5-Day Guangzhou Craft Study & Vocational Workshop Programme

Morning - Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall
The hall was completed in 1931 on the site of the Qing dynasty's Guangdong provincial assembly, and it commemorates Sun Yat-sen, who was born in Xiangshan in this province and whose revolutionary career began here. The octagonal auditorium spans 71 metres without a single column, an unusually ambitious structure for its date, and the exhibition covers the 1911 revolution and the republic that followed.

Late morning - Chen Clan Academy
Built between 1888 and 1894 as a study hostel for the Chen lineage, the academy is the province's best single display of Cantonese decorative arts: wood, stone and brick carving, plasterwork, ceramics and ironwork across a three-hall, six-courtyard plan.

Lunch
A Cantonese lunch, with a note for teachers on food-safety and allergy handling for group bookings.

Afternoon - Guangdong Museum
The province museum covers Guangdong's history from the Neolithic through the maritime trade era to the present, and holds a strong natural-history collection covering the Pearl River delta and the South China Sea. Timed entry is booked in advance.

Evening - Debrief and return
A short discussion session, then return to the hotel.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Day tour - no hotel night included.

Morning - Cantonese opera
Cantonese opera (yueju) is sung in its own dialect, with elaborate embroidered costumes, painted faces and a repertoire that mixes history, legend and comedy. You visit a theatre or an opera society hall, see the costumes and instruments at close range, and hear a demonstration of the two main vocal styles. If your dates coincide with a performance, the day is arranged around it.

Lunch
A Cantonese lunch, with the option of a traditional tea-house setting.

Afternoon - Tea and craft workshop
A tea session covering Guangdong's own tradition - pu'er and the region's consumption of it - followed by a hands-on craft session in one of the province's signature techniques: Cantonese embroidery, paper-cutting, or painting a folding fan.

Evening - Dinner and free time
Dinner in the old quarter, then return to the hotel or stay for the riverside lights.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Day tour - no hotel night included.

Morning - Yum cha, the Cantonese institution
Guangzhou drinks tea in the morning, and eats while it does. You sit in a family teahouse where the trolleys still come round and order the standard set: har gow, steamed prawn dumplings with a pleated translucent skin; siu mai; char siu bao, the barbecue pork bun; cheung fun, rolled rice-noodle sheets; and a pot of pu'er or chrysanthemum tea. Your guide explains the etiquette - tapping two fingers on the table to thank whoever pours, and leaving the lid ajar when you want more water.

Late morning - Market and kitchen
Walk a wet market to see the produce that defines Cantonese food: live seafood in tanks, rice noodles made fresh, flowering chives, water chestnuts and a dozen varieties of dried seafood. Then step into a restaurant kitchen at a quiet hour to watch the wok work that gives Cantonese stir-fries their smoky edge, and see rice-noodle sheets steamed and rolled to order.

Lunch
A Cantonese restaurant lunch built around steamed fish, roast meats and seasonal greens.

Afternoon - Tea, and the old commercial quarter
Taste two or three teas at a specialist shop in the old commercial quarter, then walk the covered arcades of the Xiguan district, where the shophouse colonnades were designed for a climate of sun and sudden rain.

Evening - Dinner and a roasts shop
Dinner features Cantonese roast meats - char siu, roast goose and crisp pork belly - carved at a shop counter and eaten with rice.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Day tour - no hotel night included.

Morning - Shamian Island
Shamian is a sandbank in the Pearl River that was divided into British and French concessions after 1859 and laid out with gardens, consulates, churches and trading houses. Two thirds of a mile of arcaded buildings survive on a car-free island, and the banyan avenue in the middle is where the city comes to be photographed on a wedding day. Your guide reads the facades - the verandas, the shuttered windows, the colonial-era banks - and explains how the treaty-port century shaped the city.

Late morning - Xiguan and the arcades
Cross into the older Chinese city. Xiguan was the merchant quarter, and its qilou shophouses - a shop at street level, a home above, and a covered walkway in front for shade and shelter - still line several streets. You walk Enning Road and the restored Yongqing Fang lanes, past ancestral halls and small temples.

Lunch
Congee, rice-noodle rolls and a Cantonese soup at a neighbourhood restaurant.

Afternoon - The Pearl River waterfront
Walk down to the river and along the promenade, past the riverside churches and the docks that made Guangzhou China's southern trading gate, with the Canton Tower across the water on the far bank.

Evening - Free by the river
The walk ends at the waterfront, where you can stay for the evening lights or be returned to your hotel.

Meals
Lunch

Accommodation
Day tour - no hotel night included.

Morning - Drive west to Kaiping (depart 08:00)
Leave Guangzhou and drive about two hours west into the Pearl River delta's hinterland. Kaiping was a source of emigration to Southeast Asia, the Americas and Australia, and the money sent home before the Second World War was spent on houses of a kind found nowhere else in China.

Late morning - The diaolou
The diaolou are multi-storey towers that combine Chinese domestic planning with European decorative detail - Roman columns, Islamic domes, Gothic arches - built as fortified homes during a period of banditry in the 1920s and 1930s. More than 1,800 survive across the county, and the four clusters inscribed by UNESCO in 2007 (Zili, Majianglong, Jinjiangli and Sanmenli) are the ones to see, along with the Li Garden.

Lunch
A local restaurant serving Kaiping dishes, including claypot rice and the region's preserved vegetables.

Afternoon - Villages and return
Walk one of the village clusters at a slow pace, then drive back to Guangzhou, arriving in the early evening.

Meals
Lunch

Accommodation
Day tour - no hotel night included.