The Most Beautiful UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the People's Republic of China
25 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the People's Republic of China are Terracotta Army, Ruins of St. Paul's and Forbidden City. The list covers 25 UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Last updated 13 October 2026.
China's World Heritage combines one of the oldest unbroken cultures with some of the most spectacular karst and mountain scenery on the planet. Imperial dynasties built on a scale meant to mirror the cosmos, Buddhism arrived along the Silk Road and left painted caves in the desert, and limestone, sandstone and glacial water produced landscapes that shaped Chinese painting.
The Terracotta Army, thousands of life-size soldiers buried with the first emperor Qin Shi Huang, is the most famous archaeological find of the country. Beijing's Forbidden City was the imperial palace of the Ming and Qing for nearly five centuries, and the Temple of Heaven, where emperors prayed for good harvests, is built on round and square forms symbolising heaven and earth. The Mogao Caves near Dunhuang preserve a thousand years of Buddhist murals, and the Potala Palace rises in tiers above Lhasa.
Nature is just as present. Wulingyuan's thousands of sandstone pillars stand above misty valleys, Huangshan's granite peaks and twisted pines became a classic subject for painters, and Jiuzhaigou and Huanglong hold lakes and travertine terraces in shades of turquoise. Tiger Leaping Gorge forces the upper Yangtze between snowy peaks, West Lake in Hangzhou inspired gardens across East Asia, and in Macau the stone facade of the Ruins of St. Paul's recalls a Jesuit church.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Terracotta Army | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 2 | Ruins of St. Paul's | Ruins | ✓ |
| 3 | Forbidden City | Palace | ✓ |
| 4 | Tiger Leaping Gorge | Canyon | ✓ |
| 5 | Huanglong | Protected area | ✓ |
| 6 | Wulingyuan | Protected area | ✓ |
| 7 | Potala Palace | Palace | ✓ |
| 8 | West Lake | Lake | ✓ |
| 9 | Temple of Heaven | Temple | ✓ |
| 10 | Mogao Caves | Cave | ✓ |
| 11 | Jiuzhaigou Valley | National park | ✓ |
| 12 | Huangshan | Protected area | ✓ |
| 13 | Summer Palace, Beijing | Palace | ✓ |
| 14 | Yungang Grottoes | Cave | ✓ |
| 15 | Longmen Grottoes | Rock-cut architecture | ✓ |
| 16 | Jokhang | Temple | ✓ |
| 17 | Leshan Giant Buddha | Sculpture | ✓ |
| 18 | Mount Sanqing | Mountain | ✓ |
| 19 | Jiaohe Ruins (Yarkhoto) | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 20 | Western Xia Imperial Tombs | Necropolis | ✓ |
| 21 | Maijishan Grottoes | Cave | ✓ |
| 22 | Shilin Stone Forest | Rock formation | ✓ |
| 23 | Bingling Temple | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 24 | Dazu Rock Carvings | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 25 | Huashan Rock Paintings, Ningming | Cave | ✓ |
01 Terracotta Army
People's Republic of China · 24.5 km from Weinan34.385° N 109.273° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by artemtation from Pixabay The farmer who found the Terracotta Army wasn't looking for it. In March 1974, Yang Zhifa, his five brothers and a neighbor were digging a well during a drought, hoping only for water, when at about three metres down they hit a layer of charcoal and reddened soil, and past four metres one of them pulled up a life-sized pottery head.
Did you know? The paint on the figures is so fragile that, once exposed to Xi'an's dry air, its lacquer base can curl within seconds and flake off in minutes.
02 Ruins of St. Paul's
People's Republic of China · 1 km from Macau22.197° N 113.541° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by jazz4jess from Pixabay A stone façade stands alone at the top of a broad staircase in the old centre of Macau. It is all that remains of the Church of Mater Dei, built by the Jesuits between 1602 and 1640 and in its day one of the largest Catholic churches in Asia, together with the College of Saint Paul beside it.
Did you know? Apart from its granite front, the church was built largely of rammed earth and timber, which is why the fire of 1835 left only the façade standing.
03 Forbidden City
People's Republic of China · 1.6 km from Beijing39.916° N 116.391° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
N509FZ · CC BY-SA 4.0 For almost five centuries the Forbidden City was the physical centre of the Chinese state. The Yongle Emperor of the Ming dynasty began it in 1406, after moving the capital from Nanjing to Beijing, and the complex was ready by 1420; from then until 1912 twenty-four emperors, fourteen Ming and ten Qing, lived and ruled here.
