Most first-time visitors to China assume airport lounges are for business-class ticket holders and nobody else. They are wrong. A China airport lounge guide has to start there, because the…
A Northeast China winter itinerary is the most physical trip in this series. The cold is not a backdrop, it is the main character: minus 20 is a normal afternoon,…
Jiangnan — the “south of the Yangtze” — is the China of ink paintings: white-walled canal towns, scholar’s gardens, and slow tea. The beauty of a Jiangnan 7 day itinerary…
Inner Mongolia is a province shaped like a long scarf draped across the top of northern China, and most first-timers make the same mistake: trying to see both ends in…
Shandong is the province where China shows its two faces at once: a breezy German-era port city on the coast and the Confucian heartland of the interior, two hours inland…
Fujian is the China I keep coming back to — a coastal province that hides, inland, some of the country’s strangest architecture and greenest mountains. In one week you can…
Guangxi is the China I show people when they say the country is all concrete. Within a single week you can float past limestone peaks on a misty river, climb…
Shenyang surprised me. I went expecting a grey industrial stopover and found a city with a genuine imperial heart — the former capital of the Qing dynasty, full of tiled…
There is a particular kind of tiredness that only arrives after a long ridge hike, and the best cure I have found is a hot shower and a window looking…
The first time I slept in a yurt, I woke up at 4 a.m. to the sound of wind moving across open grass and a sky so dense with stars…