Good evening

This week, we asked seven leading historians and travel experts to nominate their personal wonders of the world. Their choices varied from ancient to modern, eclectic to surprising. But all were celebrations of “the ingenuity of mankind and our ability to collaborate and achieve incredible things beyond our potential as individuals”.

Bettany Hughes, author of The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, chose the ruins of one of the originals - the Temple of Artemis in Turkey, which was once twice the size of the Parthenon temple in Athens and was mimicked from Olympia to Sicily. Today reduced to one standing column, this huge holy house was a place where refugees could seek asylia (the root of the word asylum) and the protection of the goddess, she writes.

Lucy Worsley, chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces, chose a very English wonder in Derbyshire’s Bolsover Castle; archaeologist Mary-Ann Ochota opted for the oldest monastery in Tibet; and adventurer Alice Morrison was transported back to Egypt, when she was 22, and recalls hearing the two giant statues of the Colossi of Memnon singing to her in the desert wind.

Meanwhile, travel writer Kevin Rushby and archaeologist Jago Cooper were awestruck by the technical ingenuity and environmental complexity of, respectively, the Yemeni terraces and Sri Lanka’s Sigiriya rock complex.

But the Guardian’s architecture and design critic, Oliver Wainwright, brought us bang up to date with his choice of the Chinese megacity of Chonqing, “a place where neighbourhoods cling to cliffs, connected by elevated roads 20 storeys up in the air”, and where “metro lines emerge from tunnels through the mountains, only to plunge straight through the middle of residential skyscrapers”. He describes it as feeling like “being thrust into a cross between the movie Inception and a game of snakes and ladders”.

All of these creations were conceived of and built by “visionaries who strived to generate wonders for their present and our future”. Wonders that we still marvel at today.