Yibin Travel Guide: Sichuan’s Bamboo Sea and River Confluence
Stand on the embankment at Hejiang Gate at dusk and you can watch two rivers become one: the grey, silt-heavy Jinsha coming down off the Tibetan plateau, the clearer green…
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Basha Miao Village Guide: The Last Gunslinger Village in Guizhou
The last kilometre of road to Basha climbs out of the Duliu River valley through fir forest so dense the light turns green. Then the trees open and you are…
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China’s Major Railway Hubs: Navigating the Big Stations
A good China railway stations guide is worth more than a phrasebook, because the stations — not the trains — are where foreign travellers actually get into trouble. Chinese railway…
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China Train Types Guide: G, D, C, Z, T and K Explained
The first time you search a route on 12306 you get a wall of options — G1234, D311, K599, Z50 — and no explanation of why one takes five hours…
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Chinese Dumpling Guide: Jiaozi, Wonton and Beyond
Any useful Chinese dumpling guide has to start by admitting that “dumpling” is a translation problem. In English it’s one word. In China it covers at least a dozen distinct…
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Chengdu Food Guide: Sichuan’s Laid-Back Culinary Capital
Most visitors arrive with a one-item Chengdu food guide in their head: hotpot. That is a shame, because hotpot is the loudest dish in the city, not the best one….
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China Night Market Guide: What to Eat After Dark
This China night market guide is for travelers who discover, usually around 8pm on their second evening, that the country’s real food culture does not live in restaurants. It lives…
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China Tea Tour Guide: From Hangzhou Longjing to Fujian Oolong
Tea in China is not a drink so much as a landscape, a calendar and a social code. Follow it and you end up in terraced hills above West Lake…
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Yangzhou Travel Guide: Jiangsu’s Classical Gardens and Slender West Lake
For a thousand years Yangzhou was one of the richest cities in China, a salt-trade capital where the Grand Canal meets the Yangtze. Poets wrote about its moonlit bridges; merchants…
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Manzhouli Travel Guide: Inner Mongolia’s Russian Border Town
There is nowhere else in China quite like Manzhouli. Pastel façades with onion domes line the main street, shop signs run in Chinese, Russian and Mongolian, and a 30-metre matryoshka…
