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China stretches across East Asia, from the deserts and grasslands of the north and west to the tropical coast of the south. In the southwest the land rises to the Tibetan Plateau and the Himalayas, where Mount Everest stands on the border with Nepal. Two great rivers, the Yellow River and the Yangtze, flow east across the country to the sea, and most people live in the fertile plains and river valleys of the east.
The oldest known Chinese writing, carved on oracle bones, is more than 3,000 years old. In 221 BC the kingdoms of China were joined into one empire, and emperors of one dynasty after another ruled for more than 2,000 years, until the last emperor gave up the throne in 1912. The People's Republic of China was proclaimed in Beijing in 1949.
Today China is one of the largest countries in the world by area and, as of 2025, has the second-largest population, after India. It is a one-party state led by the Communist Party of China. Standard Chinese, based on the Mandarin spoken around Beijing, is the common language taught in every school, but many people also speak Cantonese, Shanghainese or another regional language, and the country officially recognises 56 ethnic groups.
Chinese history is often told as a chain of dynasties, ruling families that rose, governed for decades or centuries and fell. Early legends speak of even older kings, but the story below starts where writing and archaeology agree, with the Shang kings and their oracle bones.
From about 1250 BC, the kings of the Shang dynasty asked questions of their ancestors by heating ox bones and turtle shells until they cracked, then carved the questions and answers on them. Found near Anyang in Henan, these oracle bones are the oldest known large body of Chinese writing, and many of their characters are still in use.
Confucius was born in 551 BC, by tradition, in the state of Lu, in today's Shandong. His teachings on family duty, respect for elders, learning and good government shaped Chinese life for more than 2,000 years.
In 221 BC the king of Qin conquered the last rival kingdom and called himself Qin Shi Huang, the First Emperor. He made one system of writing, money, weights and measures for the whole empire, joined older walls into a long northern defence and was buried near Xi'an with the Terracotta Army.
In 105 AD Cai Lun, an official at the Han court, presented the emperor with an improved way of making paper from tree bark, hemp, rags and old fishing nets. Simple paper existed before him, but his method made it cheap and common.
The Tang dynasty, founded in 618, is remembered as a golden age of poetry, painting and trade. Its capital Chang'an, today's Xi'an, was one of the largest cities in the world and a meeting point for merchants who came along the Silk Road.
In 1271 Kublai Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, proclaimed the Yuan dynasty. By 1279 the Mongols ruled all of China, with their capital at Dadu, on the site of today's Beijing.
In 1368 Zhu Yuanzhang, a former peasant and monk, drove out the Mongols and founded the Ming dynasty, first with Nanjing as its capital. Most of the Great Wall that visitors see today was built under the Ming.
In 1405 the admiral Zheng He sailed with a huge fleet of treasure ships on the first of seven voyages. His fleets reached Southeast Asia, India, Arabia and the east coast of Africa.
After 14 years of work by more than a million people, the Forbidden City in Beijing was completed in 1420. It was the home of 24 Ming and Qing emperors for almost 500 years.
In 1644 the Manchus of the Qing dynasty, founded in the northeast in 1636, took Beijing and began to rule all of China. The Qing was the last imperial dynasty of China. Men were ordered to wear their hair in the Manchu style, with a long braid called a queue.
In 1839 China tried to stop the British opium trade and war broke out. It ended in 1842 with the Treaty of Nanking, which opened ports to foreign trade and gave the island of Hong Kong to Britain.
After the revolution that began in 1911, the Republic of China was founded on 1 January 1912, and on 12 February the six-year-old emperor Puyi gave up the throne. More than 2,000 years of imperial rule came to an end.
On 1 October 1949, after years of civil war, Mao Zedong proclaimed the People's Republic of China in Beijing. The Nationalist government of the Republic of China moved to Taiwan. The date is now celebrated as National Day.
In December 1978, two years after the end of the Cultural Revolution, the leadership under Deng Xiaoping began reforms that let farmers and businesses sell for profit and invited foreign investment. In the decades that followed, hundreds of millions of people rose out of poverty.
At midnight on 1 July 1997, Britain handed Hong Kong back to China, after 156 years of British rule. It became a special administrative region with its own laws and currency. Portugal handed over Macau in 1999.
The Summer Olympics opened in Beijing on 8 August 2008, the eighth day of the eighth month, a date chosen partly because eight is a lucky number in China. In 2022 Beijing also hosted the Winter Olympics, becoming the first city to hold both.
