China and the World: What You Already Touch

01What You Already Touch

How have you already met China before you ever set foot in it?

You have already touched China in six ways before you arrive: through films, books, goods, words, museums and family. This page connects each touch to a place you can go. The bamboo forest you saw in a film is a real mountain in Zhejiang; the porcelain bowl on your shelf came from a kiln in Jiangxi; the word "tea" in your mouth began as a sound in a Minnan dialect. China is not a place you discover fresh; it is a place you have been meeting for years without knowing it.

The first correction is that the film locations are real mountains, not computer graphics. The bamboo duel in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon 卧虎藏龙 was filmed in the Anji Bamboo Sea 安吉大竹海 in Zhejiang, a real forest of seventy thousand mu of moso bamboo where the wind moves through the canopy like water. The landscape of Genshin Impact 原神's Liyue 璃月 region is not invented either, and this is not a fan theory: in 2020 the studio ran an official tie-in with three national scenic areas 景区, filmed a documentary at each, and said which part of the game each one had shaped. Zhangjiajie 张家界 in Hunan 湖南 was the model for Jueyun Karst 绝云间, Huanglong 黄龙 in Sichuan 四川 for Luhua Pool 渌华池, Guilin 桂林 in Guangxi 广西 for Dihua Marsh 荻花洲. The studio's art director has also been clear about the limit: the team extracts elements and rebuilds them rather than copying a place, so no single park is Liyue. Black Myth: Wukong 黑神话:悟空 went further still: thirty-six of the places in that game were scanned from real buildings, and twenty-seven of them stand in one province, Shanxi 山西. What is certain is that all of these places exist, all are reachable, and all look more dramatic in person than on any screen.

The second correction is that the Chinese objects in Western museums point to source places you can visit, not to a debate about how they got there. The Dunhuang 敦煌 silk paintings in the British Museum came from the Mogao Caves 莫高窟; the blue-and-white porcelain in the Victoria and Albert Museum came from kilns near Jingdezhen; the bronzes in the Metropolitan Museum came from the Shang dynasty capital at Yinxu 殷墟. This page does not discuss how these objects left China or whether they should return. It only notes that each object has a source place, and that standing in that source place changes how you see the object in the museum.

The third correction is that the Chinese words in English are fossils of trade routes, not random borrowings. "Tea" comes from the Minnan pronunciation te, carried by Dutch traders from Fujian 福建 to Europe. "Ketchup" comes from a Minnan word for fish sauce, carried by the same sea routes. "Typhoon" comes from Cantonese 广东 or Minnan words for big wind. "Kowtow" comes from the Chinese ketou, to knock the head. "Gung-ho" comes from the Chinese gonghe, "work together," picked up by American marines in the 1930s. Every one of these words is a fossil of a route, and every route has a starting port you can stand in.

02Six Channels, Six Places

Which real places do Chinese films, novels, goods, words, museum objects and family histories lead to?

Channel one: film and games. The bamboo forest of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon 卧虎藏龙 is the Anji Bamboo Sea 安吉大竹海, two hours from Hangzhou 杭州 in Zhejiang. Two video games have since done the same thing at a far larger scale, and that channel now has more than forty addresses attached to it, so it has the block after this one to itself.

Channel two: books in translation. Journey to the West 西游记, known to many readers through Monkey or through the character Sun Wukong 孙悟空, traces a real pilgrimage: the monk Xuanzang 玄奘 travelled from Chang'an (today's Xi'an 西安) to India in the seventh century, and the Giant Wild Goose Pagoda 大雁塔 in Xi'an was built to house the scriptures he brought back. Romance of the Three Kingdoms 三国演义 leads to two places: the Wuhou Shrine 武侯祠 in Chengdu 成都, dedicated to Zhuge Liang 诸葛亮, and the Red Cliffs (Chibi 赤壁) on the Yangtze in Hubei 湖北, where the most famous battle of the novel was fought. The temples page and the museums page have the detail; this page gives the map.

Channel three: goods you own. The porcelain mug in your kitchen likely traces to Jingdezhen 景德镇 in Jiangxi 江西, which has made porcelain for a thousand years and still fires kilns today. The silk scarf in your drawer traces to Hangzhou in Zhejiang, the southern terminus of the Grand Canal 大运河 and a silk-making centre since the Tang dynasty. The tea in your cupboard traces either to Wuyishan 武夷山 in Fujian 福建, the origin of oolong and the centre of the tea trade that gave English the word "tea", or to Longjing 龙井 near Hangzhou, the most famous green tea. The tea page has the tasting notes; this page gives the origins.

