The only thing you can find online is usually catering to rich western tourists or “expats” and usually boils down to “Which place is the most western/ High GDP and McDonalds!” so I’d rather get an opinion from someone that’s been there that isn’t a business tourist.
seconded. lived there for a bit and it’s great.
pretty small for a capital. downtown area is all within walking distance, but there’s also a huge new urban area south towards the lake. climate is great though summers are a bit cold and wet for my taste (rain and thunder every day andtemps of like 23).
used to have a lot of hippie/hipster white people but last time i visited they were mostly gone which is fine. Sal bought the french bakery so now there’s three or four Salvador restaurants in that area. oh and the cool little used bookshop is gone.
west mountain is cool but i never went to shilin, heard it’s boring.
I’ve only been to Chengdu, which I thought was fantastic. Weather seemed decent, has excellent food, beautiful natural scenery nearby, amazing museums/history, pandas, Sichuan opera, extremely friendly people, and it also has a reputation for being the gayest city in China:
A healthy work/life balance is a signature of the Chengdunese; and that laid-back approach is present in every aspect of life there—including social mores. It confers on the locals a reputation for tolerance that has helped its LGBTQ+ population feel more comfortable being open and out. “It’s the lifestyle here—people don’t work so hard, they’re outdoors all the time,” says Kurt Macher, the openly gay general manager of the Temple House. “People look at you here, they smile and they don’t care. I see many gay Chinese couples walking down by the river, hand in hand, and I’ve never seen that in Beijing, Shanghai, or even in Hong Kong.”
Also, while I think it is a tourist hub for people in China (especially the panda research center), I saw no other westerners the whole time I was there, so you’re unlikely to see anything specifically catering to expats like you described.
There’s a saying in Chinese 上有天堂，下有苏杭 which means ‘Heaven is above, on Earth there is Suzhou amd Hangzhou’.
I loved Suzhou. Suzhou is a large city about an hour west of Shanghai (half hour by HSR) in the wealthy province of Jiangsu (think Newcastle relative to Sydney, Geelong to Melbourne). It’s an old city full of canals (I mean… all the cities are old) built close to the Great Canal. It’s reputed for its old silk culture and style of opera (not as famous as jingju but quite nice). Hangzhou in nearby Zhejiang province is probably a bit too tech-y, influencer-y (it’s the headquarters of Alibaba) but is considered one of the most aesthetically pleasing cities in the country alongside Suzhou because of the West Lake and its rolling tea fields. Nanjing (the capital of the Jiangsu province) is very nice too and probably overlooked.
Other cities tend to be those that are within commuting distance from major cities like Zhuhai (close to Shenzhen) for employment but not over urbanised yet.
Wuhan was also pretty damn nice. It’s kinda hard to go wrong. I also watch videos of an influencer who lives in Changchun (whose name means ‘Eternal Spring’) and honestly it looks lovely in the right seasons. It’s always subjective though because I’ve always lived coastal and don’t think I’d be able to live inland.
Wazzup Beijing
Wulingyuan and the best food are both in Hunan Province.
