Cities

For six years, from 1267 to 1273, the Mongol army sat outside this city and could not get in. The walls held, the river kept supplies coming, and the siege…

Sometime in the seventeenth century a blacksmith called Tang Peng set up next door to a painter, watched him work, and started copying ink landscapes in hammered wrought iron. The…

In 1905 a retired imperial examination champion named Zhang Jian opened a museum in his home town. It was the first public museum in China founded by a Chinese person,…

Changzhou has an image problem: guidebooks file it as “the city between Nanjing and Suzhou with the dinosaur park”. True, and it undersells the place. Within forty minutes of the…

In the 760s Lu Yu settled in the hills west of the city, walked the tea gardens and springs, and wrote the first book on tea. Twelve centuries later the…

Here is a fact that reorganises most people’s mental map of eastern China: Wuzhen and Xitang, the two water towns half of Shanghai’s visitors day-trip to, are both administratively part…

The first thing you notice is the width of the roads. Baotou was laid out in the 1950s around a new steelworks by planners who assumed the city would grow…

The 6pm auction at Shenjiamen is the loudest room in Zhejiang. Crates of hairtail come off the boats still stiff with cold, buyers shout numbers nobody outside the trade understands,…

At 5:40 in the morning on the ridge above Chongtou, the valley below has disappeared. Cloud sits in it like milk in a bowl, and the only things breaking the…

In the winter of 1128 a man named Kong Duanyou fled south with the collapsing Song court, carrying his family’s most precious possession: a portrait of his ancestor, Confucius, painted…