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…
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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…
