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…
-
-
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…
-
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…
-
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,…
-
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,…
-
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…
-
Quzhou Travel Guide: Zhejiang’s Confucius South Homeland
In the winter of 1128 a man named Kong Duanyou fled south with the collapsing Song court, carrying his family’s most precious possession: a portrait of his ancestor, Confucius, painted…
-
Jinhua Travel Guide: Zhejiang’s Wuzhou Ancient City
Lie flat on your back on a plank boat, hands folded on your chest, and a boatman hauls you on a rope through a gap in the rock with maybe…
-
Taizhou Travel Guide: Zhejiang’s Green Mountains and Sea
On a wet April morning at Guoqing Temple the only sounds are water running off camphor leaves and an elderly monk sweeping the same three metres of flagstone he has…
-
Hukou Waterfall Guide: The Yellow River’s Thundering Falls
You hear it before the road turns. A low, chest-level rumble that you feel in your sternum, and then the loess plateau simply opens and the Yellow River — three…
