Guangdong

Overview

Guangdong is the Cantonese-speaking south of China, the province that makes a large share of what the country exports, and the home of the cooking the rest of the world knows as Chinese. It has the largest economy of any Chinese province, roughly a tenth of the mainland’s output, and a 2020 census population of 126 million. Almost all of that weight sits in the Pearl River delta, where Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Foshan, Dongguan and Zhuhai have grown into one another, and where more than 86 million people live in the eleven delta cities once you count Hong Kong and Macao.

For a visitor the province splits into four pieces. The delta holds the capital, Guangzhou, a trading port since 214 BC and now a city of nearly 19 million, and Shenzhen, the technology city on the Hong Kong border, which has its own guide. West of the delta, the countryside around Kaiping is dotted with diaolou, fortified towers put up by emigrants who came home from North America, Australia and Southeast Asia, and listed by UNESCO in 2007. East along the coast, Chaozhou and Shantou speak Teochew rather than Cantonese and eat differently. The hills of the northeast around Meizhou are Hakka country, and the far north beyond the Nanling range is where the province keeps its forests and its red sandstone cliffs.

Language matters here more than in most of China. Guangdong counts around 20 million Cantonese speakers, 20 million Hakka speakers and 14 million Teochew speakers, and while Mandarin works everywhere, locals are protective of Cantonese and English is thin outside the big-city hotels. Three cuisines follow the three languages, and food is the honest reason to build a trip around this province rather than pass through it on the way to Hong Kong.

The history that still shows is trading history: the Maritime Silk Road, the Canton system that funnelled every Western merchant through one riverbank for 85 years, the emigration that built Chinatowns from San Francisco to Bangkok, and the 1980 Special Economic Zones that turned a county of 30,000 people into Shenzhen.

History & character

Nanyue and the first Guangzhou

Panyu, the town that became Guangzhou, was founded on the east bank of the Pearl River in 214 BC when the Qin armies pushed south into the lands of the Yue peoples. When the dynasty collapsed, the Qin general Zhao Tuo made Panyu the capital of his own kingdom of Nanyue in 204 BC, and the Han only took it back in 111 BC. The tomb of the second Nanyue king, Zhao Mo, who ruled from 137 to 122 BC, turned up under a Guangzhou hillside in 1983 with a silk-sewn jade burial suit of 2,291 pieces. It is the best single argument for thinking of Guangzhou as an ancient city rather than a modern one.

The port at the end of the Maritime Silk Road

Guangdong took its name in 226, when the city became the seat of Guang Prefecture. By the Tang dynasty it was the Chinese end of the sea route to Persia and Arabia. Arab and Persian merchants had their own quarter, and there were enough of them that pirates from the same nations sacked the city in 758, and the rebel Huang Chao is recorded as killing about 200,000 foreigners there in 878. The Huaisheng Mosque, traditionally founded in the 7th century by an uncle of the Prophet, may be the oldest mosque in China.

Canton, the Thirteen Factories and the Opium War

From 1757 to 1842 the Thirteen Factories, a row of warehouses on the riverbank outside the walled city, were the only place in China where foreigners could legally trade. Tea and silk went out, silver came in, and then British opium came in faster than the silver had. The British captured Canton on 18 March 1841 during the First Opium War, and the settlement that followed gave them Hong Kong. In 1859 Britain and France dug a canal to cut the Shamian sandbank off from the city and divided it three-fifths British and two-fifths French; the Anglican church went up in 1865 and the French Catholic chapel in 1892. Shantou, on the eastern coast, was opened as a treaty port in 1860 under the Treaty of Tientsin.

Emigrants and revolutionaries

Taishan and the neighbouring counties west of the delta sent so many men abroad in the 19th century that a large share of the older overseas Chinese communities trace their roots to them, and the Teochew ports sent the families who are now the largest ethnic Chinese group in Thailand and Cambodia. Money and ideas came back with them. Sun Yat-sen, born in Zhongshan on the western side of the delta, founded the Whampoa Military Academy on Changzhou Island in Guangzhou in May 1924 with Soviet money and advisers, Chiang Kai-shek as superintendent and Zhou Enlai running the political department. By the time war with Japan began in 1937, most Chinese divisions were commanded by Whampoa graduates.

