Two hours south of Xining the road drops off the loess plateau and the colour changes completely. Rust-red sandstone pillars stack up in ranks several hundred metres high, weathered into…
The rock here is the colour of dried blood. Water comes off it in white sheets, dozens of metres at a time, into ravines so densely green they feel prehistoric…
Fifty minutes out of Beijing West on a southbound bullet train, the North China Plain is still what it always is: wheat, maize, power lines, low grey towns. Then the…
Taihu is the size of a small country and roughly two metres deep. That single fact explains most of what you will see: water that turns silver rather than blue,…
In 1972 thirteen farmers from a village of eighty households sold their goats, bought hammers and steel chisels, and started cutting a road through a vertical cliff. They had no…
The first thing you notice at Red Stone Gorge is the temperature. You walk down a staircase into a slot in the rock and the air drops several degrees, the…
Around 2,600 years ago, people living along a river in what is now eastern Jiangxi began burying their dead in caves punched into vertical red cliffs, sixty metres above the…
At 1,600 metres in subtropical central China you expect bamboo, or pine, or cloud forest. What you get here is grass — thousands of hectares of it, rolling over the…
There is a crevice here called Tianyi Xiang where the rock walls close to less than a metre apart for a couple of hundred metres, and you walk it sideways…
You hear it before the road turns. A low, chest-level rumble that you feel in your sternum, and then the loess plateau simply opens and the Yellow River — three…