汉字

Why this place

Chinese characters began as pictures and evolved for three thousand years into the modern script — and unlike an alphabet, the system encodes meaning as well as sound, which is why it holds together across mutually unintelligible spoken varieties. Roughly 3,000 characters cover most modern reading; each one has a structure, a stroke order and often a story.

What to see

• Anyang's Yinxu, where the earliest writing was found
• Xi'an's Forest of Steles, for the script's development in stone
• Beijing's National Museum and the Palace Museum, for bronze and oracle-bone inscriptions
• A calligraphy class, which is the practical way to understand how characters are built
• Modern type foundries and design studios, since Chinese typography is a live discipline

What to eat

• Not edible — but learning characters is what makes restaurant menus and market signs readable
• Start with food characters: 米, 面, 茶, 肉, 鱼

How to plan

A single lesson in stroke order will change how you see every sign in the country.

Best time

Any time

Practical tips

• Learn the 200 most common radicals first — they give you a usable guess at the meaning of most new characters