Cities

Gaoyou does not announce itself. It sits north of Yangzhou along the old Beijing Hangzhou waterway, roughly an hour from the city that the whole world has heard of, and…

Every Hainan itinerary runs along the coast, and every Hainan itinerary misses the point. Two hours inland from the beaches sits Wuzhishan, the only mountain city on the island, holding…

Qingzhou is the city in Shandong that quietly outlived its own fame. For thirteen centuries it was the seat of a prefecture that governed most of central Shandong, and for…

Yunnan is supposed to be the cool green province of the southwest, which makes Yuanmou the exception that proves you should check the map. This county in the north-centre of…

You have almost certainly eaten in Shaxian. It is the tiny district south of Sanming in inland Fujian that spawned the most widespread restaurant chain in China, the place where…

Mianxian is a county that history books mention in one line and tourists never visit. It sits in the upper Han River valley in southern Shaanxi, a green basin bracketed…

Somewhere between the Pearl River delta’s factories and its golf courses there is a stretch of low hills where, at the turn of the twentieth century, returned emigrants built fortified…

Guilin sells the world a picture of karst peaks reflected in a river, and most visitors happily buy it. Ten hours of mountain road further west, the scenery changes completely:…

If you drive north out of Chengdu toward the alpine lakes of Jiuzhaigou, you pass through a walled town that was already a frontier garrison when the road was only…

We started steering travelers to Jixi (绩溪) because it is the one place where you can still read the whole Huizhou merchant story in the buildings, not just in a…