1980 and the zones

In May 1980 the Central Committee designated Shenzhen as the first Special Economic Zone in China. Zhuhai and Shantou followed the same year, so three of the country’s six zones sit in Guangdong, and the whole delta became the factory floor for the reform era. The province’s output reached 14.58 trillion yuan in 2025.

What it feels like now

Guangdong reads as less centred on Beijing than anywhere else on the mainland. The street language is Cantonese, tea comes before food, the restaurants are bigger and later than in the north, and the reference points are Hong Kong, Southeast Asia and the diaspora rather than the capital. Two layers of contact with the outside world, the medieval sea trade and the colonial-era treaty ports, still shape the place, and the third layer, the factories, is what pays for it.

See & do

Old Guangzhou

The Museum of the Mausoleum of the Nanyue King at 867 Jiefang Road in Yuexiu is built over the tomb itself, 20 metres underground and made of 750 large stones with painted murals. More than 1,000 burial objects came out of it, from bronzes and musical instruments to a chariot, and the jade suit is the centrepiece; the museum opened in 1988 and the nearest metro is Yuexiu Park on Line 2, exit E.

The Chen Clan Ancestral Hall on Zhongshan 7th Road was built in 1894 by 72 branches of the Chen clan as lodgings for their young men sitting the imperial examinations. It is 19 buildings, nine halls and six courtyards on a 13,200 square metre site, and the point is the decoration: a 27-metre ceramic ridge with 224 figures from Cantonese opera, brick and wood carving, and 1,800 metres of plasterwork. It now houses the Guangdong Folk Art Museum and has its own metro station.

Shamian Island is small, 900 metres by 300, and walkable in an hour: the old consulates and trading houses are now hotels, a hostel, restaurants and souvenir shops. On the far bank of the river, the Canton Tower is 600 metres tall and has been open since 29 September 2010; the indoor observatory is at 449 metres, the open rooftop at 488, and sixteen glass capsules crawl round the rim of the roof in 20 to 40 minutes. A night cruise on the Pearl River costs 50 to 200 yuan a head. Out on Changzhou Island, the site of the Whampoa Military Academy is a museum.

Cantonese opera

Cantonese opera went on the UNESCO intangible heritage list in 2009. It mixes singing, martial arts and acrobatics, the plots come from Chinese history and the classics, and it is still performed across Guangdong, Guangxi, Hong Kong and Macao. Under the Qianlong emperor most of the troupes were based in Foshan, where they formed the Qionghua Guild. Guangzhou and Foshan are the places to catch it; ask your hotel what is on, since listings rarely make it into English.

The Kaiping diaolou

The UNESCO listing covers four village clusters: Zili, Sanmenli, Majianglong and Jinjiangli. The towers are a mix of Chinese and Western forms, arcades and columns and domes stacked on a plain village base. Zili is the most photographed and Li Garden the most ornate single estate. At the last prices Wikivoyage recorded, Zili cost 78 yuan, Li Garden 100, Majianglong 60 and Jinjiangli 50, with a combined ticket for all four plus the South Tower at 180 yuan, valid for two days; Zili closes at 17:30 but the towers start locking up around 17:00. Prices will have moved, but the ratio between the sites is a fair guide. It works as a long day from Guangzhou or a night in Kaiping.

Chaozhou’s floating bridge

The Guangji Bridge across the Han River was begun in 1170. It is 517.95 metres long on 24 stone piers with 18 spans, and the middle section is a pontoon of 18 boats that can be opened for river traffic, which puts it in the traditional list of China’s four great ancient bridges alongside Zhaozhou, Lugou and Luoyang. A restoration begun in 2003 put back the Ming-style pavilions and the floating section, and since a modern road bridge opened downstream in 1989 it carries only visitors. The local saying is that if you go to Chaozhou without crossing it, you have not been to Chaozhou.

Nanhai One

In 1987 a survey team found a Southern Song merchant ship on the seabed off the western coast. Nanhai One was the first ancient vessel found on the Maritime Silk Road and the largest of its kind; it is 30.4 metres long and carried an estimated 60,000 to 80,000 items, most of them porcelain. In 2007 the whole hull was lifted in one piece and placed in a seawater tank, 64 metres long, 40 wide and 23 high with 12 metres of water, inside the Maritime Silk Route Museum built for it at Yangjiang. You watch the excavation through viewing windows.

