Attractions

Most foreigners who reach Guangdong stop at Guangzhou or Shenzhen and miss the coast to the east. Nanao Island, off the city of Shantou, is the largest island in the…

Yangzhou sits north of the Yangtze, a slow canal city that peaked as a wealthy salt-trading town and kept its good manners. Its signature sight is Slender West Lake, or…

Most visitors fly into Wuhan for the Yellow Crane Tower and leave without realizing the city holds one of the largest urban lakes in China. East Lake, or Donghu, is…

Tianjin is often treated as a half-day stop on the way to Beijing, but that sells the city short. Its most distinctive corner is the Five Great Avenues, a grid…

Most travelers who come to Fujian fly straight into Xiamen and never set foot in Fuzhou, which is a real pity. The provincial capital keeps a compact, walkable historic core…

Three hours south of Hangzhou, in a county most foreign travellers have never heard of, a block of volcanic rhyolite has weathered into a set of flat-topped cliffs and needle…

Guilin gets the karst tourists. Two hundred and fifty kilometres northwest, in the corner of Guizhou where three provinces meet, the same limestone does something stranger: instead of standing over…

Fujian is known for tea mountains and port cities, so the red rock country in its northwest corner tends to go unnoticed. Taining sits in a basin of Cretaceous sandstone…

A river in northeast China ran into a wall of cooled lava about ten thousand years ago, backed up behind it, and made a lake forty-five kilometres long. That is…

Rising behind the city of Huizhou in Guangdong, Luofu Mountain is one of the sacred peaks of Chinese Taoism and one of the easier day trips from the Pearl River…