Bingling Temple Grottoes Travel Guide: Boat Ride to Gansu’s Cliff Buddhas
You cannot drive to the best part of this. The boat leaves a jetty on the Liujiaxia Reservoir, ninety minutes southwest of Lanzhou, and for an hour it runs between…
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Mount Kongtong Travel Guide: Gansu’s Cliffside Taoist Mountain
There is a stairway on this mountain called the Ladder to Heaven. It is 369 steps cut straight up a sandstone face, the treads are worn into shallow bowls by…
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Kanbula National Park Travel Guide: Qinghai’s Red Cliffs Above the Yellow River
Two hours south of Xining the road drops off the loess plateau and the colour changes completely. Rust-red sandstone pillars stack up in ranks several hundred metres high, weathered into…
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Chishui Travel Guide: Guizhou’s Danxia Waterfalls and Ancient Fern Forests
The rock here is the colour of dried blood. Water comes off it in white sheets, dozens of metres at a time, into ravines so densely green they feel prehistoric…
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Baiyangdian Travel Guide: Reed Marshes and Boat Villages Near Beijing
Fifty minutes out of Beijing West on a southbound bullet train, the North China Plain is still what it always is: wheat, maize, power lines, low grey towns. Then the…
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Putian Travel Guide: Fujian’s Mazu Temples and Loquat Coast
Somewhere between Fuzhou and Xiamen the high-speed line runs past a bay with a long low island offshore. That island is Meizhou, origin point of a sea-goddess tradition followed by…
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Wuwei Travel Guide: Silk Road Oasis of the Bronze Galloping Horse
If you have seen China’s national tourism emblem — a bronze horse at full gallop, one hoof resting on a flying swallow — you have already seen Wuwei. The figure…
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Hanzhong Travel Guide: Rapeseed Valleys and Cliff Plank Roads in Southern Shaanxi
Cross the Qinling tunnel south of Xi’an and Shaanxi changes completely. The loess plateau gives way to a green river basin of paddy fields, bamboo and tea, ringed by mountains…
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Baoji Travel Guide: Bronze Age Treasures at the Foot of the Qinling
The two oldest written characters for “China” are not in Beijing or Xi’an. They are cast inside a bronze wine vessel in a museum an hour west of Xi’an, in…
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Nanchong Travel Guide: Silk City on Sichuan’s Jialing River
Most people crossing Sichuan go Chengdu to Chongqing and never look north. Two hours up the Jialing River there is a city of six million that almost no foreign visitor…