Foshan’s temple and fighters

The Ancestral Temple in Foshan, rebuilt in 1372, is the Lingnan-style Daoist temple at the heart of the old town, and the Wong Fei-hung Memorial Hall in Chancheng is where the lion-dance and kung fu tradition is kept on show. Both are an easy half day from Guangzhou on the Guangfo metro line.

Towns & cities

Guangzhou

Guangzhou is the capital: 18.7 million people in the 2020 census, 32.6 million in the metropolitan area, and the fifth most populous urban area in China. The old core is Yuexiu, north of the river, with Yuexiu Park, the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall and the Nanyue tomb. Liwan, to the west, holds Shamian Island, the Chen Clan hall and the street markets that sell antiques and specialist goods. Across the water in Haizhu, the Canton Tower faces Zhujiang New Town, the newer business district. Twice a year since 1957 the Canton Fair at Pazhou, the oldest and largest trade fair in China, fills the city with buyers.

Shenzhen

Shenzhen is the technology city on the Hong Kong border and the home of Huawei, Tencent, DJI, Oppo and BYD. It has its own guide; the short version is that you come for the skyline, the design districts and the land border with Hong Kong, not for anything older than 1980.

Foshan

Foshan sits 25 km southwest of Guangzhou, close enough to count as the same city, with 9.5 million people of its own. It is regarded as the home of Cantonese opera, of the Nanquan school of martial arts and of lion dancing; Wong Fei-hung has a memorial hall in Chancheng district, and Ip Man, the Wing Chun master who taught Bruce Lee, was from here. The Ancestral Temple, rebuilt in 1372, is the central monument, and in the 19th century the English called the town the Birmingham of China for its ironworks.

Kaiping

Kaiping, in the emigrant counties west of the delta, is the diaolou town. Around 1,800 of the fortified towers still stand in its villages, most of them empty, out of more than 3,000 at their peak; the building boom came in the warlord years of the 1920s and 1930s, and after 1949, when the state reached down to village level, they lost their purpose. The old riverside town of Chikan has been under renovation since 2017.

Chaozhou and Shantou

Chaozhou is the cultural capital of the Chaoshan region and a city of 2.57 million. The old town keeps a 2.6 km stretch of Ming city wall, the Kaiyuan Temple and the Guangji Bridge across the Han River, and gongfu tea, first brewed here in the Song dynasty, is still part of everyday manners. Shantou, downriver on the coast, is the bigger and rougher city, 5.5 million people, the treaty port of 1860 and one of the original Special Economic Zones, though it never took off the way Shenzhen did. Some 2.16 million overseas Chinese trace their roots here, and Nan’ao Island offshore was rated the most beautiful island in Guangdong by the Chinese edition of National Geographic.

Meizhou

Meizhou, in the hills of the northeast, calls itself the Capital of Hakkas in the World. The Meixian dialect spoken here is treated as standard Hakka, the countryside around Dabu county holds the walled villages and round houses of the Hakka clans, and from August or September the village orchards are heavy with pomelos.

Zhuhai

Zhuhai is the city across the border from Macao: a Special Economic Zone since 1980, 2.49 million people at the end of 2023, and three land crossings into Macao at Gongbei, Wanzai and Hengqin. It runs to an archipelago of 262 islands, ten of them inhabited, and the seafront Lovers’ Road and the Fisher Girl statue are the local promenade. It is greener and slower than Shenzhen and makes a comfortable base for Macao.

Zhaoqing and Shaoguan

Zhaoqing, up the West River from Guangzhou, is the lakeside town of Star Lake and the base for the Dinghu Mountain reserve 18 km to its east. Shaoguan, in the far north, is the railway town for the Danxia cliffs and the Nanling forest.

Food & drink

Guangdong has three kitchens, and the one you know is only the first. Cantonese cooking is built on freshness and restraint: steaming, quick stir-frying and slow roasting, and the daily meal that defines it is yum cha, tea with dim sum. Har gow prawn dumplings, siu mai, char siu bao, turnip cake, cheong fun rice rolls and egg tarts, once wheeled round on trolleys and now mostly ticked off a paper menu. Locals sum it up as “a pot of tea with two pieces”, and a big Guangzhou teahouse will run to more than a hundred varieties. The other Cantonese signature is siu mei, the roast meats hanging in the window: char siu, crackling pork belly, roast goose.