China has not one cuisine but many, often grouped into eight great regional traditions, among them Sichuan, Cantonese, Shandong and Jiangsu. As a rough rule, the north eats more wheat, as noodles, buns and dumplings, and the south eats more rice. A family meal is not served in courses: several dishes of meat, fish, tofu and vegetables go in the middle of the table at the same time, everyone has a bowl of rice, and people help themselves with chopsticks. In some regions soup comes near the start of the meal, in others at the end. At the New Year's Eve reunion dinner a whole fish is served and some of it is left over on purpose, because yú, fish, sounds like the word for surplus: 'may there be plenty every year'.
A whole duck roasted until the skin is thin and crisp, carved at the table. You wrap slices of skin and meat in thin pancakes with sweet bean sauce, spring onion and cucumber. It was a dish of the imperial court and is now served at state banquets.
Bianyifang, one of Beijing's famous duck restaurants, traces its history back to 1416.
Half-moon dumplings of thin wheat dough, filled with minced pork and cabbage or other fillings, then boiled, steamed or pan-fried. In the north, families make them together on New Year's Eve, because their shape looks like the old gold and silver ingots used as money.
Some families hide a clean coin in one dumpling; whoever finds it can expect good luck in the new year. If you try this, warn everyone at the table before you eat.
Small steamed dumplings with a thin, pleated top, filled with pork and a hot, savoury soup. The Shanghai style comes from Nanxiang, once a village near Shanghai. The soup starts as a solid jelly of meat stock, which melts when the dumplings are steamed.
To avoid burning your mouth, put the dumpling on a spoon, bite a small hole, sip the soup and then eat the rest.
Small portions served in bamboo steamers or on little plates with tea, for breakfast or lunch: shrimp dumplings (har gow), open pork dumplings (siu mai), barbecued pork buns and rice noodle rolls. Going out for dim sum with tea is called yum cha, 'drinking tea', in Cantonese.
In Cantonese, dim sum is pronounced dim sam; the words mean something like 'touch the heart'.
Soft tofu in a red, spicy sauce with minced beef or pork, fermented broad bean and chilli paste and Sichuan pepper, which makes the lips tingle. It comes from a small restaurant in Chengdu in the 1800s; the name means 'pockmarked old woman's tofu', after the cook, Mrs Chen.
Stir-fried cubes of chicken with peanuts, dried red chillies and Sichuan pepper in a sauce that is spicy, a little sweet and a little sour. It is said to be named after Ding Baozhen, a governor of Sichuan in the 1800s, whose title was Gongbao, 'palace guardian'.
The dish contains peanuts, so people with a nut allergy should ask before ordering any Sichuan stir-fry.
A pot of simmering broth in the middle of the table, into which everyone dips thin slices of raw meat, fish balls, tofu, mushrooms and vegetables to cook them. The Chongqing style has a fiery broth full of chillies and Sichuan pepper; Beijing's version uses a clear broth for thin slices of lamb.
Many restaurants serve a split pot, spicy on one side and mild on the other, so everyone can choose.
Strips of pork marinated in honey, soy sauce and five-spice and roasted until sticky and red at the edges. It hangs in the windows of Cantonese roast meat shops and is served sliced over rice or baked into buns.
The name means 'fork roast', because the meat was once roasted on long forks over a fire.
Cooked rice stir-fried with egg and spring onions, a quick home dish that uses up rice from the day before. Yangzhou fried rice, from Jiangsu, adds prawns, ham and peas.
Soft scrambled eggs cooked with juicy tomatoes into a sweet and savoury sauce. It is one of the first dishes many Chinese people learn to cook and is eaten at home all over the country, spooned over rice.
Rice simmered in plenty of water until soft and creamy, eaten for breakfast or when someone is unwell. It is topped with pickles, spring onions, a fried dough stick or pieces of fish, chicken or preserved egg.
Hand-pulled wheat noodles in a clear beef broth with slices of beef, white radish, coriander and red chilli oil. The cook pulls and folds the dough in front of you until it becomes long, thin noodles in about a minute.
You can often choose the thickness of your noodles, from very fine to wide and flat.
A flat bread split open and stuffed with chopped, slow-braised pork. It is the classic street snack of Xi'an and is sometimes called a Chinese hamburger. In the Muslim Quarter of Xi'an it is made with beef or lamb.
