China is the fourth largest country on earth by total area and, since 2022, no longer the most populous. Both of those facts are recent enough that most accounts of the country still get them wrong, and they set the tone for everything below: the figures move, and the ones in circulation are usually a decade or more out of date.
The country in figures
The population was 1,404.89 million at the end of 2025 — a fall of 3.39 million on the year before, and the fourth consecutive annual decline. The peak was about 1.426 billion in 2022, and India overtook China as the world's most populous country in April 2023. Births in 2025 ran to 7.92 million against 11.31 million deaths. Some 67.89 per cent of the population lives in towns and cities.
One thing to know about any Chinese population or economic figure: the national statistics exclude Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, and exclude residents of those places and foreigners living on the mainland.
The land area is about 9.6 million square kilometres, with some 22,800 kilometres of land boundary and around 18,000 kilometres of mainland coastline. On United Nations figures that makes China the fourth largest country by total area, behind Russia, Canada and the United States — and the gap to the United States is about 32,000 square kilometres, under half a per cent, which is why some sources place China third. The difference comes from whether coastal and territorial waters are counted, not from a dispute about the land. Note also that China's own figure includes Taiwan and includes territory disputed with India, so neither country's area figure is neutral.
On administrative structure: 22 provinces administered from Beijing, five autonomous regions, four municipalities under central government and two Special Administrative Regions — 33 province-level units. China's own official count gives 23 provinces, the extra being Taiwan, which it does not administer and which its own statistics exclude. That is the reason different sources give different numbers, and it is worth knowing before comparing any two of them.
Fourteen neighbours, and which direction they lie in
China has fourteen land neighbours — more than almost any country — and six maritime ones across the seas: South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia and Indonesia.
The directions are routinely garbled, and one error is worth naming because it circulates widely: India and Pakistan lie to the west and south-west, not the east. The only eastern land neighbour is North Korea. Mongolia is to the north and Russia to the north-east, with a short further stretch in the north-west. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan are west and north-west; Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal and Bhutan west and south-west; Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam to the south.
A second claim that gets repeated is that large proportions of the borders of Mongolia, Russia and Kazakhstan lie with China. That is true of Mongolia alone, which borders only China and Russia. China accounts for a small fraction of Russia's frontier, and most of Kazakhstan's border is with Russia rather than China.
From Everest to below sea level
The range of terrain is usually described as running from Everest to the sea, which undersells it by 154 metres. The Turpan Basin in Xinjiang lies about 154 metres below sea level and is the lowest point in the country, so the span is from the highest place on earth to one of the lowest on land.
Everest stands at 8,848.86 metres, a height announced jointly by China and Nepal in December 2020, and it sits on the border between them rather than inside China — the northern approach is in Tibet, where the mountain is called Qomolangma. Four seas flank the mainland to the east and south: the Bohai, the Yellow, the East China and the South China. The land descends from west to east in four broad steps, from the Qinghai-Tibet plateau at over 4,000 metres, through plateaus and basins, to plains and hills and finally the continental shelf.
The Great Wall is not visible from space
This is the most persistent claim made about China and it is false, and the authority against it is NASA's own.
NASA published the correction under its own name in 2005. Its chief scientist for Earth observation, Kamlesh Lulla, said that "it is very, very difficult to distinguish the Great Wall of China in astronaut photography", the problem being that the wall's materials closely match the surrounding ground. Yang Liwei, China's first astronaut, reported that he could not see it. From the Moon it is not a question at all: Alan Bean of Apollo 12 said "no man-made object is visible at this scale".
Three genuine qualifications, which should not be collapsed back into the myth. It has been photographed from orbit — Leroy Chiao took the first confirmed picture from the International Space Station in November 2004, using a 180 millimetre lens on a sunny day shortly after snowfall; he did not see the wall himself and was not certain his photograph showed it. It is readily visible in spaceborne radar imagery, where it appears as a line across the desert. And the "only man-made object" half of the claim fails independently: from low orbit, cities, airports, motorways and reservoirs are all far more conspicuous than a narrow wall the colour of the land it runs through.
How long the wall actually is
Two official figures, and they measure different things.
A state survey published in 2012 gave 21,196.18 kilometres for all branches and all periods, counting 43,721 individual heritage sites — wall sections, defence works, passes and ruins. An earlier announcement in 2009 gave 8,851.8 kilometres for the Ming-dynasty wall alone, and the breakdown matters: 6,259.6 kilometres of built wall, 359.7 kilometres of trench, and 2,232.5 kilometres of natural barrier such as hills and rivers counted as defensive line. So about a quarter of the headline Ming figure is terrain rather than masonry.
The figure of "over 6,000 kilometres" that appears in older accounts was the accepted number before 2009, and is close to the Ming survey's built-wall component. It is obsolete rather than invented. The Great Wall was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1987.
Five thousand years, and what that does and does not mean
The claim that China has a culture five thousand years old is defensible in one sense and not in another, and the distinction is more interesting than either a flat assertion or a flat denial.
