14-Day Private China Tour with Pandas, Zhangjiajie and Great Wall

Be at the Giant Panda Breeding Research Base when it opens. Feeding happens early, and that is when the animals are awake and moving; the base holds the world's largest captive population. Then explore Chengdu itself, a flat, unhurried basin city that takes its hot pot and its teahouses seriously: Jinli Ancient Street, the Wuhou Shrine, and an evening at the Shufeng Yayun teahouse, where the Sichuan opera ends with the face-changers swapping masks almost too fast to follow.

Ninety minutes on the high-speed train and the flat ground runs out. Chongqing grew up its hills rather than across them, so the city works in three dimensions: towers on the ridgelines, a monorail that passes straight through a residential building, and highways stacked one above another. Take it in layers, from the old lanes of Ciqikou to the stepped streets of Shibati and the stilted terraces of Hongya Cave. After dark, go up Nanshan and look back across the river at the whole thing lit.

Take a day trip southeast of the city into the Wulong Karst, a UNESCO-listed landscape of sinkholes and underground rivers. The Three Natural Bridges are what remains of a cave whose roof fell in: three single arches of rock over gorges as much as 300 metres deep. Transformers: Age of Extinction was filmed here, yet you will see very few foreign visitors. Later, make a short stop at Fengdu Ghost City, a hillside of temples to the afterlife above the Yangtze.

Take a morning flight southwest to Kunming, Yunnan's capital. At 1,890 metres it stays mild all year, which is why it is known as a city of permanent spring. An hour out of town, the Shilin Stone Forest, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, spreads limestone over 400 square kilometres, worn across 270 million years into towers and blades between two and thirty metres high. The Sani Yi people have lived among the stones for centuries, and their embroidery is some of the finest folk textile work in Yunnan.

Travel two hours by high-speed train across the plateau to Dali, under the nineteen peaks of the Cangshan range. Before the Mongol Yuan dynasty absorbed it, Dali was the capital of two independent kingdoms in turn. The ninth-century Three Pagodas of Chongsheng Temple stand on the flat ground between the town and the mountains. The old town is a grid of stone-paved lanes and Bai houses; in the afternoon, a boat on Erhai Lake shows you the range from the water.

Fly from Dali to Guilin in the morning. The karst hills around the city have been the model for Chinese landscape painting for a thousand years, but today you drive north to the Longji Rice Terraces. Zhuang and Yao farmers cut these fields into the slopes about 800 years ago, and they climb from 300 to 1,100 metres. Arrive for the late light and sleep in a guesthouse in Ping'an village. The rice is green in spring and summer and gold from late September.

Return to Guilin for four hours on the Li River in your own boat, heading downstream through the view on the twenty-yuan note. The hills along the way have names, many of them animals in the classical reading; the Nine Horses Fresco Hill is one, and the river passes the old town of Xingping. Where the water shallows, the boat slows, and you can see the riverbed. The boat leaves you at Yangshuo, and the afternoon ends on a bicycle along the Yulong River valley, past bamboo groves and stone arch bridges.

Take a high-speed train from Guilin into Hunan, then continue by private transfer to Fenghuang, one of the best-preserved Ming and Qing dynasty towns in China. It runs along the Tuojiang River at the edge of a canyon, and its wooden houses stand out over the water on stilts. Fenghuang means phoenix; the lanterns, the old city walls, and their reflections in the river go some way to explaining the name. In the morning, cross on the stepping stones and walk the upper town before the day-trippers arrive.

Zhangjiajie National Forest Park is one place where the photographs do not exaggerate. More than three thousand sandstone columns, up to 300 metres tall, stand in subtropical forest; in 2010 one of them was officially renamed the Avatar Hallelujah Mountain after the film. Day 9 starts with the Bailong Elevator, the world's tallest outdoor lift, which climbs 326 metres in 66 seconds to the Yuanjiajie plateau and the First Bridge Under Heaven. Day 10 is Tianmen Mountain: a 7.5-kilometre cable car, the naturally formed Tianmen Cave, and a glass skywalk built out from the cliff face.

Take a morning flight to Xi'an, the old capital at the eastern end of the Silk Road. In 1974, farmers digging a well found the burial guard of Qin Shi Huang, the First Emperor: 8,000 life-size figures set in three pits in 210 BC, every face modelled individually and every figure once painted in strong colour. Pit 1 is the size of an aircraft hangar. The detail is what earns the full day, so take your time with it: rank insignia, hairstyles that change from unit to unit, and fingers shaped one by one.

Xi'an's city walls run for 14 kilometres and are still intact, and the way to see the size of the old capital is by bicycle along the top. Then continue to the Muslim Quarter, home to the Hui community, whose ancestors came along the Silk Road and stayed. Eat as you walk: lamb skewers and roujiamo, shredded meat in a flatbread. The Great Mosque, founded in 742 AD, is built entirely in Chinese style, its prayer hall facing Mecca at the end of a run of garden courtyards. Dinner is at a Tang Dynasty show.

Take a morning high-speed train north to Beijing, five hours through the North China Plain, arriving in the early afternoon. The Forbidden City was begun in 1406 and finished in 1420: 72 hectares, 980 buildings, and 8,700 rooms, the largest collection of preserved imperial wooden architecture in the world. Spend what is left of the day in the hutongs around the Drum Tower and the Shichahai lakes, the narrow lanes where old Beijing lived, on foot or by rickshaw.

Visit Mutianyu, 70 kilometres north of Beijing, a fair compromise: easy enough to reach, with crowds that stay manageable, and long enough to walk a proper stretch along the forested ridge. Within a few hundred metres, the restored wall gives way to the original masonry, watchtowers without roofs and parapets coming apart, and it carries on along the ridge as far as you can see. Then transfer to Beijing Capital International Airport for onward international flights.

A free day to explore at your own pace before your onward travel.