Guangzhou

Guangzhou — Canton to the age of sail — has been trading with the world for two thousand years and shows no sign of stopping. This was imperial China's window: the port where Arab and Persian merchants settled under the Tang, where the Thirteen Factories confined Europe's traders in the eighteenth century, and where the Canton Fair still convenes global commerce twice a year. The city's civilisation is built on that traffic — and on the table: yum cha, the Cantonese morning ritual of dim sum and unhurried tea, is Guangzhou's great contribution to the world's happiness, dispensed in vast, clattering teahouses that treat breakfast as an art form. Along the Pearl River the city has composed a modern waterfront: the Canton Tower's slender twist on one bank and, facing it, the Guangzhou Opera House — Zaha Hadid's first opera house, two grey "pebbles" washed smooth beside the river, opened in 2010 and immediately among the most admired buildings in China. It is the venue documented in the concert record, and with the Xinghai Concert Hall (named for Xian Xinghai, the Canton-born composer of the Yellow River Cantata) and the Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra, it anchors one of the country's strongest musical establishments. Shamian island keeps the colonial arcades under banyans; the kitchens keep the standards.