Author: karl

I was halfway through a bowl of cross-bridge noodles in Lijiang when I first saw it — a wall of thirteen snow-streaked peaks punching straight through a blue November sky,…

I was still rubbing sleep from my eyes at 6:40 a.m. when the wooden boardwalk at Kanas Lake, Xinjiang, China, went quiet. Then the mist peeled back like a curtain…

I pressed my face to the glass until a guard coughed politely, and I still couldn’t see the bottom of the gold bowl. I had read that the Shaanxi History…

The first time I stood among the shattered marble arches of the Old Summer Palace, the only sound was a crow flapping somewhere over the lotus ponds. I had just…

I arrived at the foot of Mount Qingcheng before the tour buses did, and the mist was still sliding off the cypress trees like smoke off a boiling kettle. There’s…

The first time I saw them from the back of a scooter bumping along a muddy Fujian lane, I thought I had stumbled onto a set of giant prehistoric doughnuts…

I met the best Tai Chi teacher of my life at 5:40 a.m. on a stone terrace 1,600 meters up Wudang Mountain, half-blind with altitude and jet lag, watching a…

I arrived in Hongcun before sunrise, and the only sound was a wooden ladle dipping into still water. A woman in a blue apron was washing leafy greens at the…

The first time I rode up to Victoria Peak Hong Kong, I made the classic rookie mistake: I pressed my face to the wrong window of the tram and watched…

The first time I saw the Oriental Pearl Tower, I laughed out loud. Not because it’s silly — though a 468-meter tower dressed in pink-and-purple spheres and a needle does…