Foshan (佛山)

Two cities in one

Foshan is a prefecture city with five districts, and visitors only ever need two of them. The first is Chancheng, the old city in the north: the Ancestral Temple (Zu Miao) with its flying roofs and ceramic figurines, the Shiwan ceramics quarter where the roof sculptures all over the region are still made, and Liang Yuan, one of the four great gardens of Guangdong. It feels like the Cantonese world Guangzhou used to be, and it costs a metro fare and a lunch to see.

The second is Shunde, in the south, and it is the reason to come. Shunde was a county-level city in its own right until December 2002, when the State Council folded it into Foshan along with Nanhai, Sanshui and Gaoming. Locals over a certain age still say they are going to Shunde, not to Foshan, and they have a point: Guangzhou calls itself the capital of Cantonese food, and Chinese food writers will tell you quietly that the real action has always been here. In December 2014 UNESCO named Shunde a City of Gastronomy — the sixth in the world, the second in China after Chengdu, and the first in the Cantonese-speaking region. The local saying is eat in Guangzhou, the chefs come from Fengcheng.

Why the garden is the anchor

Shunde's food is the draw, but the one thing here that belongs on a world list is a garden. Qinghui Garden is the oldest of the four great gardens of Guangdong — alongside Liang Yuan in Foshan, Yuyin Shanfang in Panyu and Keyuan in Dongguan — and it is frequently called the foremost of them. It covers twenty-two thousand five hundred square metres in the middle of Daliang, the county seat, and it began as the estate of a discredited Ming dynasty top scholar before the wealthiest family in the county bought it and spent two centuries turning it into a machine for producing examination graduates. It is on the national list of key cultural relics, and it is the only garden in Guangdong on the list of the ten great gardens of China.

The garden is small by garden standards — an hour and a half to two hours, slowly — and it sits a five-minute walk from Huagai Road, the old food street, which is the best-planned hour in this entire corner of the delta: carved windows in the morning, double-skin milk at noon.

What else is here

Shunde's other names are worth knowing even before you come: Fengjian, a water town in the north of the district with Ming and Qing bridges and the title of Lingnan's Zhouzhuang, and Shunfengshan, the park with the largest paifang archway in Asia, both free. The food streets need no introduction: Huagai Road in Daliang for the double-skin milk and the ginger milk curd, Jinbang street for the buffalo-milk sweets, and the fish sashimi and stir-fried freshwater fish that food writers cross provinces for. Chencun, in the east, is the home of the flower market that supplies the whole delta before every Lunar New Year.

Chancheng's half now has a page of its own for the temple — the Ancestral Temple — with Liang Yuan and the Nanfeng kiln to follow; the day trips page covers the one-day version of the temple city.