Attractions

The first time I heard about Qiandao Lake, I assumed it was another one of those poetic Chinese place names that sounds better than the reality. It is not. This…

The first time I saw Erhai Lake, I was still half-asleep on a sleeper bus from Kunming, and the 6 a.m. light was doing something unfair to the water. It…

The first time I saw Mount Siguniang, I was slumped against a bus window, four hours out of Chengdu and half-convinced the driver had taken a wrong turn into a…

I arrived at Lugu Lake at 2 a.m. after a four-hour bus from Lijiang, stumbled out into air so cold and thin it slapped the sleep off my face, and…

The first time I stood under the Xi’an Bell Tower at dusk, I made a classic rookie mistake: I thought it was just a pretty building to photograph and move…

I was halfway through a bowl of cross-bridge noodles in Lijiang when I first saw it — a wall of thirteen snow-streaked peaks punching straight through a blue November sky,…

I was still rubbing sleep from my eyes at 6:40 a.m. when the wooden boardwalk at Kanas Lake, Xinjiang, China, went quiet. Then the mist peeled back like a curtain…

I pressed my face to the glass until a guard coughed politely, and I still couldn’t see the bottom of the gold bowl. I had read that the Shaanxi History…

The first time I stood among the shattered marble arches of the Old Summer Palace, the only sound was a crow flapping somewhere over the lotus ponds. I had just…

I arrived at the foot of Mount Qingcheng before the tour buses did, and the mist was still sliding off the cypress trees like smoke off a boiling kettle. There’s…