Fifty minutes north of Chengdu by high-speed train, Mianyang is Sichuan’s second city and its least-visited one — a place of research institutes, riverside parks and enormous bowls of rice…
Stand on the embankment at Wuzhou in the late afternoon and you can see the join: the Gui River arrives clear and green from the karst country upstream, the Xun…
Zhongshan is the Pearl River Delta city that most itineraries skip, which is exactly why it works. An hour from Guangzhou and, since the Shenzhen–Zhongshan Link opened in 2024, barely…
Say “Hakka house” to most travellers and they picture the round earthen towers of Fujian. Meizhou, three hours inland from Guangzhou in the hills of eastern Guangdong, builds something different…
Most foreign travellers meet Hengyang as a name on a departure board somewhere between Changsha and Guangzhou, and stay on the train. That is a mistake worth correcting. Ninety minutes…
The name means “sun shines first” — 日照 — and it comes from an old line about this stretch of coast being the first part of the province to catch…
You check out of a Beijing hotel at noon, your overnight train leaves at 21:40, and you are standing on the pavement with a 23 kg suitcase and nine hours…
China built 45,000 kilometres of high-speed railway and most travellers never need anything else. Then you decide to visit a rice-terrace village in Yunnan, a Dong minority town in Guizhou,…
Here is the fact that catches out most visitors: your International Driving Permit is worthless in mainland China. To drive here legally you need a Chinese document, and the good…
There is a saying in Fuzhou that a meal without soup is not a meal. It is not a figure of speech. Sit down in an ordinary restaurant in coastal…