7 Days in Huaibei

The 340-meter hill in the city center carries the Xiantong temple, first recorded in the Western Jin year 284; the museum doubles as the Grand Canal gallery, hung with Liuzi finds.

1. huaibei xiangshan park
2. huaibei city museum

The 1999 dig that bared a Song stone wharf and Tang-Song shipwrecks put Liuzi on the Grand Canal's 2014 World Heritage list; Nanhu, some 20 minutes away, is a coal-subsidence lake turned wetland park.

1. huaibei liuzi canal site
2. huaibei nanhu wetland

The newest of the subsidence lakes sits at Duji's edge with a boardwalk loop; Longji's wooded ridge makes an easy afternoon climb a short hop east.

1. huaibei shuoxi lake
2. huaibei longji mountain

About 35 km south, Linhuan pours teahouse tea beside walls rammed over 2,000 years ago; the December 1948 campaign headquarters at Wenchang Palace sits in the same town — take the slow lunch.

1. huaibei linhuan old town

December 1948 was the Shuangduiji phase of the Huaihai campaign — the memorial hall and cemetery record it plainly — and Suixi's stone street, a few hundred meters of early-Republican shopfronts, closes the day.

1. huaibei shuangduiji memorial
2. huaibei shiban street

The mining park explains the pits that filled the city's lakes; at Liuyuan village, Ming-Qing pomegranate trees — some centuries old — still set fruit in the autumn.

1. huaibei mining park
2. huaibei sijiliuyuan

A market breakfast, a last lap of Xiangshan's steps and the train out.

1. huaibei city markets