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Since I've traveled to almost all provinces in China (I'm missing just 3!) I often get asked what's the most spectacular place that I know in the country, and I think it's probably Fanjingshan in Guizhou province.
It's two temples, linked by a bridge, first built in the 7th century AD, on top of an extremely steep peak at 2,572 meters altitude. Going there is quite the journey as you need to climb a huge staircase of exactly 8,888 steps to reach the top 😅 You really wonder how they managed to build these temples back in the days! Thankfully nowadays you can also take a cable car that brings you closer, in which case the journey is shortened to about 2,300 steps, which took us about 2 hours with me carrying one of my daughters on my back and holding the other one's hand (picture below).
Unfortunately when we went it was quite foggy so I couldn't take good pictures but I included sunny-weather pictures so you can see just how jaw-dropping this place is.
The surroundings of Fanjingshan, and Guizhou province generally, are immensely charming too. Guizhou is one of the most rural provinces in China and home to plenty of ethnic minorities who've remained very traditional, with unique architecture styles for their villages.
For instance right around Fanjingshan we visited two villages (see both videos): one village called Yunshe of the Tujia ethnic minority, and one called Zhaisha which is a village of the Dong minority, famous for their very special towers in the middle of their villages.
https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1782246119210352992
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One other place in Guizhou where I haven't been but where I would very much like to go next time I visit the province is a place that I'm pretty much certain no-one outside China has ever heard of called Pingba (平坝樱花): the world's largest gathering of cherry blossoming trees: an incredible 700,000 trees! All of this in islands and peninsulas on a lake. This place looks like the closest thing there is on earth to the garden of Eden!
It's a shame Guizhou is rarely visited by foreign tourists. In general in my experience it's the number 1 mistake people make when they visit China: they tend to spend all their time visiting cities (Shanghai, Beijing, Xi'an, etc.) when the countryside is in my humble opinion in some ways more impressive, with so many absolutely breathtaking sites.
A fun anecdote I recently read in the French press (
https://20minutes.fr/publicommunique...mondiale-chine) which illustrates this is that there's this French guy called Jean Bottazzi who's the Vice President of the French Speleology Federation (FFS). One day he decided to visit China and Guizhou specifically (since the place is filled with mountains and huge cave networks, including the Shuanghe cave network, the longest one in China) and... he literally stayed there, he now lives in China!
https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1782246122989502841
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