With a landmass of almost 10 million sq. km (4 million sq. miles), plus a further 5 million sq. km (2 million sq. miles) of water, no other single country can even come close to offering such a vast choice of destinations as the unimaginable vastness that is currently known as China.
The world's foremost authority on China, Harvard professor John King Fairbank, declared that "our libraries are filled with writers who know all about China, but could not see how much they did not know." We concede that we have barely scratched the surface, especially when we consider that human history in this area stretches back almost two million years, much further than the much-vaunted "5,000 years of Chinese civilization," yet even this is hardly a smudge on the far longer geologic record. In many parts, the People's Republic has only recently been opened to visitors, and so we have only had a few decades to unlock some of this enormous realm's secrets. While we certainly do not claim to have uncovered everything, we have been truly inspired by this huge treasure house, and have included here what we have been able to find out so far, starting with what we think is some of China's very best.
