Zhejiang Cuisine Guide: Dongpo Pork, Lake Fish and Shaoxing Wine
A cube of pork belly the size of a matchbox arrives in a small porcelain bowl, tied with a straw bow, so dark it looks lacquered. You press it with…
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Anhui Hui Cuisine Guide: Mountain Herbs, Cured Fish and Bamboo Shoots
The first thing most visitors notice about food in southern Anhui is the smell. Walk down Tunxi Old Street in the evening and somewhere between the tea shops and the…
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Bayanbulak Grassland Travel Guide: Swan Lake and Nine Bends in Xinjiang, China
At around ten o’clock on a July evening, on a low hill in a high basin ringed by snow peaks, a few hundred people stand in silence and watch the…
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Shapotou Travel Guide: Where the Tengger Desert Meets the Yellow River
There is a spot on the edge of Zhongwei where you can stand with one foot in loose sand and look down on a green belt of poplars and, beyond…
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Xumishan Grottoes Travel Guide: Ningxia’s Hidden Silk Road Buddhas
Everyone who comes to China for Buddhist cave art queues at Dunhuang, Yungang or Longmen. Almost nobody drives an hour northwest of Guyuan, in southern Ningxia, into a valley of…
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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…
