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The flight into Lijiang does something odd to your sense of scale. You leave Kunming at 1,900m and 45 minutes later you are descending toward a broad basin at 2,400m, with a horizon of 5,000m peaks. This is the three-day guide for travellers who have heard Lijiang is a cute Unesco old town and have no idea what else is here: Dayan and the Naxi culture, Black Dragon Pool reflection, the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain cable car at 4,506m with altitude-sickness warnings, Shuhe and Baisha, Tiger Leaping Gorge on day three.

The flat green peaks on the back of the Chinese yuan 20 note are real, and they are better on a bicycle than on a cruise boat. This is the long-form guide to Yangshuo — the Li River and the Yulong, a bamboo raft ride and a Moon Hill climb, beer fish on West Street, the Longji rice terraces as a day trip, and why you should stay in the countryside rather than in town. A weekend from Shenzhen, and possibly the best 72 hours in southern China.

On my second night in Shenzhen I walked out of the Shekou metro and into what looked like a hallucination: a full-sized ocean liner moored in the middle of a paved city plaza, with a synchronised fountain show throwing jets at its hull to a soundtrack of Andrew Lloyd Webber. The full guide to Sea World Shenzhen — the retired French liner Minghua, the expat bar strip, where to eat in three tiers, and why Shekou is the neighbourhood to base yourself in for more than a weekend.

My first taxi ride in Shenzhen, the driver nodded at the Futian skyline and asked if it was bigger than London — a fair question. This is the long-form guide to a mainland Chinese city almost no foreigner writes about properly: Huaqiangbei and OCT Loft, Shekou and Sea World, Ping An Finance Centre and the border runs to Hong Kong, a three-day route that actually works, and why you should stop skipping Shenzhen on your way somewhere else.