Early - the first pot
Cantonese morning tea begins before most of the city is awake, and the point of starting early is not to beat a queue but to see the room as it is used: families, retired neighbours, business conversations, all of them conducted over the same four dumplings and a pot of tea. Your guide walks you through the canon - har gow, siu mai, char siu bao, cheung fun - and the small etiquette of the table, then gets out of the way.
Late morning - Yuexiu Hill and the teahouse quarter
The old teahouse tradition grew up around the foot of Yuexiu Hill, where the gardens, the park and the city's oldest quarter meet, and the morning continues on that ground. Yuexiu has been the centre of Guangzhou for more than two thousand years, and the Five Rams made in 1959 - eleven metres high, carved from 130 blocks of granite - stand above the park with the surviving Ming city wall running through the trees behind them. It is a walk rather than a meal, which is the point after breakfast.
Lunch
A Cantonese lunch - rice noodles, roast meat, greens.
Afternoon - the market, then the snack lanes
The afternoon is where Cantonese eating gets interesting, because it is mostly not in restaurants. A neighbourhood wet market first - live seafood, fresh rice noodles, flowering chives, a wall of dried seafood - and then the old city's snack lanes, where the same tradition appears in small portions: rice-noodle rolls, congee with preserved egg, beef balls, steamed cakes, sweet soups. Your guide explains what each thing is and, more usefully, when the city eats it, because almost none of it belongs to a mealtime in the European sense.
Meals
Breakfast, Lunch
Accommodation
Day programme - no hotel night included.