Channel four: words you say. "Tea," "ketchup," "typhoon," "kowtow," "gung-ho," "silk" and "china" (lowercase, meaning porcelain) are all Chinese in origin. The country and the cup share a name because Europe knew China by its most famous export. Each word is a fossil of a route: sea routes from Fujian and Guangdong 广东 carried tea and ketchup; land routes from Xi'an carried silk; nineteenth-century diplomacy carried kowtow; wartime alliances carried gung-ho.

Channel five: museums you have visited. The British Museum holds thousands of Chinese objects, including Dunhuang 敦煌 silk paintings from the Mogao Caves 莫高窟. The V&A, the Met and other major museums hold Chinese ceramics, bronzes and paintings, each with a source place: Mogao for the silk paintings, Jingdezhen for porcelain, Yinxu 殷墟 for bronzes. Standing in that source place gives the museum object a context no label can provide.

Channel six: family. If you are Chinese-American or Chinese-Canadian, your family likely came from the Four Counties 四邑 in Guangdong: Xinhui 新会, Taishan 台山, Kaiping 开平 and Enping 恩平, which supplied most nineteenth-century Chinese migrants to North America. The visible legacy is the Kaiping Diaolou 碉楼, fortified towers built by overseas Chinese 华人华侨 with money earned in California and Canada, mixing Chinese floors with Western windows. They became a World Heritage 世界遗产 site in 2007, the first dedicated to overseas Chinese culture.

03Screens, and the Buildings

Which real buildings do Genshin Impact and Black Myth: Wukong lead to?

Two video games have sent more foreign and Chinese visitors to specific Chinese buildings than any guidebook of the last decade. Both published where they had been. One of them scanned thirty-six real sites and put twenty-seven of them in a single province most itineraries skip.

Genshin Impact 原神 named its own sources. The sandstone pillars that players of Genshin Impact recognise from Jueyun Karst 绝云间 are the Wulingyuan 武陵源 scenic area 景区 at Zhangjiajie 张家界 in Hunan 湖南, a natural World Heritage 世界遗产 site. Two more of Liyue 璃月's landscapes have addresses of their own: the five-colour pools of Huanglong 黄龙 in Sichuan 四川 became Luhua Pool 渌华池, and the karst peaks and river of Guilin 桂林 in Guangxi 广西 became Dihua Marsh 荻花洲. The studio did not only name them: as part of the 2020 tie-in it installed the game's own teleport waypoints and Geoculi at the real sites, to be found by people who travelled there. None of these places requires a film ticket to enter, and all of them require a willingness to walk, because the camera angles are chosen from viewpoints that take an hour or more to reach.

The game that moved the most people is Black Myth: Wukong 黑神话:悟空. It came out in August 2024, and its art team scanned thirty-six real sites. Twenty-seven of them are in Shanxi 山西, a northern province that almost no first-time itinerary includes. That is not a matter of taste. Shanxi holds roughly twenty-eight thousand surviving historic buildings, about a tenth of the national total, and more than five hundred timber halls built in the Yuan dynasty or earlier, which is usually given as over eighty per cent of everything that old left standing in the country. The team went where the buildings are. The table below lists what they scanned, from the painted clay figures at Xiaoxitian 小西天 to the twenty-eight lunar mansions at the Jade Emperor Temple 玉皇庙 in Zezhou 泽州. What followed is the only part of this page with a visitor count attached: in the first two months those twenty-seven sites took 5.37 million visitors between them, and Xi County 隰县, a county of ninety thousand people, ended up capping Xiaoxitian at ten thousand a day. The temples page and the architecture page tell you what to look at once you are inside.

04By the Numbers

How many World Heritage sites, overseas Chinese and inbound visitors does China have?

The table under this block carries the source and the year beside each figure. The prose says what the figures change for a visitor.

Sixty-one World Heritage 世界遗产 sites. As of July 2026, after the listing of the Jingdezhen 景德镇 handmade porcelain heritage, China has sixty-one World Heritage sites: forty-two cultural, fifteen natural and four mixed. For a visitor the number means that the outdoors pages and the museums page have more sites than any single trip can cover, and that even a two-week itinerary will pass within a day's travel of a dozen of them.

Forty-four intangible cultural heritage 非物质文化遗产 items, the most in the world. The list includes the Spring Festival 春节, late January or February, listed in December 2024, as well as Kun opera, calligraphy, the tea art of Guangdong 广东 and the wooden arch bridges of Fujian 福建. For a visitor the number means that a performance, a festival or a craft demonstration is likely to be happening somewhere during your trip. The calendar page has the dates.

