Changsha, Chilli, Neon and the Xiangjiang

Changsha is Hunan's loud, hungry capital, a city that has turned late-night eating and homegrown pop culture into a proper reason to visit. It begins on the water: Orange Isle, a long sandbar in the Xiangjiang River crowned by a colossal stone head of the young Mao Zedong, who studied here and wrote a poem about the place. Across the current, Yuelu Mountain rises in camphor and maple above Yuelu Academy, a Confucian school founded in 976 and still teaching, its courtyards among the quietest corners in central China.

The Hunan Provincial Museum holds the Mawangdui finds: the tomb of Lady Dai, buried in 163 BC and recovered so intact that her skin still yielded to the touch, along with painted silk banners and lacquerware that rewrote what scholars knew of Han life. Then the city turns modern — the neon canyon of Wuyi Square, the deliberately retro alleys of Wenheyou stacked inside a tower block, and the ceaseless queues outside Chayan Yuese tea shops. Taiping Old Street keeps a run of Qing shopfronts along with the courtyard house of Jia Yi, the Han scholar exiled to Changsha in the second century BC.

Eat with a tolerance for chilli. Hunan cooking is hotter and more sour than Sichuan and far less numbing: stir-fried pork with chopped green chillies, steamed fish head under a red drift of pickled peppers, and Changsha's own black stinky tofu, fried and doused in garlic and chilli oil, best from Huogong Dian. The city is also the fast-train gateway to the sandstone pillars of Zhangjiajie, three hours west, on a longer route through China's interior.