Chang Sha

Changsha has spent the last two decades building a reputation as China's most unapologetically fun city, and Hunan Satellite TV — the province's entertainment network, based here and responsible for much of the reality TV and talent-show programming that dominates Chinese pop culture — is a big part of why. But the city's spice-and-nightlife energy has older roots. Hunan cuisine (Xiang cuisine) is one of China's great culinary traditions, built around fresh chilies, fermented black beans, and a smokier, more sour-forward heat than Sichuan's numbing mala — locals will insist, not entirely joking, that Changsha's food is the spicier of the two. Pozi Street, a food street with over 1,200 years of history, is the most concentrated place to try it, dense with stalls selling stinky tofu, spicy crayfish, and rice noodles late into the night.

Mao Zedong spent his student years in Changsha, and the city leans into that history without becoming a solemn shrine to it. Orange Isle (Juzizhou), the world's largest inland river island within a city center, was where Mao once swam and wrote poetry as a young revolutionary; it's now a public park anchored by a 32-meter granite sculpture of his head as a young man, completed in 2009 from stone quarried in Fujian. The more substantial historical draw is the Hunan Museum, home to the extraordinary Mawangdui excavation — Han-dynasty tombs discovered in the early 1970s that yielded silk paintings, lacquerware, and the remarkably preserved body of a noblewoman known as Lady Dai, still soft-tissued enough at discovery for doctors to perform an autopsy. For something lighter, Window of the World packs roughly 50 miniature reproductions of global landmarks — the Eiffel Tower, the Pyramids, Angkor Wat — into a single theme park.

Changsha's climate favors spring (April-June) and autumn (September-October), avoiding both the humid subtropical summer and the damp winter. Two to three days covers the city center comfortably, and Mao's actual birthplace and boyhood home in Shaoshan, about 90 minutes away, makes for a straightforward half-day trip for anyone drawn in by the Orange Isle history.