Attractions

The first time I saw Shibaozhai from the deck of a Yangtze cruise ship, I thought the red tower pinned to the cliff was a film set. It isn’t. Shibaozhai…

On my last trip up the Yangtze, I watched the river fold itself into the walls of Qutang Gorge and realized the small hilltop town we were approaching was not…

I have toured many caves, but few prepared me for the moment a small boat rounded a corner inside Yellow Dragon Cave and revealed a floodlit cavern the size of…

Crossing the Taklimakan by road, I watched the asphalt ribbon disappear into a wall of dunes on both horizons and understood why old Silk Road travelers called it the “Sea…

I have watched a lot of deserts, but nowhere else have I stood where the sand dunes literally press against the back fences of a green town. The Kumtag Desert…

When I first stepped into the cool dimness of a Bezeklik cave, the desert heat of the Flaming Mountains vanished and I found myself face to face with a thousand-year-old…

Standing on the cracked earthen ramparts of Gaochang, I watched the wind sweep fine desert dust across a city that once held thirty thousand souls. The Gaochang Ruins near Turpan,…

An hour’s flight from the coastal cities and a world away in feeling, the Jiaohe Ruins sit on a tongue of dried loess between two rivers outside Turpan, Xinjiang, China….

Most foreigners who come to Anhui go straight up Yellow Mountain and leave, missing the broad green water that sits at its northern foot. That water is Taiping Lake —…

Serious travelers to Shanxi eventually hear the same piece of folklore: for most of the 20th century, experts believed not a single wooden hall from China’s Tang dynasty (618–907) had…