Cities

Turpan is a place of superlatives. Sitting in a deep desert basin in Xinjiang, China, it contains the country’s lowest point (Aydingkol Lake, 154 meters below sea level), records some…

Western Hunan — Xiangxi in Chinese — is where the province folds itself into green gorges, stilted wooden towns and mist that rarely lifts before nine in the morning. This…

Everyone has heard of the Mogao Caves at Dunhuang. Far fewer travelers know that Gansu province holds a second Buddhist cave complex of world importance — and that it might…

Stand on the riverside promenade in Dandong at dusk and you are looking at one of Asia’s most unusual views: the broad Yalu River, a half-finished bridge glowing in rainbow…

Most travelers racing between Wuhan and Changsha on the high-speed line never look out the window at Yueyang, and that is their loss. This mid-sized Hunan city sits on the…

Anshun is the town most travelers rush through on the way to Huangguoshu — Asia’s largest waterfall — without realizing they’ve just skipped one of Guizhou’s strangest and most rewarding…

Everyone knows Xi’an’s terracotta warriors. Almost nobody outside China knows that Xuzhou has its own army — thousands of miniature Han dynasty soldiers, standing in battle formation in pits beside…

Every morning in Ganzhou, workers unhook a chain of wooden boats so river traffic can pass, then reconnect them into a walkway that pedestrians have used for more than 800…

Liuzhou smells like nowhere else in China. Step out of the train station and there it is — the funky, fermented perfume of luosifen, the river snail rice noodle soup…

This Qinhuangdao travel guide covers the coastal city of Qinhuangdao in Hebei, China, where the hills of the northeast flatten into the Bohai Sea and the Great Wall finally runs…