Sixty million overseas Chinese 华人华侨. About sixty million people of Chinese origin live outside China, in nearly two hundred countries. Roughly seventy-five per cent are in Southeast Asia; the rest are in North America, Europe and Oceania. About forty-two per cent trace their ancestry to Guangdong and twenty-six per cent to Fujian. For a visitor the number means that a hometown connection of some kind, a restaurant or a temple or a family village, is likely to exist wherever you are from, and that the source villages in Guangdong and Fujian are reachable and worth a day trip.

A hundred and fifty-four million inbound visitors in 2025. Of those, 35.17 million were foreign nationals, up thirty per cent from the year before, and 30.08 million entered visa-free. The total spend was 131.1 billion US dollars. For a visitor the numbers mean that the country is set up for international travellers, with English signage, mobile payment for foreigners and visa-free entry for many passports, and that the popular sites are busy but not overwhelmed. The how-it-works page has the entry procedure; this page gives the scale.

Fourteen land neighbours. China shares borders with fourteen countries, tied with Russia for the most in the world. For a visitor the number means that a single trip can touch Russian architecture in Harbin 哈尔滨, Central Asian markets in Kashgar 喀什, Southeast Asian temples in Xishuangbanna 西双版纳 and Himalayan views in Tibet 西藏, all without leaving the country. The land and climate page has the full list; this page notes the consequence.

05What It Changes for Your Trip

How do you build a trip around a film, an object or a family village?

Plan your trip around what you already know. The most memorable itineraries for first-time visitors are not the ones that hit the most sites but the ones that connect a film, a book, an object or a family story to the place it came from. This page gives you six starting points; the pages linked from block five give you the detail.

Booking. Most film locations and source places do not need special permission, but the major ones do. The Mogao Caves 莫高窟 at Dunhuang 敦煌 require a timed entry 分时段预约 and sell out in peak season 旺季; the Forbidden City 故宫 and the Shanghai Museum 上海博物馆 require real-name booking; the Jingdezhen 景德镇 Imperial Kiln museum requires a ticket. The digital page and the how-it-works page have the booking procedure. If your trip is a roots trip, tracing family to a village in Guangdong 广东 or Fujian 福建, do the homework before you go: find the village name in Chinese characters, bring old photographs and addresses, and expect that the village may have changed name or merged with a neighbour.

A note on the Shanxi 山西 route. The Black Myth sites are a different kind of trip from the rest of this page. Most of them are small county temples with no infrastructure built for crowds, scattered across a province and often an hour or more apart by road, so the route is a driving trip rather than a day out from Taiyuan 太原. Xiaoxitian 小西天 now caps entry and sells out in holiday weeks; book it before you plan the days around it. The how-it-works page has the booking procedure.

Arriving. A film location will not look exactly like the film. The bamboo at Anji 安吉 is greenest in summer and bare in winter; the pillars at Zhangjiajie 张家界 are most dramatic in early morning mist and invisible in heavy rain; the Red Cliffs at Chibi 赤壁 are a riverbank, not a battlefield, and the view has changed since the third century. Go with the film as a starting point, not an expectation. At a source place like Dunhuang or Jingdezhen, take a guide or an audio tour: the cave paintings and the kiln ruins make sense only with context, and a label in a museum cannot replace standing in the cave where the painting was made. In the Four Counties 四邑 region of Kaiping 开平, Taishan 台山, Xinhui 新会 and Enping 恩平, Mandarin works for most people under sixty, but older villagers may speak only Taishanese or Cantonese 广东. A few words of Cantonese greeting go further than perfect Mandarin.

Walking through. The six channels can be strung into routes. A porcelain-and-tea route runs Jingdezhen → Hangzhou 杭州 → Wuyishan 武夷山, following the goods that built the maritime trade. A silk-route journey runs Xi'an 西安 → Dunhuang, following the camel roads that carried silk west and Buddhism east. A roots route runs Guangzhou 广州 → Kaiping → Taishan, following the migrants who left and the towers they built with the money they sent back. The transport page has the train hours; this page gives the logic. For a roots trip, go in the morning, when village elders are outside and willing to talk; bring a small gift from your home country; and do not be surprised if someone invites you into a home that looks exactly like the photographs your grandparents kept.

What to skip. Do not try to do all six channels in one trip. That is a lifetime of travel, not a two-week holiday. Pick the one or two channels that matter most to you: if you loved Crouching Tiger 卧虎藏龙, go to Anji and Zhangjiajie; if your grandmother came from Taishan, go to Kaiping and the village archives; if you collect porcelain, go to Jingdezhen and the museums that hold its exports. Depth beats breadth here, because the connection is personal.

06Where You’ll Meet It

Where on PreeChina are the kilns, the tea hills, the temples and the source sites?

This page is the connection. The places are elsewhere.

The museums page covers the sites where the objects in Western collections were made: the Mogao Caves 莫高窟, the Jingdezhen 景德镇 kilns, the Yinxu 殷墟 ruins. It explains what you will see when you stand in the source place. This page tells you why the object matters; that page tells you how to visit it.

