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China, Shanghai, Yu Gardens (Yu Yuan), Huxingting Teahouse
Photographer: Colin Sinclair
Copyright: dkimages

China has grown up alone and aloof, cut off from the rest of Eurasia by the Himalayas to the southwest and the Siberian steppe to the north. For the last three millennia, while empires, languages and peoples in the rest of the world rose, blossomed and disappeared without trace, China has been busy largely recycling itself. The ferocious dragons and lions of Chinese statuary have been produced for 25 centuries or more, and the script still used today reached perfection at the time of the Han dynasty, two thousand years ago. Until the late nineteenth century, the only foreigners China saw - apart from occasional ruling elites of Mongol and Manchu origin, who quickly became assimilated - were visiting merchants from far-flung shores or uncivilized nomads from the wild steppe: peripheral, unimportant and unreal.
Today, the negative stories surrounding China - the runaway pollution, the oppression of dissidents, and imperialist behaviour towards Tibet and other minority regions - are only part of the picture. As the Communist Party moves ever further from hard-line political doctrine and towards economic pragmatism, China is undergoing a huge commercial and creative upheaval. Hong Kong-style city skylines are rearing up across the country, and tens of millions of people are finding jobs that earn them a spending power their parents could never have known. Whatever the reasons you are attracted to China, the sheer pace of change, visible in every part of Chinese life, will ensure that your trip is a unique one.
Fact file
. With an area of 9.6 million square kilometres, China is the fourth largest country in the world - practically the same size as the United States - and the most populous nation on earth, with around 1.3 billion people. Of these, 92% are of the Han ethnic group, with the remainder comprising about sixty minorities such as Mongols, Uyghurs and Tibetans. The main religions are Buddhism, Taoism and Christianity (Confucianism has died out as a religious system, but its tenets remain embedded in the Chinese psyche), though the country is officially atheist. A third of China comprises fertile river plains, and another third arid deserts, plateaux or mountains. China's longest river is the Yangzi (6275km) and the highest peak is Qomolongma - Mount Everest (8850m) - on the Nepalese border.
. China is a one-party state run by the Chinese Communist Party, the sole political organization, which is divided into Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches. The chief of state (President) and the head of government (Premier) are elected for five-year terms at the National People's Congress. After decades of state planning, the economy is now mixed, with state-owned enterprises on the decline and free-market principles ubiquitous. China's main exports are clothing, textiles, tea and fossil fuels, and its main trading partners are the US, Japan, South Korea and Europe.

The first thing that strikes visitors to the country is the extraordinary density of its population. In central and eastern China, villages, towns and cities seem to sprawl endlessly into one another along the grey arteries of busy expressways. These are the Han Chinese heartlands, a world of chopsticks, tea, slippers, grey skies, shadow-boxing, teeming crowds, chaotic train stations, smoky temples, red flags and the smells of soot and frying tofu. Move west or north away from the major cities, however, and the population thins out as it begins to vary: indeed, large areas of the People's Republic are inhabited not by the "Chinese", but by scores of distinct ethnic minorities, ranging from animist hill tribes to urban Muslims. Here, the landscape begins to dominate: green paddy fields and misty hilltops in the southwest, the scorched, epic vistas of the old Silk Road in the northwest, and the magisterial mountains of Tibet.
While travel around the country itself is exhausting rather than difficult, it would be wrong to pretend that it is an entirely easy matter to penetrate modern China. The main tourist highlights - the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, the Terracotta Army, and Yangzi gorges - are relatively few considering the vast size of the country, and much of China's historic architecture has been deliberately destroyed in the rush to modernize. Added to this are the frustrations of travelling in a land where few people speak English, the writing system is alien and foreigners are regularly viewed as exotic objects of intense curiosity - though overall you'll find that the Chinese, despite a reputation for curtness, are generally hospitable and friendly.

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