China · Guangdong
Plan your Guangzhou trip
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01Your itinerary
02Where to stay
Tianhe / Zhujiang New Town
Best for first-timers, business travellers and anyone prioritising transport and English-speaking front desksThe new financial and cultural core: supertall towers, the Guangdong Museum and opera house on one axis, immaculate pavements, malls under everything and the best-connected metro interchanges in the city. Efficient, international, and short on street life once the offices empty.
Four Seasons Hotel Guangzhou
The river-facing rooms look straight at Canton Tower, and you are a two-minute walk from the APM line and Line 3 and 5 interchanges.
¥¥¥¥Fraser Suites Guangzhou
Tiyu Xilu is the CBD's dense shopping and eating quarter, which solves Zhujiang New Town's one real weakness — nowhere casual to eat after 8pm.
¥¥¥Yuexiu / Beijing Road
Best for sightseeing on foot and travellers who want to be inside the old cityThe historic centre, walkable and mid-priced, with the Nanyue King tomb, Yuexiu Park, the cathedral and the old shopping streets all within a couple of metro stops. Older buildings, more noise, considerably more character than the CBD.
Atour Hotel Guangzhou (Beijing Road Pedestrian Street – Dongshankou Metro Station)
The pedestrianised main drag is loud until late; a room one street back keeps the location and loses the noise.
¥¥LNCommunity Guangzhou Haizhu Branch
Walking distance to Yide Road's wholesale markets and the Sacred Heart Cathedral, and on Line 2 for a direct run to Guangzhou South station.
¥¥Liwan / Shamian
Best for repeat visitors, food-led trips and anyone who would rather wake up in the old town than the CBDOld Guangzhou: arcaded shophouse streets, the Litchi Bay canal, wet markets at street level and the quiet colonial island of Shamian at the southern edge. The best eating in the city is within walking distance and the least English is spoken.
Guangdong Victory Hotel
Shamian is silent at night and shaded by century-old banyans, which is a rare combination in this city — you trade CBD convenience for it.
¥¥¥Lanyu Hotel, Yongqingfang Branch
Puts you a few minutes from Enning Road, the Taotaoju teahouse and the Cantonese Opera Art Museum, in a neighbourhood that is still residential.
¥¥Pazhou, Haizhu
Best for Canton Fair attendees, and bargain hunters in the off-monthsThe trade-fair district: the vast Canton Fair complex, exhibition-scale hotels, and a riverside strip that is either the busiest place in Guangdong or nearly empty depending entirely on the calendar.
The Westin Pazhou
During the fair this is the only sane place to be and it costs accordingly; outside fair weeks the same rooms are among the best value in the city.
¥¥¥Affiliate notePostcardRoute is reader-supported. Some links to Booking.com (stays, flights, car hire, tickets and tours, airport transfers) are affiliate links, tracked through CJ Affiliate: if you book through them we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. We only recommend places we would send a friend.
03Tickets & tours
Museum of the Nanyue King's Mausoleum
The intact tomb of Zhao Mo, second king of the Nanyue kingdom, buried around 122 BC and found by accident in 1983 during construction work.
Tip Do this first, before anything else in the city. It gives you the two-thousand-year context that makes the trading-port story make sense, and it takes ninety minutes.
Chen Clan Ancestral Hall
An 1894 clan academy built by pooled contributions from Chen families across Guangdong, and the single best surviving showcase of Cantonese…
Tip Look up. The polychrome ceramic figures along the roof ridges are the point, and almost everyone photographs the courtyard and misses them.
Shamian Island
A river sandbank turned British and French concession after 1859, now a quiet island of banyan-shaded avenues and pastel colonial buildings with…
Tip Go at 7am. You get tai chi groups, joggers and empty streets instead of the afternoon queue of wedding photoshoots that colonise every good facade.
Canton Tower
A 600-metre lattice tower with a deliberately pinched waist, still one of the tallest structures on earth and the fixed point of the Guangzhou…
Tip The better view is of the tower, not from it. Cross to Zhujiang New Town and watch it from Flower City Square at dusk, when it and the whole CBD light up on a…
Yongqingfang and Enning Road, Liwan
The best-preserved run of arcaded qilou shophouses in the city, restored rather than demolished, with Bruce Lee's ancestral family home, the…
Tip Walk it in the late afternoon and stay for dinner. This is the part of Guangzhou where the street food and the small restaurants are genuinely local rather than aimed at…
Sacred Heart Cathedral, Yide Road
A neo-Gothic cathedral completed in 1888 and built entirely of granite — twin 58-metre spires, French design, Chinese stonemasons — sitting…
Tip The surrounding wholesale streets are the real attraction. Yide Road sells dried scallops, abalone and fish maw by the sack and is one of the great sensory experiences…
Yuexiu Park and Zhenhai Tower
The city's largest central park, containing the Five Rams statue that represents Guangzhou's founding legend, a surviving stretch of Ming city wall,…
Tip Enter from the south and climb through to Zhenhai Tower; the upper terrace is one of the few places you can see the old city and the new towers in the same frame.
A morning at a grand old teahouse
Not a landmark, but the most essential experience in the city. Panxi by Liwan Lake, Taotaoju on Enning Road, Guangzhou Restaurant and Lianxianglou…
Tip Arrive by 8am, take a queue number, order pu'er tea, and point at what the next table is eating. Nobody minds, and the paper order sheet is picture-free.
Day trips from Guangzhou
Shunde, Foshan
Forty minutes southwest by metro or rail, and the place many Cantonese will tell you is the true heartland of their cuisine — a UNESCO City of…
Day tripKaiping Diaolou
About two hours west, a UNESCO-listed landscape of several hundred fortified watchtowers built in the early twentieth century by Chinese emigrants…
Day tripShenzhen
Under half an hour by high-speed rail from Guangzhou South, and the sharpest possible contrast: a city that was villages and fish ponds in 1980 and…
Day tripGuangzhou's Baiyun Mountain
Not out of town at all — a forested ridge inside the northern city limits, reachable by metro and cable car, and where Guangzhou goes to escape the…
Day tripEverything to do in Guangzhou
Skip-the-line tickets, guided tours and day trips, all in one place on Booking.com.
04Getting there & around
Getting around
The Guangzhou Metro is the answer to almost every transport question in this city. It is one of the largest systems in the world by track length, it runs from around six in the morning to about eleven at night, every station and every announcement is bilingual, and fares run from about two to fourteen yuan depending on distance…
Flights
Compare fares into Guangzhou and pick dates that suit the days you planned.
Airport transfers
Book a private or shared ride from the airport so the first evening starts at your door, not at a ticket queue.
Car hire from Guangzhou
Only worth it for day trips beyond the city — in town, the plan above works on foot and public transport.
Affiliate notePostcardRoute is reader-supported. Some links to Booking.com (stays, flights, car hire, tickets and tours, airport transfers) are affiliate links, tracked through CJ Affiliate: if you book through them we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. We only recommend places we would send a friend.