A riveting jumble of wildly differing dialects and climatic and topographical extremes, it's like several different countries rolled into one. Follow your nose in China and you won't want to stop travelling. Gobble down a steaming bowl of Lanzhou noodles in a Silk Road street market, raise the temperature with some searing Hunan fare, or flag down the dim sum trolley down south. Wolf down Peking duck in Beijing, melt over a Chongqing hotpot or grab a seasoned ròujiāmó (shredded pork in a bun) before climbing Hua Shan. The Chinese live to eat, and with 1.4 billion food-loving people to feed, coupled with vast geographic and cultural variations in a huge land, expect your taste buds to be tantalised, tested and treated. Get lost in green forests of bamboo or, when your energy fails you, flake out on a distant Hainan beach and listen to the thud of falling coconuts. Swoon before the rice terraces of the south, take a selfie among the gorgeous yellow rapeseed by Qinghai Lake, or hike the Great Wall as it meanders across mountain peaks. China's landscapes span the range from alpha to omega: take your pick from the sublime sapphire lakes of Tibet or the impassive deserts of Inner Mongolia, island-hop in Hong Kong or cycle between fairy-tale karst pinnacles around Yangshuo. Stupendous Sceneryįew countries do the great outdoors like the Middle Kingdom. Pack a well-made pair of travelling shoes and remember the words of Laotzu: 'a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step'. Serve it all up according to taste: collapsing sections of the Great Wall, temple-topped mountains, villages that time forgot, languorous water towns, sublime Buddhist grottoes and ancient desert forts. The world's oldest continuous civilisation isn't all smoked glass and brushed aluminium, and while you won't be tripping over artefacts – three decades of round-the-clock development make some parts of the country completely unrecognizable from their more humble beginnings – rich seams of antiquity await. Its modern face is dazzling, but China is no one-trick pony. It's going places, so jump aboard, go along for the ride and see where it's headed.
The name alone makes you want to get packing.