The four cities had specific tourist sites supplemented by pagodas, temples, palaces, restaurants. Beijing featured Tien'anmen Square, Forbidden Palace, Mutianyu Great Wall, Temple of Heaven, Birds nest, old Hutong alleys and a Chinese Opera and another historical performance dedicated to a revered female emperor, Wei Zetian (Second Zhou Dynasty, ~690 CE). Zi'an was the first capital of CHina featuring the Summer Palace and Terracotta Warriors (~210 BCE) which were only discovered in 1974. Amusingly we met a surviving farmer discoverer and his family and then cast our own little warriors to take home. Zhangjiajie is pretty much a tourist town in Hunan with wondrous quartz-sandstone mountains made increasingly famous by the film series Avatar. I missed my much-loved chili-rich Hunanese feeds given a health issue with one of our group, Fran from Melbourne, but she was lovely so no worries. Finally Shanghai, modern and business-like, just for a day or so after a very late flight, so taken pretty easy. This is modern China, after all, so we took the maglev (300kph) to the airport.
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