Nantong Travel Guide: Where the Yangtze Meets the Sea in Jiangsu
In 1905 a retired imperial examination champion named Zhang Jian opened a museum in his home town. It was the first public museum in China founded by a Chinese person,…
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Changzhou Travel Guide: Pagodas, Theme Parks and Canal Lanes in Jiangsu
Changzhou has an image problem: guidebooks file it as “the city between Nanjing and Suzhou with the dinosaur park”. True, and it undersells the place. Within forty minutes of the…
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Huzhou Travel Guide: Tea Hills and Taihu Lakeshore in Northern Zhejiang
In the 760s Lu Yu settled in the hills west of the city, walked the tea gardens and springs, and wrote the first book on tea. Twelve centuries later the…
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Jiaxing Travel Guide: Canal Town Halfway Between Shanghai and Hangzhou
Here is a fact that reorganises most people’s mental map of eastern China: Wuzhen and Xitang, the two water towns half of Shanghai’s visitors day-trip to, are both administratively part…
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Baotou Travel Guide: Steel City Gateway to Inner Mongolia’s Grasslands
The first thing you notice is the width of the roads. Baotou was laid out in the 1950s around a new steelworks by planners who assumed the city would grow…
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Chinese Breakfast Guide: Congee, Buns and Jianbing
At 6:40am on a Wuhan side street, a woman is holding a paper bowl of hot sesame noodles in one hand and steering a scooter with the other, eating as…
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China BBQ Skewers Guide: Roadside Grills Coast to Coast
It starts around nine at night. A cart rolls out onto the pavement, someone tips a bag of charcoal into a long steel trough, and within twenty minutes the whole…
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China Coffee Culture Guide: From Luckin to Local Roasters
On a single lane off Yongkang Road in Shanghai I once counted eleven cafés in four hundred metres — a Japanese-style kissaten with a siphon bar, two competition-grade filter shops,…
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Zhoushan Travel Guide: Zhejiang’s Island Archipelago
The 6pm auction at Shenjiamen is the loudest room in Zhejiang. Crates of hairtail come off the boats still stiff with cold, buyers shout numbers nobody outside the trade understands,…
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Lishui Travel Guide: Zhejiang’s Terraced Rice Fields
At 5:40 in the morning on the ridge above Chongtou, the valley below has disappeared. Cloud sits in it like milk in a bowl, and the only things breaking the…
