Off-the-wall journeys

A 'love hotel'.[Photo provided to China Daily]

And you can ride a haunted subway. Or a "children's tram" with a man in a scowl-faced sushi-roll costume with fish roe bubbling from his head and pink pants with an even brighter-pink braided waistband.

(Perhaps hard to say which is scarier.)

Where else can you visit a "kingdom" inhabited by more than a hundred costumed little people? (The shortest is the monarch, who blasts out on a motor-trike.) They dance to death metal, pop ballads and Korean hip-hop hits, and dwell in massive mountainside mushrooms - when not performing acrobatics and tightrope walking.

China hosts the most UNESCO World Heritage Sites of any country. Its five millennia of history have left a legacy of world icons from the Forbidden City to the Potala Palace.

But its contemporary condition has sired wacky attractions, as the tourism sector develops at breakneck pace and locations without a natural draw script new novelties from scratch.

These places appeal to neophilic globetrotters jaded by beaches, mountains and temples.

They've been there. Done that.

And want something new. Some place more.

Since this jet-set sect is huge, yet relatively small in the grand tourism scheme, most oddball locales find themselves mostly appealing to the most thrill-seeking.

Consequently, they're able to keep the doors open yet don't draw the hoards they aspire to. Marginal allure produces marginal profits.

Yet they're arguably some of the country's most fascinating and distinctive destinations.