Cities

Golmud (格尔木) is the town most foreign travelers pass through without meaning to. It is the last real city before the Qinghai–Tibet railway climbs onto the roof of the world,…

Most foreign travelers who make it to Qinghai stop at Qinghai Lake and call it a trip. We’ve sent clients far past that line, and the ones who went all…

Xinyu (新余) is the kind of Chinese city that rarely appears on foreign itineraries, which is precisely why it works as a relaxed stop. A mid-sized industrial city in central…

Here is the first thing every client needs to hear: this Suzhou (Anhui) travel guide is not about the canal city near Shanghai. That famous Suzhou is in Jiangsu. The…

Most foreign travelers have never heard of Lu’an (六安), and that is exactly why we send clients there. Tucked into the western foothills of the Dabie Mountains in Anhui province,…

I went to Huangshi (黄石) in October 2025 because I was curious about a Chinese city that admits what it is: a steel-and-mine town on the Yangtze that is now…

I went to Jingmen (荆门) in October 2025 because I wanted a Hubei that sat quietly between the Wuhan buzz and the tourist trails of the Yangtze gorges. Jingmen is…

Guigang is one of those Guangxi cities that sits on the map between bigger names and gets skipped. I stopped there in June 2025 on a river-bound loop and found…

Guangxi has famous names, Guilin, Yangshuo, Nanning, but the trip I keep recommending to friends who want to dodge crowds is Laibin. I went in May 2025 after a reader…

When people think of Guangxi, they picture Guilin’s peaks or Yangshuo’s rivers, and I love those places too. But on a trip in May 2025 I kept going east to…