What Visitors Already Touch

01What a Visitor Already Touches

How has a visitor already met China before ever setting foot in it?

A visitor has already touched China in six ways before arriving: through films, books, goods, words, museums and family. This page connects each touch to a place that can be visited. The bamboo forest seen in a film is a real mountain in Zhejiang; the porcelain bowl on a shelf came from a kiln in Jiangxi; the word "tea" in the mouth began as a sound in a Minnan dialect. China is not a place discovered fresh; it is a place that has been met for years without knowing it.

The opening 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 that can be visited, 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 notes that each object has a source place, and that standing in that source place changes how the object in the museum is seen.

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 where a visitor can stand.

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 a celebrated episode of the novel is set. The temples page and the museums page have the detail; this page gives the map.

Channel three: goods owned. The porcelain mug in a 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. A silk scarf in a 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 a 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, a widely known green tea. The tea page has the tasting notes; this page gives the origins.

Channel four: words said. "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 a leading 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 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. For readers who are Chinese-American or Chinese-Canadian, the 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 many 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, a listing 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 many 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 more than 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 pass 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 many 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 few opening itineraries include. That is not a matter of taste. Shanxi holds a very large share of China's surviving historic timber buildings, including a great many halls built in the Yuan dynasty or earlier. 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). The sites drew a surge of visitors after release, and Xi County (隰县), a county of ninety thousand people, ended up setting a daily limit at Xiaoxitian. The temples page and the architecture page say what to look at once 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.

Dozens of intangible cultural heritage (非物质文化遗产) items. The list includes the Spring Festival (春节), late January or February, listed in recent years, 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 a 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. Many are in Southeast Asia, with large communities in North America, Europe and Oceania. A great many trace their ancestry to Guangdong and 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 the visitor is from, and that the source villages in Guangdong and Fujian are reachable and worth a day trip.

Inbound travel has grown fast. Foreign visitors have returned in large numbers, many arriving without a visa. For a visitor the numbers mean that the country is set up for international travellers, with English signage, mobile payment for foreigners and entry without a visa 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. 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 a Trip

How is a trip built around a film, an object or a family village?

Plan the trip around what is already known. The memorable itineraries for visitors are not the ones with a long list of 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 six starting points; the pages linked from block five give the detail.

Planning ahead. Many film locations and source places need no special permission, but the major ones ask for advance arrangements. The Mogao Caves (莫高窟) at Dunhuang (敦煌) work on timed entry (分时段预约) and fill in peak season (旺季); the Forbidden City (故宫) and the Shanghai Museum (上海博物馆) work on named entry; the Jingdezhen (景德镇) Imperial Kiln museum is a paid site. The digital page and the how-it-works page cover the procedures. For a roots trip, tracing family to a village in Guangdong (广东) or Fujian (福建), do the homework before departure: 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. Many 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) caps entry in busy weeks, so it is worth arranging before the days are planned around it. The how-it-works page covers the 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 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 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 many people under sixty, but older villagers may speak Taishanese or Cantonese alone (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 the visitor's home country; and no surprise is needed if someone invites the visitor into a home that looks exactly like the photographs grandparents kept.

What to skip. Doing all six channels in one trip should not be attempted. That is a lifetime of travel, not a two-week holiday. Pick the one or two channels that matter personally: for a fan of Crouching Tiger (卧虎藏龙), go to Anji and Zhangjiajie; if a grandmother came from Taishan, go to Kaiping and the village archives; for a porcelain collector, go to Jingdezhen and the museums that hold its exports. Depth beats breadth here, because the connection is personal.

06Where It Is Met

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 is seen when standing in the source place. This page says why the object matters; that page covers how to visit it.

The tea page takes the word "tea" and the goods in a 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 highland 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 covers the visit.

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 visitors often get wrong about China's place in the world?

• Not a closed country. The country is open to international travellers, and the infrastructure is built for it: English signage, foreign-card payment, entry without a visa for many passports.
• Not just ancient. The China met 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 left China the same way. Chinese objects in Western museums arrived through trade, gift, archaeological excavation and purchase, as well as through the colonial-era removals that draw attention. This page does not judge how they got there; it points to where they came from.
• Not just Cantonese (广东) immigrants. The Four Counties (四邑) supplied many 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 one an elder knows from childhood.
• Not the well-known ones. The buildings that Black Myth: Wukong (黑神话:悟空) brought to attention were mostly little known before it, inside China either. Xiaoxitian (小西天) was a quiet county temple 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 just outbound. Chinese tourists are known for travelling abroad, but inbound tourism is growing fast, with foreign visitors rising sharply. The country a visitor arrives in is one that is learning to welcome the world, not one that is sending its people out alone.