It holds for settled, state-level society. The walled city of Liangzhu, inscribed by UNESCO in 2019, dates from around 3300 BCE, and UNESCO describes it as revealing an early regional state with a unified belief system and as an outstanding example of early urban civilisation — about 5,300 years ago.
It does not hold for recorded history. Continuous written records begin far later, with the Shang oracle-bone inscriptions at Anyang from around 1250 BCE, which is roughly 3,300 years. Nor does it support the idea of a single unbroken culture or state: Liangzhu is described as an early regional state, not an ancestor of a unified China, and the continuity argument is contested among historians rather than settled.
What "the financial centre of China" now means
Older accounts call Hong Kong unquestionably the financial centre of China and one of three in the world alongside London and New York. Half of that survives, and it is the half usually doubted.
On the leading twice-yearly index, New York, London and Hong Kong ranked first, second and third in both the March and September 2026 editions — in March separated by a single ratings point. So the trio is real.
What fails is "unquestionably", and the reason is domestic. Shanghai ranked fifth or sixth and Shenzhen eighth or ninth, within a handful of points of Hong Kong, with Beijing in the teens or twenties. Hong Kong leads within China by a narrow and narrowing margin rather than standing alone. The omission older accounts can no longer carry is Singapore, which sits fourth, between Hong Kong and Shanghai. These rankings are republished every March and September, so any version of them dates quickly.
Language
The official standard forms are Putonghua — Standard Mandarin — and simplified Chinese characters, set out in a law of 2001 and revised with effect from 1 January 2026. More than 80 per cent of the population can communicate in Putonghua.
Beneath that the picture is far richer than "dozens of languages" suggests. China recognises 56 ethnic groups and is home to well over a hundred distinct languages: the major Chinese varieties — Mandarin, Wu, Yue or Cantonese, Min, Hakka, Xiang and Gan — alongside unrelated languages including Tibetan, Uyghur, Mongolian and Zhuang. In Hong Kong and Macao, Cantonese is a co-official spoken language and traditional characters are used, which is a practical difference rather than a nuance.
World Heritage, and two places that are not on the list
China has 61 properties on the UNESCO World Heritage List, among the most of any country. The ones that bear on this part of the archive include the Great Wall, the Imperial Palaces of the Ming and Qing dynasties, the Mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor and the Peking Man site, all inscribed in 1987; the Historic Ensemble of the Potala Palace in Lhasa from 1994; the Historic Centre of Macao from 2005; the West Lake cultural landscape at Hangzhou from 2011; the Grand Canal from 2014; Kulangsu from 2017; the Liangzhu archaeological site from 2019; and the Beijing Central Axis from 2024.
Two places commonly described as World Heritage are not. The Three Gorges are not inscribed — the Yangtze gorges appear only on China's tentative list, from 2001. Hainan is not inscribed either; its tropical rainforest and Li settlements were added to the tentative list in 2022. A tentative listing is a nomination, not a designation.
On the gorges there is a further point worth making, because older accounts describe them as untouched natural wonders. They now lie within a reservoir. The Three Gorges dam was begun in 1994, the river was closed in 1997, generation began in 2003, and the reservoir first reached its full level of 175 metres in October 2010. The United States Geological Survey states that the reservoir submerges all three gorges and alters the landscape of the area. The official Chinese account does not contest this so much as decline to discuss it: it addresses flood control, power, navigation and water supply, and says nothing about scenery.
Entry, and the date to watch
Entry requirements change, and this one has a date attached to it. British citizens holding standard passports could enter mainland China visa-free for stays of up to thirty days until the end of December 2026, for tourism, business, visiting family or friends, and transit. Longer stays, paid work, study and journalism require a visa arranged in advance. No extension beyond 2026 has been announced, so this is a position to verify rather than assume.
Independent of that, passports need at least six months' validity beyond arrival and two blank pages, and place of residence must be registered with the local public security bureau within twenty-four hours of arrival — hotels normally handle this at check-in.
Hong Kong and Macao are separate for immigration purposes, with their own entry rules, currencies and legal systems. British citizens with a full British passport may visit Hong Kong for up to six months without a visa. Two things catch people out: travelling from the mainland to Hong Kong and back requires a visa permitting a second entry to the mainland, and Hong Kong no longer accepts British National (Overseas) passports for immigration clearance or as proof of identity.
What official advice flags
British government advice carries several warnings that bear on an ordinary visit, and they are worth reading before travelling rather than after.
On the law: it is possible to be arrested without having intended to break the law under national security provisions, and detention on those grounds can last months before formal arrest, without legal representation. Exit bans can be imposed in commercial and civil disputes as well as criminal matters, can last months or years, and may not be known about until departure is attempted. Posting political statements critical of China may be treated as illegal, and demonstrations and large gatherings should be avoided.
On the practical side: police conduct identity checks and printed copies of a passport are not accepted, so the original should be carried. Restricted military areas are not always marked, and being in one without authorisation can mean detention, a fine or deportation. There is a zero-tolerance approach to drugs, including testing on entry. Serious crime against foreign visitors is relatively rare, but tea-tasting and massage scams are common in tourist areas. Typhoon season runs from about May to November and mainly affects the southern and eastern coasts.