Fayuan Temple Beijing is the oldest working Buddhist monastery in the capital, a quiet warren of courtyards, peony beds, and incense smoke hidden in the hutongs just southwest of the…
The Nanputuo Temple Xiamen sits at the foot of Wulao Peak with its back to the hills and its face toward the sea, a working Buddhist monastery where the vegetarian…
The Sun and Moon Pagodas Guilin are a pair of illuminated towers rising from the middle of Shanhu Lake in the heart of the city, and they are the easiest…
The Mu Residence Lijiang is the former palace of the Mu clan, the Naxi chieftains who ruled this corner of Yunnan for twenty-two generations across roughly 470 years, and it…
The Banpo Museum Xi’an is the place to stand on a wooden walkway above a six-thousand-year-old village and look down at the round and square pit houses where one of…
The Jade Buddha Temple Shanghai is one of the few working monasteries inside a Chinese megacity where you can stand three meters from a two-meter-tall statue carved from a single…
Hangzhou is sold to the world as a lake city, and West Lake earns the praise, but the place that actually puts the old commercial and culinary Hangzhou under your…
If Suzhou is famous as the city of gardens, the place that actually lets you walk inside the old water-town texture the gardens were built to echo is Pingjiang Road…
Nanjing wears its history heavier than most Chinese cities, and the single best place to feel the weight of its imperial past is Zhonghua Gate Nanjing, the colossal southern gate…
Most visitors arrive in Guangzhou expecting dim sum and skyscrapers, and they get both, but the building that best explains how this southern trading city actually thinks is Chen Clan…