The tea page takes the word "tea" and the goods in your cupboard to their origins: Wuyishan 武夷山 for oolong, Longjing 龙井 for green tea, Yunnan 云南 for pu'er. This page gives the trade route; that page gives the tasting notes and the tea houses.

The old-towns page has the living towns that appear in films and novels: the water towns near Shanghai, the walled cities of Shanxi 山西, the ethnic villages of Guizhou 贵州. This page gives the map from screen to street; that page gives the itinerary.

The temples page covers the Giant Wild Goose Pagoda 大雁塔 in Xi'an 西安, the Wuhou Shrine 武侯祠 in Chengdu 成都 and the religious sites that connect Journey to the West 西游记 and Three Kingdoms 三国 to real architecture. This page gives the literary reference; that page gives the opening hours.

The markets page is where Jingdezhen porcelain, Hangzhou 杭州 silk and Fujian 福建 tea are still bought and sold: the wholesale markets, the antique streets, the morning markets where the trade that built the English vocabulary still happens. This page gives the origin; that page gives the address.

The transport page has the train hours that make the porcelain route (Jingdezhen → Hangzhou → Wuyishan) and the silk route (Xi'an → Dunhuang 敦煌) possible. This page gives the logic of the route; that page gives the timetable.

The cuisine page explains why the porcelain bowl matters: Chinese food is served family-style on shared plates, and the shape of the plate shapes the meal. This page gives the object; that page gives the table manners.

The parks page covers Zhangjiajie 张家界's sandstone pillars and the natural landscapes that game designers and film directors draw from. This page gives the reference; that page gives the trails.

07What It’s Not

What do first-time visitors get wrong about China's place in the world?

• Not a closed country. In 2025, 154.5 million visitors entered China, including 35.17 million foreign nationals and 30.08 million visa-free entries. The country is more open to international travellers than it has been in years, and the infrastructure is built for it: English signage, foreign-card payment, visa-free entry.
• Not only ancient. The China you meet through films and games is contemporary: Crouching Tiger 卧虎藏龙 was released in 2000, Genshin Impact 原神 launched in 2020. The heritage sites are ancient, but the culture that carries them to the world is alive and changing.
• Not all Chinese goods are cheap. Jingdezhen 景德镇 porcelain ranges from mass-market mugs to imperial-grade pieces that cost more than a car; Hangzhou 杭州 silk ranges from scarves to museum-quality brocade; Wuyishan 武夷山 tea ranges from daily drinkers to single-bush teas that sell for thousands of dollars a kilogram. The shopping page has the tiers.
• Not every film location looks like the film. Season, weather, development and camera angle all change the view. The bamboo at Anji 安吉 is bare in winter; the pillars at Zhangjiajie 张家界 vanish in rain; the Red Cliffs are a riverbank, not a battlefield. A game is looser still: the studio behind Genshin Impact says it takes elements from a place and rebuilds them, so Jueyun Karst 绝云间 is built out of Zhangjiajie rather than copied from it. Go with curiosity, not a screenshot.
• Not all museum pieces came from looting. Chinese objects in Western museums arrived through trade, gift, archaeological excavation and purchase, as well as through the colonial-era removals that get the most attention. This page does not judge how they got there; it only points to where they came from.
• Not only Cantonese 广东 immigrants. The Four Counties 四邑 supplied most of the early Chinese migrants to North America, but Fujian 福建 supplied more migrants to Southeast Asia, and today the overseas Chinese 华人华侨 population includes people from every province. The Guangdong 广东 connection is strong for North American families; it is not the whole story.
• Not a single Chinese language. Mandarin is the national language and works almost everywhere, but Cantonese, Minnan, Wu, Hakka 客家 and dozens of other languages are still spoken at home and in the market. In the old villages of Guangdong and Fujian, the local language may be the only one an elder knows.
• Not the famous ones. The buildings that Black Myth: Wukong 黑神话:悟空 made famous were mostly not famous before it, inside China either. Xiaoxitian 小西天 was taking about five hundred visitors a day the year before the game; the Iron Buddha Temple 铁佛寺 at Gaoping 高平 and the Jade Emperor Temple 玉皇庙 at Zezhou 泽州 are county-level temples that appear on no standard itinerary. The game did not send anyone to the Great Wall 长城. It sent them to buildings that had been standing quietly for six or seven hundred years.
• Not only outbound. Chinese tourists are famous for travelling abroad, but inbound tourism is growing fast, up seventeen per cent in 2025, with foreign visitors up thirty per cent. The country you arrive in is one that is learning to welcome the world, not one that is only sending its people out.