Did you know? The legend of 9,999 rooms is not borne out by surveys, which count about 8,886 bays of rooms.
04 Tiger Leaping Gorge
People's Republic of China27.230° N 100.140° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Charlottees from Pixabay The Jinsha River — the upper Yangtze, before it earns that name downstream — has cut a 15-kilometer gorge between the Yulong and Haba snow-capped ranges so deep that the drop from the highest peaks to the river below runs to nearly 3,800 meters, making it one of the deepest canyons on the planet, whatever the exact ranking on any given list.
Did you know? The gorge lies within the Three Parallel Rivers of Yunnan, a World Heritage Site since 2003.
05 Huanglong
People's Republic of China32.741° N 103.831° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by ymyphoto from Pixabay Huanglong, the Yellow Dragon, is a high valley in the Minshan range of northern Sichuan where mineral-rich water has built one of the finest travertine landscapes on Earth. Snowmelt and springs saturated with calcium carbonate run down the valley floor and deposit it as they flow, forming a golden, scaly ribbon of rimmed terraces, pools and frozen-looking cascades.
Did you know? Huanglong was inscribed by UNESCO in December 1992, the same year as Jiuzhaigou, which lies only about 100 km away.
06 Wulingyuan
People's Republic of China29.346° N 110.467° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Vined from Pixabay Wulingyuan is a forest of stone. More than 3,000 pillars and peaks of quartz sandstone rise from the valleys of north-western Hunan, many of them over 200 metres tall. Between them run gorges, streams, pools and waterfalls. The landscape is so improbable that it looks invented; UNESCO listed it as a World Heritage Site in 1992.
Did you know? Construction of the Bailong Elevator began in 1999 and stirred debate over its effect on a World Heritage landscape; it opened in 2002.
07 Potala Palace
People's Republic of China · 2.2 km from Lhasa29.658° N 91.117° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by nrxfly from Pixabay The hill the palace stands on has been sacred longer than the palace itself. Tradition holds that in 637, Songtsen Gampo — the Tibetan king credited with unifying the plateau — built the first palace on this outcrop, known as Marpo Ri, or the Red Hill, to mark his marriage to the Chinese princess Wencheng.
Did you know? Copper was poured into the foundations to help the palace withstand earthquakes, and its sloping walls are about 5 metres thick at the base.
08 West Lake
People's Republic of China · 3.1 km from Hangzhou30.238° N 120.141° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Vined from Pixabay West Lake, Xihu, lies on the western edge of old Hangzhou, a sheet of shallow water framed on three sides by gentle wooded hills and on the fourth by the city. It is one of the most influential landscapes in East Asia: a place that poets, painters and garden designers in China, and later in Japan, took as a model of how nature and human work can be composed into a single picture.
Did you know? The Kangxi Emperor inscribed titles for the Ten Scenes, and the Qianlong Emperor later carved his own poems on the backs of the same stelae.
09 Temple of Heaven
People's Republic of China · 2.4 km from Beijing39.882° N 116.407° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by ccxcn from Pixabay The Temple of Heaven is less a single temple than a walled ceremonial landscape in the south of central Beijing, laid out so that architecture itself would read as a statement about the cosmos. It was begun under the Yongle Emperor of the Ming dynasty, the same ruler who built the Forbidden City, with construction dated to 1406–1420.
Did you know? UNESCO notes that the temple's symbolic plan shaped architecture and city planning across East Asia for centuries.
10 Mogao Caves
People's Republic of China · 16.9 km from Dunhuang40.037° N 94.804° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Zhangzhugang · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Mogao Caves are among the richest treasure houses of Buddhist art anywhere. For roughly a thousand years, from the fourth century to the fourteenth, monks, merchants and officials cut shrines into a cliff face on the edge of the desert near Dunhuang, an oasis town on the Silk Road where traders and pilgrims prepared for, or recovered from, the crossing of the Gobi and Taklamakan.
Did you know? Aurel Stein left in 1907 with about 7,000 complete manuscripts and 6,000 fragments, paying only about £130.
11 Jiuzhaigou Valley
People's Republic of China33.200° N 103.900° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by HI-MXWG from Pixabay The name means, roughly, "valley of nine villages," after the Tibetan settlements scattered through it — villages that predate its 1978 designation as a protected scenic reserve by centuries.
