Guilin sells Guangxi to the world: polished limestone peaks, bamboo rafts, postcard mist. Bamei is what happens a whole province southwest of that postcard. Bamei village sits deep in the…
There are few places in China where the hour of the day changes the view more completely than Dongjiang Lake. At midday it is a deep blue reservoir ringed by…
Xunpu village sits on a narrow finger of land in Fengze District, where Quanzhou Bay opens into the estuary, and it looks like nowhere else in Fujian. The lane walls…
Most travelers to Shanxi head straight for Datong, Pingyao and the Ming walls, and treat Taiyuan as a railway station on the way. That is a shame, because 40 kilometers…
Pull off the highway in the middle of the Qaidam Basin and you will see a sheet of water the colour of a swimming pool in southern Spain, ringed by…
Hubei, China spends most of its reputation on the Yangtze and the dam at Sandouping. Thirty kilometres upstream of the dam, on a tributary that most international itineraries never mention,…
Yunnan, China does not do one climate per province. It does one climate per valley, and nowhere is that truer than on the Gaoligong range in the far west, where…
Northern Xinjiang, China has a habit of producing landscapes that look wrong for a desert country: green valleys, black limestone, turquoise lakes, and then the canyon at Dushanzi, which is…
Guizhou does not get the foreign visitor numbers that Yunnan or Sichuan do, which is exactly why the Baili Azalea forest is still one of the least crowded great flower…
Most first-time visitors to Tibet, China fly into Lhasa, spend a few days getting used to the altitude, and then see only the Potala Palace and the Yarlung Zangbo valley…