Cities

On the northeastern tip of Hainan, where the island begins to taper toward the open sea, sits Wenchang, a county level city that is equal parts rocket science and sleepy…

Most visitors to Hainan land in Haikou or Sanya and never venture to the northwest, where the island bends into a quieter, stranger shape. Danzhou sits on that curve, a…

Most foreign visitors to Sichuan fly into Chengdu and never look beyond the city limits. That is a mistake. A 30 minute high speed train ride north brings you to…

Liangshan is the part of Sichuan that the pandas-and-peppercorns travel brochures forget. Tucked in the south of the province, bordering Yunnan, it is a high, mountainous prefecture where the Yi…

Dehong is Yunnan at its most unexpected: a strip of tropical lowlands along the border with Myanmar, where palm trees replace pine, where the dominant culture is Dai (closely related…

When people picture Yunnan, they imagine the humid tropics of Xishuangbanna or the old streets of Lijiang. Zhaotong breaks that image completely. Tucked into the northeastern corner of the province,…

Tongren sits in the quiet corner where Qinghai meets Gansu, a small city that most foreign visitors have never heard of and almost none plan to see. That is exactly…

Most foreign travelers racing along the Silk Road skip Jiuquan entirely, treating it as a blur of Gobi desert between Lanzhou and Dunhuang. That is a mistake. Jiuquan is the…

Zhuzhou sits in eastern Hunan, about 50 km south of Changsha, where the Xiang River meets the Lishui. Most foreign travelers have never heard of it, which is exactly why…

When travelers think of Guangxi, the image is usually Guilin’s misty peaks or Yangshuo’s rivers. Baise, far to the west of the region, offers a wilder, less-polished version of that…