Most visitors to Shanxi rush from Taiyuan straight to Pingyao or Datong and skip the provincial capital entirely. That’s a mistake, because about 25 kilometers southwest of the city center…
If you want to understand how Shanxi merchants — the “Jin shang” — built their fortunes and their homes during the Qing dynasty, there is no better single stop than…
At the northeastern tip of Hebei, the Ming Great Wall finally runs out of mountain and marches straight into the Bohai Sea. We’ve taken travelers to Shanhaiguan who had already…
An hour and a half southwest of Shijiazhuang, the land around Zanhuang County splits open into walls of red rock hundreds of meters high. We’ve taken travelers there who expected…
Two and a half hours southwest of Beijing, Baishi Mountain (白石山) rises out of the plains of Laiyuan County as a wall of pale granite. We’ve taken travelers there who…
Standing in the center of Henan Province, Songshan Mountain has watched over Chinese civilization for more than two thousand years. We’ve taken travelers there who arrived expecting just another hill…
We almost didn’t include Lushan West Sea (庐山西海) on our early Jiangxi routes, and that was a mistake. Once we took a group out on the water and they came…
We send overheated city travelers to Sanzhaolun (三爪仑) every summer and watch them exhale. This is Jiangxi’s green lung: a national forest park in Jing’an County (靖安县), under the city…
We’ve floated Fairy Lake (仙女湖, Xiannü Hu) with honeymooners, with skeptical teenagers, and with a retired couple who just wanted quiet water — and the place delivered for all of…
We first ran a Dajue Mountain Jiangxi trip for a group of nervous glass-walkway skeptics, and by the end every one of them was leaning out over the gorge grinning….