Nanyang is Henan’s largest prefecture and one of its most historically textured — a city whose significance spans Chinese history from the Han Dynasty through the Three Kingdoms period and into living tradition. It was here, in the hills south of the city, that a young Zhuge Liang spent a decade farming and studying before Liu Bei came three times to his thatched cottage and persuaded him to become the most celebrated strategist in Chinese history. The Wuhou Temple built on this site has been a place of pilgrimage for scholars, officials, and romantics for seventeen centuries.

In the same city, the Medical Sage Shrine honours Zhang Zhongjing — the Han Dynasty physician whose Treatise on Cold Damage Disorders remains a foundational text of traditional Chinese medicine, still cited in clinical practice two thousand years after it was written. Nanyang’s dual claim as the hometown of both China’s greatest strategist and its most influential physician gives the city a cultural weight that most Chinese people feel instinctively, even if they cannot always articulate why.

Beyond the shrines, Nanyang rewards exploration in every direction. Xichuan county’s Danjiangkou Reservoir — the source for the South-to-North Water Diversion project that supplies Beijing and northern China — creates a landscape of extraordinary scale and clarity. Xixia county holds the world’s densest concentration of in-situ dinosaur egg fossils. The Baotianman UNESCO Biosphere Reserve protects one of the most biodiverse temperate forest ecosystems in Central China. And Nanyang’s Dushan jade — one of China’s four great jade varieties — sustains a carving tradition whose workshops and markets fill entire city districts.