Guangzhou is famous for dim sum, skyscrapers, and relentless energy — but the city also has a mountain inside its limits. Baiyun Mountain Guangzhou (White Cloud Mountain) is an 8-kilometer…
Most travelers flying into Guangdong head straight for the cities, but two hours north of Guangzhou a very different landscape waits. Danxia Mountain Shaoguan is the red-sandstone wonderland that gave…
If you are planning a stop in Jiangxi, the single most rewarding sight in the provincial capital is Tengwang Pavilion. This riverside tower is one of the three great towers…
Penglai Pavilion is the reason the small coastal town of Penglai, in Yantai on the northern shore of Shandong Peninsula, has been famous for more than a thousand years. A…
Laoshan is the mountain that gives Qingdao its mythic backdrop: pale granite peaks that rise straight from the Yellow Sea, wrapped in pine forest and threaded with Taoist temples. A…
At around ten o’clock on a July evening, on a low hill in a high basin ringed by snow peaks, a few hundred people stand in silence and watch the…
There is a spot on the edge of Zhongwei where you can stand with one foot in loose sand and look down on a green belt of poplars and, beyond…
Everyone who comes to China for Buddhist cave art queues at Dunhuang, Yungang or Longmen. Almost nobody drives an hour northwest of Guyuan, in southern Ningxia, into a valley of…
You cannot drive to the best part of this. The boat leaves a jetty on the Liujiaxia Reservoir, ninety minutes southwest of Lanzhou, and for an hour it runs between…
There is a stairway on this mountain called the Ladder to Heaven. It is 369 steps cut straight up a sandstone face, the treads are worn into shallow bowls by…