Round pastries with a thick, sweet filling of lotus seed or red bean paste, sometimes with a salted egg yolk inside to look like the full moon. They are given and shared at the Mid-Autumn Festival, when families gather to look at the moon.
Mooncakes are rich: one is usually cut into small wedges and shared.
Balls of glutinous rice flour, often filled with black sesame paste, served in warm water or a light syrup. They are eaten at the Lantern Festival, on the 15th day of the New Year, because their round shape stands for a family together. They are soft and very sticky, so cut them small and eat slowly, especially for children and older people.
A green tea grown in the hills around West Lake in Hangzhou. The leaves are pan-roasted flat by hand, and the tea is mild, fresh and slightly nutty. Tea in China is usually drunk plain, without milk or sugar.
Most of China's people live in the east, and it has more big cities than any other country. Beijing, the capital, is in the north near the Great Wall. Shanghai, the great port and business city, sits at the mouth of the Yangtze, with the old garden and lake cities of Suzhou, Hangzhou and Nanjing nearby. Inland lie Xi'an, the old imperial capital, and Chengdu and Chongqing in the spicy southwest, while Guangzhou is the great Cantonese city of the south and Harbin the frozen city of the far northeast.
The capital and the centre of government, a city of about 22 million people. It was the imperial capital under the Ming and Qing emperors, whose palace, the Forbidden City, stands at its heart beside Tiananmen Square. The Great Wall runs through the mountains north of the city.
One of China's largest cities and the home of the world's busiest container port, near the mouth of the Yangtze. Old European banks and hotels line the Bund on one side of the Huangpu River, and the skyscrapers of Pudong rise on the other.
Under the name Chang'an, this was the capital of the Han and Tang dynasties and the eastern end of the Silk Road. Its old centre is still ringed by a Ming city wall you can walk or cycle around, and the Terracotta Army is just outside the city.
The capital of Sichuan, known for its relaxed teahouses, its spicy food and its giant pandas. UNESCO has named it a City of Gastronomy.
A hilly, misty city where the Jialing River meets the Yangtze, with roads and railways stacked on top of each other. River cruises through the Three Gorges start or end here.
The great city of the south, on the Pearl River, long known in English as Canton. For centuries it was the main port where foreign merchants could trade with China, and it is the home of Cantonese cooking.
The capital of the Southern Song dynasty and today a busy modern city, built around the willows, causeways and pagodas of West Lake. Tea plantations cover the hills just outside the city.
A city of canals, stone bridges and classical gardens, west of Shanghai. Scholars and officials built private gardens here for centuries, and the city has long been famous for its silk and fine embroidery.
A historic city on the Yangtze whose name means 'southern capital'. It was the first capital of the Ming dynasty and later the capital of the Republic of China. Its Ming city wall is one of the longest city walls still standing.
A green city in the south, surrounded by steep limestone hills that rise straight out of the rice fields. Boat trips down the Li River to the town of Yangshuo pass some of the most painted scenery in China.
The largest city of the far northeast, where winter temperatures often fall below minus 20°C. Russians who came to build the railway shaped the city in the early 1900s, and their onion-domed Saint Sophia Cathedral still stands in the centre.
A restored stretch of the Ming-era Great Wall on wooded mountains about 70 km northeast of central Beijing, with 22 watchtowers along its 2.25 km and a cable car to the top. Counting all its walls, trenches and natural barriers, a 2012 survey measured the Great Wall at more than 21,000 km.
UNESCO World Heritage
The palace of the Ming and Qing emperors, built between 1406 and 1420, with 980 surviving buildings behind a moat and high red walls. Ordinary people could not enter, which gave it its name. Since 1925 it has been the Palace Museum.
UNESCO World Heritage
The park and temples where the emperor prayed to Heaven for good harvests. Its round, blue-roofed Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests is built entirely of wood, without nails. Local people come early in the morning to do tai chi, dance and play cards.
UNESCO World Heritage
An imperial garden of lakes, halls and pavilions in northwest Beijing. The man-made Kunming Lake, the painted Long Corridor, 728 m long, and the marble boat were favourites of the Empress Dowager Cixi, who had the palace rebuilt in the 1880s and 1890s.
UNESCO World Heritage
Thousands of life-size clay soldiers, horses and chariots buried to guard the tomb of the First Emperor, east of Xi'an. Farmers digging a well found them in 1974. The three pits hold an estimated 8,000 soldiers, and no two faces are exactly alike.
