Life in Mainland China
Life in Mainland China
Provinces, regions and cities, each with a dish it is proud of. Tap the map, take a stamp for every place you get right, and come back for a new mystery province every day.
Tap a province to see what it is famous for.
Today's mystery province
One clue at a time. Tap the province on the map when you know it: the fewer clues you need, the better. A new one every day.
Provinces, regions and municipalities
The mainland is divided into provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities. A municipality is a city governed directly by Beijing, with the status of a province: Beijing itself, Tianjin, Shanghai and Chongqing. An autonomous region is a province-level area with a large ethnic minority population: Inner Mongolia, Guangxi, Tibet, Ningxia and Xinjiang. Hong Kong and Macau, special administrative regions with their own currencies and systems, appear on the Greater Bay Area page.
Geographers group the divisions into regions, and the map is coloured by them. Each has its own landscape, climate, way of speaking and, above all, food: wheat and noodles in the north, rice in the south, chillies in the west and seafood on the coast.
What the pages cover
The 7 region pages take the map apart: each lists its provinces with the capital, a dish and what the place is known for. The food pages cover the eight great cuisines, the words that build a dish name on a menu, breakfast and street food, the six types of tea and the drinks beyond tea. The daily-life pages cover the festivals and their dates, manners at the table, numbers and luck, names and forms of address, getting around, and paying with a phone.
The same places and dishes are a map in the app's Daily life tab, where each stop has notes, a quiz and a short conversation. Every conversation is also on a page here, line by line, in Chinese with pinyin and English. Each place you name correctly on the map above adds a stamp to your passport.