The province has its own local variations: Dongguan for Chinese sausage, Qingyuan and Zhanjiang for chicken, Zhuhai for seafood. Shunde, the district of Foshan south of Guangzhou, was named a UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy in 2014 and is the source of double-skin milk pudding, the Cantonese dessert.

Teochew cooking from Chaozhou, Shantou and Jieyang is a different tradition, lighter on oil and built on poaching, steaming and braising. It is known for seafood and for vegetarian dishes, and every dish arrives with its own sauce: crab vinegar with cold crab, a sharp vinegar with the braised goose. Oyster omelette, fish balls in soup and mue, a thin rice congee, are the everyday orders. The region also claims the origin of bak kut teh, the pork-rib soup now more associated with Malaysia and Singapore.

Hakka cooking in Meizhou and the northeast is heavier, saltier and closer to the ground. Preserved mustard greens go into steamed and braised dishes; kiu nyuk is thick slices of pork belly layered with them in a dark soy-and-sugar sauce; salt-baked chicken was originally buried in hot salt, though most restaurants now brine or steam it; and abacus seeds are chewy beads of tapioca and yam dough. The best-known Hakka dish is yong tau foo, tofu stuffed with minced pork and fried or braised; the story in Meizhou is that the first Hakka migrants had no wheat flour for dumplings and used tofu instead.

Tea leads the drinking. Beer comes with dinner, and baijiu matters less here than in the north. Order like a local: tea first, and pour for everyone else before yourself.

Nature

Guangdong keeps its wild country in the north, where the Nanling range walls the province off from Hunan and Jiangxi.

Nanling National Forest Park, in Ruyuan Yao Autonomous County near Shaoguan, covers about 273 square kilometres and includes Shikengkong, at 1,902 metres the highest point in the province. It was established in March 1993 and is split into four scenic areas: Xiaohuangshan, the Waterfall Cluster, Qingshuigu and Shikengkong itself, with the Shuangfei twin waterfall as the set piece.

Mount Danxia, also reached from Shaoguan, is the site that gave its name to the Danxia landform: red Cretaceous sandstone and conglomerate weathered into sheer cliffs and pillars. It was inscribed by UNESCO in 2010 as one of the six China Danxia sites and covers 16,800 hectares with a 12,400 hectare buffer zone.

Dinghu Mountain, 18 km east of Zhaoqing, was set up in 1956 as the first nature reserve in China and joined the UNESCO Man and Biosphere programme in 1979. The forest survived because a Buddhist monastery, built in the late Ming, held the land; it now records more than 500 plant species, 23 of them under state protection, 178 bird species and 38 mammals, and by the late 1990s it was drawing up to a million visitors a year. Go early on a weekday.

The coast runs for 4,300 km, most of it working shoreline rather than resort. The Pearl River estuary is home to Indo-Pacific humpback dolphins, the pink animals Hong Kong calls Chinese white dolphins, with a population of around 2,500 across the wider estuary; shipping and reclamation keep them under pressure.

Climate

Guangdong is subtropical and wet. Guangzhou’s average daily high is 18°C in January and 33°C in July, annual rainfall across the province runs to 1,500 to 2,000 mm, and yearly average temperatures sit between 19°C and 26°C depending on where you are.

The practical shape of the year: a long hot summer from May to September with humidity you can lean on and afternoon downpours, a typhoon season across the summer and early autumn that can shut ferries, flights and bridges for a day at a time, and a short mild winter. Winter figures look kind on paper, but the northern monsoon brings grey damp weeks, and because there is no central heating south of the Yangzi, hotel rooms and restaurants can feel colder inside than out. Pack a jumper for December to February even in Guangzhou.

The delta cities and the Chaoshan coast share the same pattern, with the east coast taking more typhoon hits. Meizhou and the Nanling north are cooler and drier in summer, which makes them the comfortable hiking option, and cold enough in winter for frost in the high valleys. Air conditioning is universal and often set aggressively low, so a layer for indoors is useful in summer too.

