5-Day Wuhan and Wudangshan by High-Speed Train

Morning or midday - arrival
Wuhan is three cities that became one: Wuchang on the south bank, the scholarly one; Hanyang, the industrial one; and Hankou on the north bank, the port the British, Russians, French, Germans and Japanese all carved concessions out of after 1861. Your guide meets you at Tianhe airport or at Wuhan, Wuchang or Hankou railway station - all three are on the metro, and all three are within an hour of the river - and drives you to the Wuchang side, where almost everything in this programme begins.

The Yellow Crane Tower
The tower stands on Snake Hill, and the view from the top is the reason to climb it: the Yangtze, a kilometre and a half of brown water wide here, and the first Yangtze bridge, built with Soviet help between 1955 and 1957, running straight out from the foot of the hill. The building itself is a 1985 reconstruction in reinforced concrete, moved about a kilometre from the original site when the bridge took the old one, and it follows the Qing form rather than any earlier one. What survives from the older towers is the poetry. Cui Hao's seventh-century lines about the yellow crane that left and never came back are the reason the place has its name, and Li Bai came here and famously declined to write, saying Cui Hao had already done it better. Your guide reads them in translation on the terrace and then leaves you to look at the river, which is the real exhibit.

Lunch
Wuhan eats breakfast more seriously than most cities eat dinner, and hot dry noodles - re gan mian - are the reason. Sesame paste, pickled radish, scallion, a little chilli oil, and noodles that have been parboiled, oiled and cooled so they stay springy. Your first meal is a small one: hot dry noodles, a bowl of sweet rice wine with egg, and a plate of sanxian doupi, the fried rectangle of rice, egg, mushroom and pork that is the other Wuhan breakfast. A mild version is ordered alongside for anyone who wants it.

Afternoon - Hubu Alley and the riverbank
Hubu Alley runs down the hill from the tower and has been a food street since the Ming, when it served the provincial administration offices that stood here. It is touristy and worth twenty minutes: the alley is narrow, the stalls are loud, and the food is real enough that locals still come for the grilled squid and the fried lotus root. From the bottom of the alley you are on the riverbank, and the walk north along it gives you the bridge from underneath and the ferries crossing to Hankou.

Evening
Dinner near the hotel. If the group has the energy and the season is right, the night market on Jiqing Street is the place for crayfish in oil and chilli, which Wuhan eats in quantities that are hard to credit between May and September.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Wuchang or riverside, Wuhan.

Morning - Hubei Provincial Museum
The museum sits beside East Lake in Wuchang and it is free, which means it is also crowded: entry is by timed reservation and your guide holds it in advance, usually for the first slot of the day. The building you want is the one housing the finds from the tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng, excavated at Leigudun near Suizhou in 1978. The marquis died around 433 BC and was buried with 65 bronze bells hung on a wooden frame, each of them tuned to two notes, together with the inscription that records the pitch names in use at the time.

The bells were cast with a precision that still works: they were played after excavation, and recordings exist, and the museum has them under glass with the rack reconstructed at full height. Around them are the rest of the grave - bronze vessels weighing hundreds of kilograms, the marquis's coffin set inside a larger outer one, and a gold vessel with a lid. The other half of the collection is Chu: lacquer from the southern state that dominated the middle Yangtze for eight centuries, silk, and the jade and bronze of a culture whose art is stranger and more writhing than anything coming out of the north at the same moment. Allow two and a half hours, and accept that the chime-bell hall gets loud.

Lunch
Hubei is a province of lakes and rivers and the cooking follows: lotus root in soup, steamed Wuchang fish, and the braised pork rib and lotus root stew that appears on every table in Wuhan in autumn. Your guide orders a spread that is heavy on fish and light on chilli, with a separate plate of something unspiced for anyone who needs it.

Afternoon - East Lake
East Lake covers about 33 square kilometres and is the largest urban lake in China by water area. The part worth your afternoon is the south shore: the greenway that runs under the old plane trees to Moshui Lake, the causeways, and the lotus beds that are at their best in July and August. You take a boat across rather than driving around, which is both quicker and the reason people come. On the far side, the Hubei Museum of Fine Arts and the sculpture park are optional and usually skipped.

Evening
Dinner in Wuchang. If the season is right - late March into early April - Wuhan University's cherry avenue is ten minutes from the lake and worth an hour of daylight; your guide will tell you whether the trees are out and whether the campus is open to visitors that week.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Wuchang or riverside, Wuhan.

Morning - the train west
The high-speed line runs north-west out of Wuhan across the Jianghan plain and into the hills, and Shiyan East is about two hours out. Your guide travels with you, handles the tickets, and has the scenic-area admission pre-booked: Wudangshan runs timed entry and the mountain shuttle is compulsory, because private vehicles are not allowed past the gate.

