Attractions

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…

Dunhuang gets the caves. Jiayuguan gets the fortified Pass. Guazhou gets the traffic. Tucked about 18 kilometres northeast of Guazhou town in Gansu, China, and roughly 100 kilometres east of…

Most visitors to Xi’an spend their time on the city wall and the Terracotta Army and never learn that, just north of the railway station, there is a vast park…

Jinan calls itself the “City of Springs,” and if you only see one of its dozens of bubbling sources, make it Heihu Spring. Set into a free riverside park along…

Ten kilometers west of the cobbled lanes of Lijiang Old Town, the ground opens into a wide, reedy wetland called Lashihai. Most visitors to Lijiang never make it out here,…

Xining is the kind of city where you feel the meeting of cultures the moment you step out of the station, and nowhere is that clearer than at Dongguan Mosque….

Most travelers who come to Qinghai head straight for the high-altitude drama of Qinghai Lake and never learn that, tucked into a quiet valley 80 kilometers east of Xining, there…