UNESCO World Heritage
世界遗产
China ties Italy for the most World Heritage sites on earth — 59 and counting.
Photo: xiquinhosilva · CC BY 2.0
Fifty-nine inscriptions, from the Great Wall to a Fujian tea plantation, split between cultural, natural and mixed listings. No traveller sees them all, but the list is a reliable filter: if a site made it past UNESCO's committee, it is genuinely extraordinary and it will be well signposted, reasonably managed, and busy. This page gathers the ones worth structuring a trip around.
24Covered in depth
24 destinations in this theme
UNESCO
Longmen Grottoes 龙门石窟
A hundred thousand Buddhas carved into two limestone cliffs facing each other across a river — including the one with Empress Wu's face.
UNESCO
Mount Tai 泰山
Six thousand six hundred steps, seventy-two emperors, and three thousand years of people climbing this exact staircase.
UNESCO
Pingyao Ancient City 平遥古城
A complete walled Ming county town that missed the twentieth century — and invented Chinese banking.
UNESCO
Temple of Heaven 天坛
The most perfect building in Beijing, and a park full of retirees doing tai chi, ballroom dancing and competitive kite-flying.
UNESCO
The Forbidden City 紫禁城
980 buildings, 8,700 rooms, 24 emperors and five centuries in which almost no outsider was allowed through the gate.
UNESCO
The Great Wall 长城
Not one wall but twenty thousand kilometres of them — and the section you choose decides your entire day.
UNESCO
The Terracotta Army 兵马俑
Eight thousand life-size soldiers, every face different, found by farmers digging a well in 1974.
UNESCO
Yungang Grottoes & Datong 云冈石窟
Fifty-one thousand Buddhist statues carved into a sandstone cliff in the 460s, when the idea was still arriving from India.
UNESCO
Gulangyu, Xiamen 鼓浪屿
A car-free island of decaying colonial villas, banyan trees and — genuinely — more pianos per head than anywhere on earth.
UNESCO
Hongcun & Xidi 宏村与西递
White walls, black tiles, and a village laid out in the shape of an ox with a stream running through every house.
UNESCO
Huangshan (Yellow Mountain) 黄山
Granite spires, twisted pines and a sea of cloud — the mountain that taught Chinese painting what a mountain looks like.
UNESCO
Suzhou Classical Gardens 苏州园林
Nine gardens on the World Heritage list, each one a whole landscape compressed into a courtyard.
UNESCO
West Lake, Hangzhou 西湖
The most painted, poeticised and imitated lake in Asia — and a UNESCO listing for its influence on garden design across East Asia.
UNESCO
Wuyi Mountains 武夷山
Bamboo rafts down a jade river between red sandstone cliffs, past the terraces that produce the world's most expensive tea.
UNESCO
Fujian Tulou 福建土楼
Rammed-earth clan fortresses up to five storeys high and 70 metres across, housing 800 people behind a single door.
UNESCO
Jiuzhaigou Valley 九寨沟
A hundred and eight lakes in calcium-carbonate blue, stacked down a Y-shaped valley below the Tibetan plateau.
UNESCO
Leshan Buddha & Mount Emei 乐山大佛与峨眉山
A 71-metre Buddha carved into a river cliff over ninety years, and a Buddhist mountain where the macaques rob you.
UNESCO
Lijiang Old Town 丽江古城
A Naxi town of cobbles and canals under an 5,596-metre snow peak, with the last living pictographic script on earth.
UNESCO
Yuanyang Rice Terraces 元阳梯田
Sixteen hundred years of Hani terracing across a whole mountain range — and in winter, at dawn, the flooded fields turn to fire.
UNESCO
Jiayuguan Fort 嘉峪关
Where the Great Wall ends: a Ming fortress in the desert, between a snow range and the Gobi, that marked the edge of the civilised world.
UNESCO
Mogao Caves & Dunhuang 莫高窟与敦煌
Four hundred and ninety-two painted caves in a desert cliff — a thousand years of Buddhist art, sealed and forgotten for nine centuries.
UNESCO
Zhangye Danxia 张掖丹霞
Hills striped in red, orange, yellow and green — twenty-four million years of mineral sediment tilted on its side.
UNESCO
Zhangjiajie 张家界
Three thousand quartz-sandstone pillars rising out of the cloud — the mountains Avatar borrowed and never gave back.
UNESCO
Lhasa & the Potala 拉萨与布达拉宫
A thousand-room palace on a rock at 3,700 metres, and a pilgrimage circuit that has not stopped turning for thirteen centuries.
+Also worth knowing
7 more from the full index
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Shanhaiguan山海关 UNESCO Hebei
Where the Great Wall meets the Bohai Sea at Old Dragon's Head — the eastern full stop of the Ming wall.
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Kaiping Diaolou开平碉楼 UNESCO Guangdong
1,800 fortified watchtowers built by returning overseas Chinese, mixing Greek, Roman, Islamic and Chinese styles in paddy fields.
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Macau澳门 UNESCO Macau SAR
Four centuries of Portuguese rule left baroque churches, pastel de nata and the Ruins of St Paul's — plus the world's largest casino economy.
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Dazu Rock Carvings大足石刻 UNESCO Chongqing
50,000 figures from the 9th–13th centuries, culminating in a 31-metre reclining Buddha. The last great phase of Chinese cave art.
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Beijing Central Axis北京中轴线 UNESCO Beijing
The 7.8 km line from Yongdingmen to the Bell Tower, inscribed by UNESCO in 2024 as a single urban composition.
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Grand Canal京杭大运河 UNESCO Multiple
1,776 km from Beijing to Hangzhou, dug from the 5th century BC and still carrying freight. Best seen at Yangzhou, Suzhou or Huai'an.
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Hemudu & Liangzhu良渚 UNESCO Zhejiang
A 5,300-year-old walled city with hydraulic works and extraordinary jade, pushing Chinese urban history back a millennium.