Rizhao Travel Guide: Shandong’s Sunlit Beach City on the Yellow Sea
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…
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Luggage Storage in China: Stations, Airports, Hotels and Apps
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…
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Long-Distance Buses in China: When to Take Them and How to Book
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,…
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Renting a Car in China: Temporary Driving Permits, Rules and Real Costs
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…
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Fujian Min Cuisine Guide: Soups, Seafood and Oyster Omelettes in Southeast China
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…
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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…
