Huaiyang Cuisine Guide: Knife Work and Soup Dumplings Along the Grand Canal
Watch a chef in Yangzhou make wensi tofu and you will understand the cuisine before you taste anything. He lays a block of silken tofu on a wet board and,…
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Shandong Lu Cuisine Guide: What to Eat in China’s Oldest Imperial Kitchen
When the Qing court needed cooks, it hired them from Shandong. When Beijing restaurants standardised their menus in the nineteenth century, they were largely copying Shandong ones. Most travellers arrive…
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Taihu Lake Travel Guide: Cycling, Tea Hills and Island Villages
Taihu is the size of a small country and roughly two metres deep. That single fact explains most of what you will see: water that turns silver rather than blue,…
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Guoliang Village Travel Guide: The Cliff Tunnel Road in the Taihang Mountains
In 1972 thirteen farmers from a village of eighty households sold their goats, bought hammers and steel chisels, and started cutting a road through a vertical cliff. They had no…
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Yuntai Mountain Travel Guide: Henan’s Red Stone Gorge and Waterfall Walkways
The first thing you notice at Red Stone Gorge is the temperature. You walk down a staircase into a slot in the rock and the air drops several degrees, the…
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Mount Longhu Travel Guide: Jiangxi’s Taoist Cliffs and Hanging Coffins
Around 2,600 years ago, people living along a river in what is now eastern Jiangxi began burying their dead in caves punched into vertical red cliffs, sixty metres above the…
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Mount Wugong Travel Guide: Jiangxi’s Alpine Meadows and Camping Ridge
At 1,600 metres in subtropical central China you expect bamboo, or pine, or cloud forest. What you get here is grass — thousands of hectares of it, rolling over the…
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Mount Langshan Travel Guide: Hunan’s Danxia Rock Pillars and River Trails
There is a crevice here called Tianyi Xiang where the rock walls close to less than a metre apart for a couple of hundred metres, and you walk it sideways…
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Xiangyang Travel Guide: Hubei’s Moated Fortress City on the Han River
For six years, from 1267 to 1273, the Mongol army sat outside this city and could not get in. The walls held, the river kept supplies coming, and the siege…
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Wuhu Travel Guide: Riverside Anhui City of Iron Art and Old Customs Houses
Sometime in the seventeenth century a blacksmith called Tang Peng set up next door to a painter, watched him work, and started copying ink landscapes in hammered wrought iron. The…
