Huaxiba — the West China Union University campus

The finest missionary-era campus in western China: West China Union University, founded in 1910 by five British, American and Canadian mission boards, laid out by the English Quaker architect Fred Rowntree in a Chinese-roofs-on-Western-plans style — the 1925 Clock Tower (the Coles memorial, rebuilt above its base in 1954) and a dozen halls now grouped as a national key heritage site (2013). Today it is Sichuan University's Huaxi campus and the West China Hospital complex, one of the largest hospitals in the country: an open, working campus and medical city rather than a museum, with the old buildings standing among it. Come for the architecture and the atmosphere of a university that produced China's first dental school; the museums inside need booking.