1 day in Kaiping (开平）, Guangdong

As an intern staying in Zhuhai for almost 1 year, one of my main priorities during this year was to travel around the different tourist sites in China.

When people come to China, they have in mind to visit the most common places like Hong Kong, Macau, Guangzhou, Shanghai and Beijing. However, once you start living in China for a couple of months as I have done this year, there is time to go for weekend trips or even day trips. For instance, 2 weeks ago, I visited a small city in Guangdong province: Kaiping.

This place is full of tall multi-storied buildings which where listed on UNESCO´s World Heritage List in 2007 as China´s 35th World Heritage Site. These old buildings were built at the start of the 20th century.

Kaiping county was considered to be very weak during the battles held in those days, so their local people decided to build some towers and buildings to become a small fortress for protection.

This place is almost 2 hours away from Zhuhai city and not very expensive to travel to. It is worth going for a day to understand different cultural concepts and how people lived during difficult times. There are still people who are living within these old buildings which are very friendly to foreigners and in my case I got invited for an afternoon tea.