UNESCO World Heritage
A riverside promenade along the Huangpu River, lined with grand banks, hotels and trading houses built mostly in the early 1900s. Across the water rise the towers of Pudong, which light up after dark.
A lake framed by hills, temples, pagodas and two long causeways lined with willows and peach trees. For more than a thousand years poets and painters have praised it, and its landscape inspired garden designers across East Asia.
UNESCO World Heritage
The largest of Suzhou's classical gardens, laid out in the early 1500s by a retired official. Ponds, rocks, bridges and pavilions are arranged so that every turn of the path opens a new view, like a series of paintings.
UNESCO World Heritage
A seated Buddha 71 m tall, carved into a red sandstone cliff where three rivers meet, in the city of Leshan, south of Chengdu. Work began in the 700s, under the Tang dynasty, and was finished in 803. It is the largest and tallest stone Buddha in the world.
UNESCO World Heritage
A breeding and research centre in the north of Chengdu, opened in 1987, where visitors can watch giant pandas and red pandas in wooded enclosures. Come early in the morning, when the pandas eat and are most active.
The Great Wall cannot be seen from the Moon with the naked eye, and from orbit it is barely visible even in perfect conditions. China's first astronaut, Yang Liwei, said in 2003 that he could not see it.
The whole of China runs on one time zone, Beijing Time, even though the country is wide enough for five. In the far west, the clock runs well ahead of the sun.
As of the end of 2025, China had about 1,405 million people. For centuries it had the largest population in the world, until India overtook it in 2023, according to United Nations estimates.
Wild giant pandas live only in the mountains of Sichuan, Shaanxi and Gansu. About 99 percent of their food is bamboo, and in 2016 the IUCN moved them from Endangered to Vulnerable as their numbers grew.
Paper, printing, the compass and gunpowder are known in China as the Four Great Inventions.
Before the Chinese New Year, hundreds of millions of people travel home to their families. This travel season, called chunyun, is often described as the largest yearly human migration on Earth. In 2024 UNESCO added the Spring Festival to its list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity.
As of 2025, China has the longest high-speed rail network in the world, about 50,000 km, more than the rest of the world put together.
Fortune cookies are not Chinese. They were made popular in California in the early 1900s, most likely from a Japanese cookie, and are almost unknown in China.
Eight is a lucky number because bā, eight, sounds like fā, to become rich. Four is avoided because sì sounds like the word for death, and some buildings have no fourth floor.
The Chinese name for China, Zhōngguó, is usually translated as 'Middle Kingdom' or 'Central State'.
As of 2026, China has 61 UNESCO World Heritage Sites, one of the highest numbers of any country. The newest, added in 2026, are the porcelain workshops and kilns of Jingdezhen.
China shares land borders with 14 countries, as many as Russia and more than any other country, and has the longest land borders in the world, about 22,000 km.
The Yangtze is the longest river in Asia and the third longest in the world. The Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze is the largest hydroelectric power station on Earth.
Pronunciation is written the way it sounds; the capital letters show where the stress goes. Audio is coming soon.
As of 2026, citizens of about 50 countries, including the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and most of Europe, can visit mainland China for up to 30 days without a visa under a policy that runs until the end of 2026. Many others, including US citizens, can stay up to 10 days without a visa if they are travelling on to a third country. Rules change often, so check with the Chinese embassy before you book.
Almost everyone in China pays with a phone app, Alipay or WeChat Pay, and both now accept foreign bank cards. Set one up at home and test it, but carry some cash in yuan as well, because foreign cards are not accepted everywhere.
Many foreign services, including Google, Facebook, YouTube and X, cannot be reached from mainland China. Download offline maps and a translation app before you travel, and tell family at home how they can reach you.
You need your passport to check into hotels, to board trains and even to enter some museums and stations. Book train tickets on the official China Railway 12306 site or app, which has an English version, and use the same passport you booked with.
Travel is very crowded around the Chinese New Year, in January or February, and during Golden Week, the first week of October, when trains, planes and famous sights fill up weeks in advance. Plan around these dates if you can.
Do not drink water straight from the tap. Hotels provide a kettle or bottled water, and many stations and trains have hot water dispensers. Choose freshly cooked, hot food at stalls.
The official emergency numbers are 110 for police, 120 for an ambulance and 119 for the fire service. Carry your hotel's name and address written in Chinese to show taxi drivers or anyone helping you.
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