Beijing

Beijing is the most historically significant city I have ever visited. The Forbidden City alone, 980 buildings, 8,700 rooms, the centre of the Chinese world for five centuries, is enough to absorb several days of serious attention. But Beijing layers its history in a way that makes every neighbourhood feel like an archaeological site. The hutong alleyways around the Drum Tower date to the Mongol Yuan dynasty. The Temple of Heaven is older than the Reformation.

The hutong neighbourhoods are what I love most about Beijing. These ancient alleyway communities, built around courtyard houses, some of them dating back six or seven centuries, have largely survived the 20th century's appetite for modernisation, though they are under constant pressure. Walking through the hutongs around Nanluoguxiang or around Shichahai lake is the closest you can get in any major Asian city to understanding what urban life looked like before the modern era.

The Great Wall at Mutianyu in the early morning, before the tour buses arrive, is the most extraordinary experience I have had anywhere. The wall disappears into mist in both directions, climbing impossible ridges and descending into valleys that look unchanged since the wall was built in the 15th century. You are completely alone with something that stretches further than you can see and has stood for six hundred years. Nothing I have photographed before or since has given me that specific sense of scale.