When to go

Spring and autumn are the seasons to aim for. October to December is the dry, clear window when the delta is at its most pleasant and the Nanling forests turn colour; March and April are green and mild before the rains settle in.

Two calendars get in the way. The Canton Fair runs a spring session from about 15 April to 5 May and an autumn session from about 15 October to 5 November, and Guangzhou hotel rates, hostels included, rise by 200 to 400 per cent while it is on. Stay in Foshan or Shenzhen those weeks, or shift your dates. The other is the national holiday calendar: Chinese New Year in late January or February, when the delta’s migrant workforce goes home and trains and hotels vanish for a fortnight, and the Golden Week of 1 to 7 October, when everything in China is full.

The wet season from May to September is not a write-off, since the food and the cities work in any weather, but it is not the time for Kaiping’s open countryside or the Nanling trails. If you want the Hakka country at its best, come from late August, when the pomelo orchards around Meizhou are ripening.

Getting there

Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport (CAN), 28 km north of the centre, handled 83.6 million passengers in 2025, which makes it the busiest airport in China and ninth in the world. It is China Southern’s main hub, Terminal 2 opened in April 2018 and Terminal 3 on 30 October 2025, and Metro Line 3 serves both Airport South (Terminal 1) and Airport North (Terminal 2). Shenzhen Bao’an (SZX) and Shantou (SWA) carry a smaller international network.

Hong Kong International Airport is the third way in. Ferries run straight from the airport to Shenzhen, Dongguan, Guangzhou and Zhongshan without passing through Hong Kong immigration, and buses cross the bridge to Zhuhai.

From Hong Kong the fast route is the Guangzhou-Shenzhen-Hong Kong Express Rail Link, 142 km end to end and open since 23 September 2018. The fastest trains take 14 minutes from West Kowloon to Futian, 18 to Shenzhen North and 46 to Guangzhou South, and mainland immigration is done at West Kowloon before you board. Guangzhou South is about 20 km south of the city centre, a 30-minute ride on Metro Line 2.

The Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge is 55 km of cable-stayed bridge, undersea tunnel and artificial islands, open since 24 October 2018, and it cut the road journey from Hong Kong to Zhuhai from about four hours to 30 minutes. The shuttle buses run 24 hours a day, as often as every five minutes, and take about 40 minutes across; private cars need permits from both sides, so assume you will take the bus.

From the rest of China, Guangzhou South and Shenzhen North are the southern end of the high-speed network, with direct trains from Beijing, Xi’an, Chengdu, Chongqing and Guilin. Beijing and Shanghai are a long day by train; from that distance flying is usually cheaper and quicker.

Getting around

Guangzhou Metro had 19 lines and 779.9 km of track by mid-2025, the third longest network in the world after Beijing and Shanghai, and fares run from 2 to 21 yuan by distance. The Guangfo Line, opened in November 2010, was the first metro line in China to link two cities and is the way to Foshan. The Lingnan Pass (Yang Cheng Tong) card costs 50 yuan and works on public transport across the province except in Shenzhen, though a passport-linked Alipay or WeChat QR code does the same job with less fuss.

Rail is the way between cities. The Guangzhou-Zhuhai intercity railway runs 117 km from Guangzhou South through Shunde and Zhongshan to Zhuhai station beside the Gongbei crossing into Macao, in 46 minutes non-stop or 76 with all stops, and since February 2024 it continues to Zhuhai airport. High-speed trains link Guangzhou and Shenzhen with Chaozhou and Shantou on the east coast, and since 2019 with Meizhou West in the Hakka country.

For Kaiping, take a high-speed train to Kaiping South, or the bus from Fangcun station at Kengkou metro in Guangzhou, about two hours for 57 yuan. The villages are spread out and the local buses leave you a kilometre or two of walking, so most people hire a taxi at the station; around 300 yuan buys a five-hour circuit of the main clusters.

Guangdong has the longest and densest expressway network in China, but self-drive is not realistic for most foreign visitors and Didi ride-hailing is everywhere in the cities, so the practical pattern is train between cities and metro or Didi inside them. The border crossings into Hong Kong and Macao are full international frontiers with passport control on both sides; allow time in the queues at Lo Wu and Gongbei at weekends.