Zhejiang

Zhejiang's capital and best-known destination — West Lake, the Southern Song capital legacy, Longjing tea country, the Grand Canal's southern terminus and modern Hangzhou's Alibaba-driven tech identity — is covered in depth on the Hangzhou city page. What follows turns instead to the rest of the province.

East of Hangzhou, a scatter of ancient canal towns preserve a version of Jiangnan's watery landscape that predates even West Lake's causeways — stone arch bridges, whitewashed wooden houses built directly over the water, and narrow canals still used for small boat traffic rather than left purely decorative. Wuzhen, the best-known of them, has restored its canal-front architecture to a high standard and runs boat rides and evening lantern displays through its two connected districts; Xitang, less polished and correspondingly quieter, offers the same architecture with a more lived-in feel. Both reward an overnight rather than a rushed day trip — the towns empty out considerably after the day-trip crowds leave, and the canals at night, lit by lanterns rather than daylight, are a different and quieter experience entirely.

Off Zhejiang's coast, Putuoshan is one of the four sacred mountains of Chinese Buddhism — a genuinely different tradition from Huangshan, the painting-tradition peak covered on the karst and sacred mountains page. Where Huangshan draws visitors for landscape and scenery, Putuoshan is a working pilgrimage site dedicated to Guanyin, the bodhisattva of mercy, its temples and a towering seaside statue of Guanyin drawing devotees from across the Buddhist world. The island itself, reached by ferry, combines temple visits with genuine coastal scenery — beaches and cliff paths sit alongside the monasteries, giving Putuoshan a dual identity as both pilgrimage site and seaside retreat that no mainland sacred mountain quite replicates.

Ningbo has functioned as a major trading port for well over a thousand years, its position on the coast making it one of China's historic gateways for maritime commerce with Japan, Korea and beyond. The city's most distinctive landmark is Tianyi Pavilion, built in the sixteenth century and generally recognised as the oldest surviving private library in China — a scholar-official's personal collection, preserved through careful family stewardship across nearly five centuries, now open as a museum and garden complex in the old city centre. Ningbo's own old town and waterfront round out a stop that most Zhejiang itineraries skip in favour of Hangzhou, despite the city's genuinely older and, in the library's case, unique claim to fame.

Inland from the coast, Yiwu runs what is generally considered the world's largest wholesale market for small manufactured goods — an enormous complex of markets trading everything from Christmas decorations to stationery to toys, supplying retailers and importers across the globe. It has nothing to do with Hangzhou's tech-company reputation; this is old-fashioned bulk trading at an almost incomprehensible scale, warehouse district after warehouse district organised by product category. It's not a conventional tourist destination, but for travellers with any interest in global trade and manufacturing, walking even a fraction of the market gives a genuinely eye-opening sense of how much of the world's everyday goods pass through a single Zhejiang city.