Ping Xiang

Pingxiang's place in modern Chinese history was made in September 1922, when 10,000 miners from the Anyuan coal mine and 1,500 railway workers from the Zhuzhou-Pingxiang line launched a joint general strike. Organised by a young Chinese Communist Party that included Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi, and Li Lisan, the strike won nearly every demand the workers made — improved welfare, a wage increase, and recognition of the Workers' Club — and stands as the first time the CCP independently led a labour movement to a complete victory, making Anyuan a genuine touchstone in party history rather than a footnote.

That history is preserved today at the Anyuan Miners' Strike Memorial Hall, built around the site of the original organising, alongside period photographs and the propaganda imagery — most famously the painting "Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan" — that later made the strike a fixture of Chinese revolutionary iconography. It's a rare destination that combines industrial history with political history in a way most cities in China simply don't have the raw material for.

Fire runs through Pingxiang in the kitchen just as it once did through the coalfields and the labour movement: the city has long competed with Changsha and Chengdu for the title of China's spiciest, with locals eating chili pickled, dried, fermented, and fresh at nearly every meal. The xiaochao (small stir-fry) style here is built for speed and heat — dishes cooked fast over high flame with a heavy hand on fresh and dried chilies. April to June and September to November bring the most comfortable weather for exploring both the mining heritage sites and the city's food streets.