Afternoon - Zixiao Palace
The Yongle emperor, who reigned from 1402 to 1424, had Wudangshan built as a single project: hundreds of thousands of labourers, nine palaces, nine monasteries, and 33 building groups in all, laid out along a sacred geography that runs from the foot of the mountain to the Golden Summit on the highest peak. The UNESCO inscription covers the ancient building complex, and what makes it exceptional is not any single hall but the way the whole thing is fitted to the terrain - terraces cut into slopes, axes aligned on peaks, and not one courtyard on a flat site.

Zixiao Palace, the Purple Clouds, is the largest surviving complex and the one you see first. Its main hall sits on a three-tier terrace of stone, dated to 1413, with a double-eave roof and the bracket work of the early Ming left unpainted except for the coloured draught that has been restored. Inside is a Ming bronze statue of Zhenwu, the Dark Warrior, the deity the mountain is dedicated to. Around the courtyards are the subsidiary halls, the stele pavilions with Yongle's own inscriptions, and the Taoist clergy, who still maintain the place as a working temple.

The Wudang Museum
At the foot of the mountain, the museum holds what the archaeologists and the conservators have taken off the buildings: roof tiles with reign marks, bronze, and the documentation of the 2003 fire that destroyed the main hall of Yuzhen Palace and the restoration that followed. Forty-five minutes, and worth it before you go up rather than after.

Evening
Dinner at the foot of the mountain. Your guide briefs the group on the morning: if you want the Golden Summit at first light, the shuttle starts before dawn and the cable car opens around seven.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
At the foot of Wudangshan, or on the mountain if booked in advance.

Early start
The mountain opens early and the shuttle runs from the gate through a series of valleys to the separate sites. Going up first is the usual order, because the summit cloud usually burns off by mid-morning and returns after two. Your guide takes the Qiongtai cable car with you - about 1,500 metres of line, twenty minutes - and walks the last stretch to the top.

The Golden Summit
At 1,612 metres, the peak carries a walled enclosure and, inside it, a hall cast in bronze and gilded, assembled in Beijing in 1416 and carried up the mountain in pieces. It is small - about five metres across - and it has stood there through six centuries of lightning, which is why the ridge is fitted with conductors and why the guides have a story about the fire that used to be lit every sixty years. The hall holds a bronze Zhenwu and the original lamps. The enclosure is reached by a narrow stair through a gate in the wall, and the queue in high season is the one thing to budget for: an hour is normal in July and October.

Nanyan Palace
Nanyan, the South Cliff, is the other reason to come. The palace is set into a recess in the cliff on the south face, with halls built out over the drop on timber supports and stone brackets, and a terrace that projects into the air above the valley. The most photographed object on the mountain is here: the Dragon Head Incense Burner, a two-metre stone dragon carved in the Yuan and cantilevered off the edge of the cliff, on which pilgrims used to walk out to set incense, and which is now fenced. The carving, the brackets under the halls and the way the whole complex is keyed into the rock are the finest surviving examples of Ming construction on a cliff anywhere in China.

Lunch
On the mountain. The food is simple - noodles, rice, mountain vegetables, and the local mushrooms - and the guide orders a plain table. Vegetarian food is easy here, since the temples run their own kitchens, and Wudang's Taoist vegetarian cooking is worth asking for.

Afternoon
Down by shuttle to Taizipo, the Prince's Slope, where the Nine-Bend Wall and the hall complex of 1412 sit on a slope with the brackets doing most of the visual work. If the group has the legs, the old stone path from Nanyan down to the valley floor is a real pilgrim route with shrines along it.

Evening
Dinner at the foot of the mountain.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
At the foot of Wudangshan.

Morning - the taiji session
Wudang is the home of the internal martial arts as they are practised now, and the attribution goes back to Zhang Sanfeng, a figure of the Song or the Yuan who is credited with founding the Wudang school. The history is disputed and your guide will say so; what is not disputed is that the mountain has supported a continuous community of practitioners for centuries, and that the schools at the foot of it teach a real curriculum. Your session runs about ninety minutes with an English-speaking instructor, on the forms rather than the fighting application: stance, weight transfer, and the first section of a bare-hand form, done slowly enough that someone who has never done it can follow. Wear flat shoes and clothes you can move in.

Lunch
At the foot of the mountain, a Taoist vegetarian table if the group wants it - the temple kitchens here cook without meat, without alliums and without strong spice, and the result is better than it sounds.

Afternoon - Taizipo and the way out
Taizipo, the Prince's Slope, is named for a legend about the young Zhenwu being pushed to give up his cultivation and the slope being the place it happened. The buildings are 1412: a hall, a scripture pavilion, and the famous Nine-Bend Wall, a zig-zag retaining wall climbing the slope whose purpose is structural but whose effect is to force you to slow down and approach the hall at an angle. The bracketing under the eaves is the thing to look at. From there the shuttle takes you down to the gate and your vehicle takes you to Shiyan East for the evening train.

Evening
Back in Wuhan by about nine. Dinner is on the train or late in Wuhan, depending on the departure.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Wuhan.