Did you know? It was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1992 and became a World Biosphere Reserve in 1997.
12 Huangshan
People's Republic of China30.125° N 118.167° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by 12412158 from Pixabay Huangshan's peaks are granite, not the limestone karst that shapes so much of scenic China, and that matters: granite fractures into sheer, blocky faces rather than smooth curves, which is why the mountain reads as a forest of vertical spires rather than rolling hills.
Did you know? Inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1990, Huangshan became a UNESCO Global Geopark in 2004 and a sister mountain of Switzerland's Jungfrau in 2002.
13 Summer Palace, Beijing
People's Republic of China · 15.1 km from Beijing39.998° N 116.269° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by hhach from Pixabay The Summer Palace is a landscape painting made with water, earth and timber. 9 square kilometres is Kunming Lake, a body of water dug by hand, and the spoil was heaped up to shape Longevity Hill, about 60 metres high, along its northern shore.
Did you know? An imperial palace stood on this site as early as 1153, when the Jin dynasty built one here.
14 Yungang Grottoes
People's Republic of China · 15.3 km from Datong40.110° N 113.122° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Marcin Białek · CC BY-SA 4.0 Construction began under Emperor Wencheng in the 450s CE, right after a period of state persecution of Buddhism had ended, and the earliest group — the so-called Tanyao Five Caves, named for the monk who oversaw them — deliberately modelled their colossal Buddha statues on the faces of the Northern Wei emperors themselves.
Did you know? The largest figure at Yungang, the seated Buddha of Cave 5, is about 17 metres tall, while the smallest carved figures measure only about 2 centimetres.
15 Longmen Grottoes
People's Republic of China · 10.1 km from Luoyang34.556° N 112.470° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by janeb13 from Pixabay At Longmen, the "Dragon Gate" south of Luoyang, the Yi River cuts between two limestone hills, and for four centuries emperors, officials and pious families hollowed out both cliffs to fill them with Buddhas.
Did you know? Work on the three Binyang caves commissioned by Emperor Xuanwu reportedly took 24 years and the labour of some 800,000 workers.
16 Jokhang
People's Republic of China · 3.2 km from Lhasa29.653° N 91.132° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by VY from Pixabay The Jokhang is the most sacred temple in Tibet, the place every Tibetan Buddhist hopes to reach at least once, and the old heart of Lhasa grew up around it. It was founded in the 7th century under King Songtsen Gampo, the first ruler of a unified Tibet, to house a Buddha image brought by his Nepalese queen Bhrikuti; its design is attributed to Nepalese craftsmen.
Did you know? In front of the temple stands a pillar inscribed with the Sino-Tibetan treaty of 821–822, which fixed the border between the two empires.
17 Leshan Giant Buddha
People's Republic of China · 4.4 km from Leshan29.547° N 103.769° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by christels from Pixabay The Leshan Giant Buddha is carved directly into a sandstone cliff at the point where the Min, Dadu and Qingyi rivers meet below the city of Leshan in southern Sichuan. At 71 metres high it is the tallest stone Buddha in the world and by far the largest pre-modern statue anywhere. It depicts Maitreya, the Buddha of the future, seated with hands resting on his knees and gazing across the water towards Mount Emei.
Did you know? The statue was declared a protected cultural relic in 1956, four decades before UNESCO listed it.
18 Mount Sanqing
People's Republic of China28.952° N 118.052° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Afra_Jiang from Pixabay Mount Sanqing in northeastern Jiangxi is a forest of granite. Out of steep, wooded slopes rise dozens of bare stone peaks and pillars — 48 named granite peaks and 89 pillars, many of them shaped by weathering into figures of people and animals — and when cloud fills the valleys, as it often does in this humid subtropical climate, the summits stand out of a white sea like islands.
Did you know? Before its World Heritage listing, Sanqingshan was declared a national geopark of China in 2005.
19 Jiaohe Ruins (Yarkhoto)
People's Republic of China · 8.4 km from Turpan42.951° N 89.064° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Acstar · CC BY-SA 3.0 Jiaohe is a city with no walls, because it never needed them. It sits on a long, narrow island of loess plateau, about 1,650 metres long and at most 300 metres wide, between two river channels that split and rejoin around it, and its edges drop more than 30 metres in sheer cliffs on every side.
Did you know? A precinct of 101 stupas stands in the north of the city: four groups of 25 small stupas around a central one modelled on the Mahabodhi type of Bodh Gaya.
