I tell travelers who’ve done the famous walls of the north that Linhai will quietly correct their assumptions. This county-level city in southeast Zhejiang was the old prefectural seat of…
Most travelers blow through Zhuji on the train and never know what they missed. I almost did, the first time, treating it as a change at Shaoxing — until a…
Most visitors to the Yangtze delta never hear the river before they see it. I mean that literally: the Qiantang River tidal bore arrives as a wall of white water…
If you’ve only ever seen Zhejiang as the West Lake and the canals of Hangzhou, Anji is the province’s green lung, and it surprised me the first time I drove…
A Yiwu travel guide has to begin with a number that sounds fake until you stand in it: the International Trade City covers more than 5.5 million square meters across…
Suihua (绥化) is the least glamorous place I recommend, and I recommend it often. It is an agricultural prefecture on the Songnen Plain an hour north of Harbin, sitting on…
I went to Wuhai (乌海) the first time for grapes, which sounds absurd for a coal-and-chemicals city in the far west of Inner Mongolia. But the sums make sense once…
The first time I sent clients to Shizuishan (石嘴山) I got it wrong. I booked them into the old riverside district, and they spent two days commuting past slag heaps…
Yunfu (云浮) was a working stop for me long before it was a leisure one. I used to pass through on stone-trade business — this is the city that cuts…
I first stopped in Duyun (都匀) by accident. A client’s flight into Guiyang landed too late to push on to the Libo karst parks, and I needed a town with…