Cities

We started steering travelers to Jixi (绩溪) because it is the one place where you can still read the whole Huizhou merchant story in the buildings, not just in a…

We first sent travelers to Yuexi (岳西县) as a quiet backup plan when Huangshan tickets sold out for the October holiday, and it has since become one of our favorite…

Zhejiang is sold to the world as canals, tea hills, and the boutique lanes of Hangzhou. All true — and all at low altitude. Push southwest toward the Fujian border,…

Shanxi’s south is a corridor of history so dense that a single county can hold a Tang-dynasty tower, a temple that inspired China’s most famous love story, and a set…

Most people who talk about the Taihang Mountains have only seen them from the plain, a blue smear on the southern horizon. To actually stand inside them, you go to…

Shanxi is usually sold to travelers as temples, cave dwellings, and the wartime merchants’ mansions of Pingyao. All true, and all at lower altitude than most visitors expect. Push southeast…

Most travelers who fly into Chongqing never leave the hot, noisy haze of the river-city proper. That is a mistake we have corrected for hundreds of readers. Two hours northeast…

Most travelers meet Wushan (巫山) through a porthole — it’s a marquee stop on the classic Yangtze cruise between Chongqing and Yichang. But Wushan, a county in Chongqing’s far northeast…

When people say “Chongqing,” they usually mean the fog-wrapped megacity of bridges and hotpot. But Chongqing is a municipality the size of a small province, and its southeastern corner —…

Most visitors to Hubei never leave the Yangtze corridor between Wuhan and the Three Gorges, which is exactly why Xuan’en (宣恩) stays so genuinely itself. Tucked into the hills of…