Experience the best of Shijiazhuang

Shijiazhuang is the capital of Hebei province, on the North China Plain, with the Taihang Mountains rising to the west. It grew from a village into a city in the early twentieth century, when two railway lines crossed here, and it remains a major transport hub. The city itself is modern, so most of the sights lie in the old towns and hills around it.

Zhengding, a walled town to the north, has the Longxing Temple, whose bronze Guanyin statue is more than twenty metres tall, as well as old pagodas and city gates. In Zhao County, the Zhaozhou Bridge, a single-arch stone bridge built in the Sui dynasty about 1,400 years ago, is among the oldest of its kind in the world. Cangyan Mountain, in the Taihang range, has a temple built like a bridge across a gorge.

The cooking of the plain is wheat-based, with steamed buns, noodles and dumplings, and Zhao County is the source of the region's snow pears. Winters are dry and cold, summers hot, and autumn brings the clearest skies.