Attractions

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…

There are about a dozen “ancient towns” within an hour of Chengdu, and most of them were rebuilt from memory in the 2000s. Huanglongxi is one of those, and I…

There are a lot of tombs in China and only one of them that people argue about. The Huangdi Mausoleum — the Yellow Emperor’s Mausoleum — sits on Qiaoshan hill…

Xi’an’s city wall gets the photographs. The Terracotta Army gets the queues. But the site we send calligraphy students, architecture fans and anyone who has ever wondered how a country…

Tuyoq is the place in Turpan where the desert and the oasis argue in public. One minute you are standing in a red sandstone canyon that looks like it was…