Early - yum cha, done properly
Guangzhou drinks tea in the morning and eats while it does, and there is no better place to learn the form than the old quarter. You sit in a family teahouse where the trolleys still come round and order the canon: har gow, the pleated translucent prawn dumpling; siu mai; char siu bao, the barbecue pork bun; cheung fun, rice-noodle sheets steamed and rolled to order. Your guide covers the etiquette as it comes up - two fingers tapped on the table to thank whoever is pouring, the lid left ajar when you want the pot refilled - and then leaves you to eat.
Late morning - the wet market
What you ate at breakfast comes from about eight hundred metres away. A working neighbourhood market is where Cantonese cooking actually begins: live seafood in tanks, rice noodles made fresh on the spot, flowering chives and water chestnuts, and a wall of dried scallop, dried shrimp and dried fish that supplies the savoury depth behind most of the region's soups. Your guide names the things worth remembering and the things that will not pass customs.
Midday - the Chen Clan Academy
Between meals, the finest Qing building in Guangdong. The Chen Clan Academy was subscribed between 1888 and 1894 by Chen families from seventy-two counties and used as lodgings for clan sons sitting the imperial examinations; it has been the Guangdong Folk Art Museum since 1959 and a National Key Cultural Relics Protection Unit since 1988. Nineteen halls and courtyards stand on 13,200 square metres, every band of them carved, moulded or glazed. It is the necessary counterweight to a day spent in kitchens and markets: the same city, the same money, a completely different kind of work.
Lunch
A Cantonese lunch - steamed fish, seasonal greens, rice.
Afternoon - roast meats and the old trade streets
The afternoon is the other half of Cantonese cooking, the part that hangs in windows. A roast-meat shop counter gives you char siu, roast goose and crisp pork belly carved to order and eaten with rice - the everyday meal of the city, and the one visitors most often miss. From there the walk runs through the old commercial lanes and the arcades of Xiguan, where the shophouse colonnades were built for sun and sudden rain, and past the dried-goods shops that supply them.
Evening - dinner, and something sweet
Dinner is a proper Cantonese table - steamed fish, a soup, a claypot, greens - and it finishes with the Cantonese sweet-soup tradition: hot or cold, sweet or barely sweet, and taken seriously as a course rather than a dessert. Then back to your hotel.
Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner
Accommodation
Day programme - no hotel night included.
