Author: karl

The first time I walked through the vermilion gates of the Beijing Confucius Temple, I was alone at 8:40 in the morning, before the tour buses rolled in. The courtyard…

There are a handful of places on earth that stop you mid-step and make the breath catch — and I don’t mean from the altitude, though that happens too. The…

I have stood in a lot of cold, wind-scoured places in my travels across China, but nothing prepared me for the moment the road curved over Pang La pass and…

The first time I saw Yamdrok Lake, I was leaning out of a minivan window at 4,900 metres, gasping less from the altitude than from the colour. Below me a…

The first time I saw Namtso Lake, Tibet, China, I stopped talking. We had driven for hours through a windswept valley, the road climbing past prayer-flag-draped passes, and then the…

Most first-time visitors to Beijing fixate on Badaling. It’s the postcard image, the one with the cable car and the crowds three-deep on every step. I went there once, squeezed…

The first time I stood on the Jiankou Great Wall, the wind nearly took my hat off and the wall beneath my boots was a pile of fractured grey bricks…

The first time I stood at the foot of the Simatai Great Wall after dark, I genuinely thought I had wandered onto a film set. The wall above me was…

The first time I stood on the Great Wall, it was at Badaling, shoulder-to-shoulder with three hundred other people photographing the same tower. Impressive, but it felt like a museum…

Standing on the viewing platform at Huangguoshu, I felt the ground actually tremble. A wall of water 81 meters (266 ft) high and 101 meters (331 ft) wide was hurling…