Secrets of the Middle Kingdom

Secrets is a word often tossed around in travel catalogs (ours is no exception, alas), but we use it here because this journey takes us to an intriguing passel of places most visitors to China miss. (The following trip description barely scratches the surface of the fabulously diverse wonders in store; and note that China: Secrets of the Middle Kingdom includes a couple of very unsecret wonders: Beijing, where we’ll do some inspired wandering in its old, marvelously evocative neighborhoods called hutongs, and Xian, whose famous Terracotta Warriors look like a sudden trumpet blast would awaken them from their 2,000-year slumber and set them streaming out of their cavernous home.)

We fly from Beijing to Datong, where we’ll visit the Hanging Monastery, stuck (almost impossibly, it seems) on the cliff of the Jinxia Gorge, and we’ll explore the World Heritage Site Yungang Grottoes and their more than 51,000 Buddhist statues. We drive through the northern Chinese countryside to Pingyao, whose lively narrow streets, magnificent old family mansions, and 1,500-year-old Shuanglin Temple have earned it World Heritage Site status. We fly southwest to massive Chongqing and drive to Chengdu (when we first visited Chengdu 30 years ago on the way to Lhasa, everyone wore Mao suits; things have changed dramatically in this interesting, typically booming Chinese metropolis).

After an excursion to the riverside Leshan Giant Buddha (giant is an understatement; it’s the world’s largest stone statue) and an optional visit to Chengdu’s teeming panda breeding center, we’re off to see those ready-to-march warriors in Xian and board a bullet train to the 1,300 or so Longmen Grottoes, filled with carved pagodas and calligraphy and more than 100,000 statues. We continue via Lanzhou to culturally Tibetan Xiahe and its much- venerated Labrang Tashikyil Monastery, and then by overnight train (a real Middle Kingdom treat) to (in your writer’s opinion) the grottoes of all grottoes: Dunhuang’s Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, carved on cliffsides overlooking a textbook desert (in whose famed Singing Sand Dunes we’ll frolic). There is much to say about Dunhuang. Here are two things that will whet your traveler’s appetite: the Caves’ frescoes are outstanding examples of Greco-Buddhist art (what did Greece have to do with them? Therein lies a great tale . . .); and it was in a walled-off cave in Dunhuang that the great explorer Aurel Stein discovered the world’s oldest printed book, a copy of the Diamond Sutra, now on display far from home in the British Museum).