Zhujiang New Town and Canton Tower

The 600 m tower (2010) on the south bank of the Pearl River, facing the new axis — Guangzhou's postcard and its one expensive ticket. Two indoor observation halls at 433 m, an outdoor deck at 450 m and the 488 m platform billed as the world's highest outdoor deck, plus a horizontal ferris wheel (the 'bubble tram') around the 450 m deck and the Sky Drop. Admission is real-name and time-slotted: six two-hour entry windows a day, and the ticket hall only sells the current window. The official ticket rules never mention passports — visitors without a Chinese ID card register at a self-service kiosk in the ticket hall and buy on the printed receipt; whether that kiosk takes a passport is the thing we could not confirm.

The provincial museum in its 2010 red-lacquer 'treasure box' on the east side of Huacheng Square: Chaozhou woodcarving, Duan inkstones, export porcelain and the Guangdong history galleries — the physical evidence that this city was China's trading port for centuries. Free, but every visitor including children needs a real-name, time-slotted booking on the museum's WeChat official account (its only channel); tickets drop at 22:00 seven days ahead (museum, April 2026). Summer and holiday slots go within minutes. Passport holders book on the WeChat mini-program with the passport as the document type and, since April 2026, enter through the west-gate visitor lane by scanning an Alipay code instead of the ID-card gate (museum's bilingual guide). The English audio guide and wheelchairs are also issued on a passport.

The green spine of the new axis: Huacheng Square runs south from the twin towers between the opera house, the museum and the library to the river, where Haixinsha — the island stadium built for the 2010 Asian Games opening — and the 2021 Haixin pedestrian bridge put you straight opposite Canton Tower. All three are free. The square is open ground; Haixinsha is a park with gates and event closures (the light festival takes it over every November); the bridge is a security-checked walkway open 7:00-23:00 that dropped its booking requirement altogether on 28 January 2025. This is the ¥0 view of the tower and the place to stand at dusk.

The low, leafy island in the river just west of the CBD — villas, riverside lawns and the city's two 1990s culture buildings: the Guangdong Museum of Art's original 1997 building at 38 Yanyu Road (still open after the 2024 move of the main collection to Baietan, free, no booking, closed Mondays) and Xinghai Concert Hall (1998), the province's symphony home. The island itself is open ground with a riverside path that gives the CBD skyline and Canton Tower from the west — the quieter alternative to Haixinsha. Line 12's Ersha Island station finally put it on the metro.

The 2013 city library on the east side of Huacheng Square: two stacked, cantilevered slabs that read as the Chinese character for 'it' (之) from the square. It is the one building on the axis you can simply walk into: no ticket, no booking, security check only. Nine floors, with the reading floors open to 21:00, a multicultural library on the 8th floor with foreign-language collections including English, French, German, Japanese and Korean, and a free reader card that the rules explicitly issue on a foreign passport. Closed Wednesdays, not Mondays — the odd one out in this district.

Zaha Hadid's 'twin pebbles' (2010) at the north-west corner of Huacheng Square — the building that put the new axis on the architecture map, with an 1,800-seat opera hall shaped like a canyon. You can go inside without a performance: the house runs guided tours (Chinese only) Tuesday-Sunday 10:00-16:00 in hourly batches, ¥15 a person, real-name, and its own ticketing page explicitly accepts passports for the booking. Book at least five working days ahead; the auditorium closes to tours whenever a company is loading in or rehearsing, which is often.

The one old thing in the new-town grid — or the memory of one. Liede was a 900-year-old creek-side village whose fields became Zhujiang New Town; in 2007 it became Guangzhou's first whole-village redevelopment, was demolished, and by 2010 its residents had moved into tower blocks. What the village kept, by its own insistence, is the line of ancestral halls, the temple and the dragon-boat pond re-erected along Liede Creek — a kilometre of grey brick, granite and banyan between the skyscrapers, free and open, best on Dragon Boat Festival when the creek fills with boats. Ten minutes east of the museums; a living neighbourhood, not a site.

The north-bank promenade along Linjiang Avenue, from Haixinsha east under Liede Bridge towards the Liede Creek mouth — the free front row for Canton Tower across the water, the twin towers behind you, and the city's evening running track. No gates, no hours, no tickets. The bridge (2009, a single-pylon cable-stayed span) is the frame in every postcard shot of the tower from this side, and its pavement is walkable across to the Party Pier bank.

The old Zhujiang Brewery (1985) on the south bank, 1.5 km east of Canton Tower: after production moved to Nansha in 2016 the 6.9-hectare riverside site was kept and rebuilt as a bar-and-restaurant strip among the malt silos, boiler house, water tower and chimney — Haizhu district calls it the largest beer-culture leisure zone in South China and one of the city's first 15 'night market' pilot areas. Free, open ground, no gates; the point is a drink at a river-facing table with the tower lit across the water. Payment is per bar; expect QR-first.

The 60-70-minute loop that every visitor is sold: past Canton Tower, under Liede and Haixin bridges, along the lit CBD and, from the older piers, the colonial waterfront of Yanjiang Road. There is no single operator. Canton Tower's own company (Guangzhou Chenggang Tourism) sails from Fortune Pier two minutes from the tower's east plaza and sells at six walk-up windows, on Ctrip/Qunar/Meituan and in its WeChat mini-program; Tianzi Pier and Dashatou near Beijing Road are the old-line piers with the most sailings. Real-name boarding on every line; fares from about ¥78 by the local listing, up to ¥198 with a buffet. The commentary is loud and in Chinese; the cheap open deck is the good deck.