Table of Contents

List of Maps ix 1 THE BEST OF CHINA 1

3 SUGGESTED ITINERARIES 50

4 BEIJING & HEBEI 59

5 THE NORTHEAST 147

6 ALONG THE YELLOW RIVER 206

7 THE SILK ROUTES 250

8 EASTERN CENTRAL CHINA 336

9 SHANGHAI 427

10 THE SOUTHEAST 489

11 HONG KONG 543

12 THE SOUTHWEST: MOUNTAINS & MINORITIES 594

13 YANGZI & BEYOND 669

14 THE TIBETAN WORLD 740

15 PLANNING YOUR TRIP TO CHINA 786

16 THE CHINESE LANGUAGE 816

17 THE CHINESE MENU 849

Index 867

About the Author

Simon Foster was born in London and grew up in rural Yorkshire. He started work as a tour leader in the Middle East in 1997 and was then posted to India and China. He has contributed to numerous international guidebooks and magazines, and now lives in sunny southern Taiwan with his wife, daughter, and dog. When he’s not writing, Simon leads adventure tours for Bamboo Trails (www.bambootrails.com) and Grasshopper Adventures (www.grasshopperadventures.com) in China, Taiwan, the Philippines, and India. Candice Lee has lived in Beijing for the past 5 years and has worked as a manager and cooking instructor at Black Sesame Kitchen for 3 years with previous experience working with HIV/AIDS, research, and event managing. She explores, eats, and scrappily finds her way through as many new places as possible (usually by bicycle).

Jen Lin-Liu is the author of Serve the People: A Stir-Fried Journey Through China (Harcourt, 2008) and a forthcoming book about the food of the Silk Road (Riverhead Press). She lives in Beijing and has written about food, culture, and travel for a wide range of international publications.

Beth Reiber spent hours pouring over her grandparents’ latest National Geographic magazines. After living four years in Germany as a university student and then as a freelance travel writer selling to major U.S. newspapers like the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post, followed by a stint in Tokyo as editor of the Far East Traveler, she authored several Frommer’s guides, including Frommer’s Japan, Frommer’s Tokyo and Frommer’s Hong Kong.

Tini Tran has spent nearly two decades as a reporter in the United States and overseas. She is a veteran foreign correspondent who has traveled extensively throughout Asia and parts of the Middle East on assignment, reporting from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq, among other countries. She has been based in China since 2008, most recently working for the Associated Press. She was chosen as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University from 2006-2007. Prior to that, she served as the Vietnam bureau chief for The AP. Born in Saigon, she returned to her homeland in 1999 to become the first Vietnamese-American allowed to join the foreign press corps.

Lee Wing-sze is a freelance writer, translator, and avid traveler who hails from Hong Kong where she has been witness to the economic and ideologic impact of China on the East-meets-West city since the 1997 handover. Music and basketball are her passion, but her dream is to step foot in every country on the earth, all the while bumping into people of different colors and collecting their compelling life stories.

Christopher D. Winnan's love/hate relationship with the continent currently known as China has lasted more than a decade. Last year he bought a retirement house in Thailand, but even that cannot seem to keep him away from China, and he is currently residing in Dali, Yunnan Province.