Cities

Most visitors to China’s northeast chase the Ice Festival in Harbin or the snow town of Xuexiang. In our experience, the travelers who remember the trip most fondly are the…

Ask most foreign travelers to name a destination in Inner Mongolia and they will say Hohhot or the Hulunbuir grasslands. In our experience, though, the small county of Ergun in…

Most foreign visitors first hear the name Nagqu as a train stop between Xining and Lhasa, and then never get off. In our experience sending travelers along the Qinghai-Tibet railway,…

Most visitors to Hainan never leave the coast, which is exactly why Baoting rewards the ones who do. This green, mountainous county in the interior of the island is home…

Dongxing is a small, sunlit border city in southern Guangxi, separated from Vietnam by the narrow Beilun River and linked to the town of Mong Cai by a single cross-border…

Suifenhe is a compact, intensely Russian-flavored border city in southeastern Heilongjiang, where the railway from Vladivostok climbs over the watershed into China. Walk the main street and you will hear…

Erenhot sits at the northern edge of Inner Mongolia, a dusty, wind-scoured border town where the Gobi Desert meets the railway line to Mongolia. Most foreign travelers have never heard…

Jiangyin is a county-level city on the southern bank of the Yangtze, squeezed between Wuxi and the river’s mouth. Most visitors rush past on the highway or the high-speed line…

Zhoukou sits in the southeast of Henan Province, a flat, wheat-and-maize plain stitched together by the Shahe and Ying rivers. It is not on the standard China tourist circuit, and…

Anhui is better known for Huangshan and the ancient villages of the south, so most travelers skip the province’s north entirely. That’s a mistake, and Huaibei is the quiet proof….