20 Western Xia Imperial Tombs
People's Republic of China · 25.1 km from Yinchuan38.435° N 105.987° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Thebrainchamber1 · CC BY-SA 4.0 At the foot of the Helan Mountains, on the dry plain west of Yinchuan, a line of great earthen mounds rises from the steppe like weathered beehives. They are the tombs of the emperors of Western Xia, a state founded by the Tangut people that ruled much of northwest China from 1038 until its destruction by Genghis Khan's Mongols in 1227.
Did you know? Chinese writers often call the site the "Pyramids of the East", a nickname earned by its tall, tapering earthen mounds rising from the plain.
21 Maijishan Grottoes
People's Republic of China · 29.1 km from Tianshui34.350° N 106.006° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
MarsmanRom · CC BY-SA 3.0 The rock at Maijishan is too soft and crumbly to hold fine carved detail, so instead of cutting figures directly from the cliff the way sculptors did at Longmen or Yungang, Maijishan's artisans built their statues up from clay modeled over wooden or stone armatures and then painted them — a technique that let them produce more than 7,000 sculptures across some 190 caves despite the mountain itself being the wrong…
Did you know? In 2014 Maijishan was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as part of the Silk Roads network of sites along the Chang'an–Tianshan corridor.
22 Shilin Stone Forest
People's Republic of China24.818° N 103.325° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
- UNESCO Global Geopark
CEphoto, Uwe Aranas · CC BY-SA 3.0 The Stone Forest — Shilin in Chinese — is a karst landscape in eastern Yunnan where grey limestone has been dissolved and cut into thousands of blades, pillars and narrow fins standing so close together that from a viewpoint they really do read as a petrified wood.
Did you know? The name Shilin, Stone Forest, was given in 1931 by Long Yun, then governor of Yunnan, whose carved inscription was destroyed in the Cultural Revolution and restored in 1985.
23 Bingling Temple
People's Republic of China · 26.8 km from Linxia City35.806° N 103.044° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Thebrainchamber1 · CC BY-SA 4.0 In a side canyon of the Yellow River, where sheer cliffs rise above the water, hundreds of Buddhas look out from niches and caves cut into the cliff. The Bingling Temple grottoes stretch for about 200 metres along the north side of the gorge and end in a great natural recess, where wooden stairways climb the rock face to higher caves and to a colossal figure of the Maitreya Buddha more than 27 metres tall.
Did you know? The ink inscription of 420 CE in Cave 169 is the earliest precisely dated inscription known from any cave temple in China.
24 Dazu Rock Carvings
People's Republic of China29.713° N 105.707° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Gwydion M. Williams from Coventry, Great Britain · CC BY 2.0 In the hills of Dazu, west of Chongqing, tens of thousands of figures look out from the rock: Buddhas, bodhisattvas, sages, demons, officials and ordinary people, cut into open cliff faces and shallow grottoes over some six centuries.
Did you know? A traditional pilgrims' saying ranks the site beside a sacred mountain: 'Go up to Emei, come down to Baoding.'
25 Huashan Rock Paintings, Ningming
People's Republic of China22.248° N 107.042° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Yumeto · CC BY-SA 4.0 A limestone cliff leans out over a bend of the Ming River in southern Guangxi, and across its face, tens of metres above the water, march some 1,900 red figures. Most are human silhouettes with arms raised and bent at the elbow and knees splayed in a squat, a posture often compared to a frog.
Did you know? Most human figures are between 60 and 150 centimetres tall, but the largest rises more than 3 metres, the biggest figure in the whole World Heritage property.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the People's Republic of China?
- On our list, Terracotta Army ranks first, followed by Ruins of St. Paul's and Forbidden City.
- Why was the Terracotta Army made?
- The figures were buried in pits near the tomb of Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of a unified China, who died in 210 BC, to protect him in the afterlife. They were discovered by farmers digging a well in 1974.
- What colour are the lakes of Jiuzhaigou and why?
- Jiuzhaigou's lakes range from turquoise to deep blue and green. The colours come from very clear water rich in dissolved calcium carbonate, together with algae and the light reflecting off the lake beds.
- What remains of St. Paul's in Macau?
- Only the carved stone facade and the grand staircase survive of the Church of Mater Dei, built by the Jesuits in the early seventeenth century and destroyed by fire in 1835.
- How many UNESCO World Heritage Sites are on this list in the People's Republic of China?
- The list covers 25 UNESCO World Heritage Sites.