.

The ruins of the Old Summer Palace, burned by British and French troops in 1860, are the other must: broken marble arches of the European-style palaces set in a lakeside park.

In Nanjing, the first Ming capital, Ming Xiaoling is the tomb of the Hongwu emperor, founder of the dynasty, on the slopes of Purple Mountain. Its spirit path of stone elephants, camels and lions curves through woods that turn gold in autumn. Next to it, the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum climbs 392 steps to the tomb of the father of modern China, and the Ming city wall, among the longest city walls ever built, still circles much of central Nanjing.

The Qing emperors split their burials in two. The Eastern Qing Tombs in Hebei, about three hours east of Beijing, hold Qianlong and the Empress Dowager Cixi, both robbed in 1928, with the carved stone chambers of Qianlong’s tomb open below ground. The Western Qing Tombs south-west of Beijing are quieter and wooded. In Shenyang, the Fuling Tomb of the dynasty’s founder Nurhaci sits in a forest park.

Out west, the Western Xia mausoleums near Yinchuan in Ningxia are eroded earthen mounds of a forgotten 11th to 13th-century kingdom, rising from the desert below the Helan Mountains.

Pingyao in Shanxi is the best-preserved walled town in China and the one place where you can sleep inside an intact Ming wall, about 6 km round with 72 watchtowers. The old city was a banking centre in the Qing dynasty, and the Rishengchang draft bank, the first of its kind, is now a museum. Walking the streets is free; a combined ticket of about 125 yuan, valid for three days, covers the wall walk and about 20 sights. High-speed trains reach Pingyao Gucheng station from Taiyuan in about 40 minutes and from Xi’an in about three hours. Stay overnight in a courtyard hotel, because the town empties when the day-trippers leave.

In the south, the Old Town of Lijiang is a Naxi town of canals and wooden houses, now crowded and commercial, best before 9am. Fenghuang in western Hunan has stilt houses on the Tuo River. The villages of Xidi and Hongcun, near Huangshan, keep their Ming and Qing merchant houses with whitewashed walls and horse-head gables. In Guangdong, the Kaiping Diaolou are some 1,800 fortified tower houses built in the early 20th century by villagers who made money overseas, mixing Chinese and European styles. The Hakka round earth houses of Fujian, the tulou, are the other great village sight. In Qufu, Shandong, the Temple, Cemetery and Kong Family Mansion mark the hometown of Confucius.

China’s cave temples are among its greatest sights, and they are as much historic sites as religious ones. Mogao, outside Dunhuang in Gansu, has about 500 caves painted and sculpted over a thousand years from the 4th century, and its murals are the finest Buddhist art in Asia. Visits are tightly controlled: a standard ticket includes two films at the visitor centre and a guided tour of about eight caves, with a daily cap, so book online weeks ahead in summer. Photography is banned inside the caves.

Longmen, 12 km south of Luoyang in Henan, lines both banks of the Yi River with more than 100,000 statues, climaxing in the 17-metre Vairocana Buddha of Fengxian Temple, carved under Wu Zetian. Go in the late afternoon, when the west bank catches the light. Yungang, near Datong in Shanxi, is older, carved by the Northern Wei in the 5th century, with colossal Buddhas in sandstone; Datong also has the cliff-hung Xuankong Temple.

In Sichuan, the 71-metre Leshan Giant Buddha, carved into a cliff above three rivers between 713 and 803, is the largest stone Buddha in the world; take the cliff staircase beside it for the full height, or a boat for the front view. The Dazu Rock Carvings near Chongqing are Song dynasty and unusually lively, with scenes of daily life. In Gansu, the Maijishan Grottoes cling to a haystack-shaped peak, and the Bingling Temple caves are reached by boat across a reservoir from Lanzhou.

West of Dunhuang, the Yumen Pass is a lone mud-brick fort in the Gobi that marked the Han frontier. Further on, the oasis of Turpan in Xinjiang has the best ruins of the route. Jiaohe is a whole city carved down into a loess plateau between two rivers, its streets and temples still readable from the walkways; go at sunset. Gaochang, the larger capital of the Uyghur kingdom of Qocho, is more eroded and best seen by electric cart. Nearby are the Astana Cemetery, with painted tombs you can descend into, and the Bezeklik Thousand Buddha Caves in the Flaming Mountains, whose murals were largely cut away by early 20th-century European expeditions.

Around Kucha, the Kizil Caves are the oldest major Buddhist grottoes in China. In Kashgar, the Id Kah Mosque and the Afaq Khoja Mausoleum, with its green-tiled dome, are the landmarks of the far west. Turpan and Kashgar are both on the high-speed and main rail lines from Ürümqi.

Western Tibet has the most remote ruin of all: Tsaparang, the citadel of the Guge kingdom, a honeycomb of caves and temples on an eroded ridge in Ngari. It takes days of overland travel and a Tibet permit with a guided tour. In Inner Mongolia, the site of Shangdu, Kublai Khan’s summer capital, is grassy foundations on the steppe.

For China before the empire, the sites are in the provinces. Sanxingdui, about an hour north of Chengdu, is a Bronze Age culture known for its bronze masks with bulging eyes and giant bronze trees; new pits opened from 2020 have filled its museum, which reopened in a large new building in 2023. In Chengdu itself, the Jinsha site museum covers the later phase of the same culture, including the gold sun-bird disc.

Yinxu at Anyang in Henan was the last Shang capital, where the oracle bones with the earliest Chinese writing were found; the open tomb of the general Fu Hao is the highlight. The Liangzhu archaeological ruins near Hangzhou are a 5,000-year-old walled city with water-control dams, now a landscaped park. In Changsha, the Mawangdui tombs yielded a remarkably preserved Han noblewoman, displayed in the Hunan Museum. In Jilin, the Koguryo capitals and tombs at Ji’an include the stepped stone Tomb of the General. For the objects from these sites, see our museums guide.

Almost every major site sells tickets through WeChat or its own official mini-program, and the busiest ones (the Great Wall at Badaling, the Terracotta Army, Mogao) need a real-name booking tied to your passport number. Bring the same passport on the day; it is your ticket. Alipay and WeChat Pay both accept foreign cards, and most sites no longer sell paper tickets at a window, though staff can usually help foreigners at a service desk.

Go at opening time. Chinese domestic tourism is huge, and the first hour is the only quiet one, especially at the wall and Xi’an. Avoid the national holidays: the Spring Festival week, the May Day holiday (1 to 5 May) and Golden Week from 1 October, when crowds at famous sites become overwhelming and tickets sell out. High-speed trains connect most of these places; see our getting around guide, and for routes that string them together, our itineraries. For the seasons, see the best time to visit.

Official guides are available at the entrance of the big sites, and audio guides in English are common. A guide is worth it at the Terracotta Army and Mogao, where the context makes the visit.

Do not climb on walls, statues or ruins, touch murals or carvings, or scratch names into anything; fines are real and so is the public shaming. Flash photography is banned in painted caves, and photos are banned outright at Mogao and in many tomb chambers. Flying a drone at any of these sites, or anywhere near central Beijing, is illegal without a permit.

At Tiananmen Square and the Mao Memorial Hall, expect airport-style security and passport checks; at the memorial hall you leave bags and cameras at a paid depot outside and file past in silence. Several sites close one day a week, usually Monday, and some grottoes close sections for conservation without notice. Wear proper shoes for the wall, which is steep and uneven, carry water in summer, and in Xinjiang and Gansu bring sun protection: the desert sites have almost no shade.