Kunming is one of China's most underrated cities. It doesn't announce itself to the world the way Beijing and Shanghai do. Spend your morning with us and discover the Kunming that you would have walked straight past on your own.

We begin at Green Lake, the “Eye of Kunming”, where Siberian seagulls have come every winter since 1985. From there we walk into the old university quarter, where three leading universities merged in wartime exile and produced China's first two Nobel laureates, and into an alley that was once an emergency exit during air raids and is now an open-air gallery.

Kunming built a railway to Vietnam before it built one to Beijing. There is a pavilion where Ho Chi Minh held meetings, with a plaque almost nobody reads. Three hours in English, never more than six of you. We will point you to the best bowl of rice noodles nearby before we say goodbye.