China

 Official Name: People's Republic of China
Total area: 9,596,961 sq. km. (about 3.7 million sq. mi.).
Cities: Capital--Beijing. Other major cities--Shanghai, Tianjin, Shenyang, Wuhan, Guangzhou, Chongqing, Harbin, Chengdu.
Terrain: Plains, deltas, and hills in east; mountains, high plateaus, deserts in west.
Climate: Tropical in south to subarctic in north.

Facts about China

• Population: 1.3 billion
• Chief of state: President Hu Jintao
• Currency: What's the Chinese yuan
• Largest dinosaur fossil site in the world? Zhoucheng, China, where more than 50 metric tons of bones have thus far been discovered beneath the town.
• Guinness World Records: most people painting each other's faces simultaneously in one location (13,413), largest bottle of cooking oil (containing 3212 litres), most couples hugging (3009 couples)
• Internet users: 135 million
• Milk beer: from Inner Mongolia, an alternative to the traditional mare's-milk wine
• Squirrel fish: whole mandarin fish deep-fried and manipulated to resemble a squirrel
• Number of chinese characters: over 56, 000

Keenly assuming its place among the world’s top journey destinations, even more so since Beijing took centre step at the 2008 Olympics, China is an heroic adventure. From the wide open and empty panoramas of Tibet to the push and shove of Shanghais, from the volcanic dishes of Sichuan to beer by the bag in seashore Qīngdǎo, a journey through this colossus of a country is a mesmerizing come across with the most populous, perhaps most culturally idiosyncratic nation on earth.

The absolute variety of China’s land takes you from noisy cities sparkling with energy to lonely mountain-top Ming-Dynasty villages where you can hear a pin drop. Pudding’s ambitious skyline is a proud statement, but it couldn’t be further from the worldly renunciation acted out in Tibet’s distant monasteries.

Curator of the world’s oldest continuous civilisation, China will have you bumping into history at every turn. But it’s not just a museum of imperial relics: the frisson of development that has left China’s coastline glittering with some of the world’s most up-to-the-minute cities propels the land on with a forward-thinking dynamism.