Cities

Lie flat on your back on a plank boat, hands folded on your chest, and a boatman hauls you on a rope through a gap in the rock with maybe…

On a wet April morning at Guoqing Temple the only sounds are water running off camphor leaves and an elderly monk sweeping the same three metres of flagstone he has…

The Yi River runs through the middle of this city almost a kilometre wide, and on a summer evening the entire population seems to be walking along it — grandmothers…

At half past six on a warm evening the whole street starts to smoke at once. Every table has its own small charcoal grill sunk into the middle, and on…

Climb the steps of Beigu Mountain at seven in the morning and the Yangtze below you is a sheet of grey tin, barges sliding downstream in single file, the pavilion…

Climb the ridge road south of Xingyi at eight in the morning and the valley below looks like a mistake in the landscape: several thousand near-identical green cones, each a…

Kaili itself will not seduce you. It is a workmanlike prefecture capital of concrete blocks and noodle shops spread across a bowl of green hills, and most travellers who arrive…

At Dashanpu, on the eastern edge of Zigong, a museum has been built directly on top of a fossil bed and the floor has simply been left open. You walk…

Stand on the embankment at Hejiang Gate at dusk and you can watch two rivers become one: the grey, silt-heavy Jinsha coming down off the Tibetan plateau, the clearer green…

For a thousand years Yangzhou was one of the richest cities in China, a salt-trade capital where the Grand Canal meets the Yangtze. Poets wrote about its moonlit bridges; merchants…