Changzhou has an image problem: guidebooks file it as “the city between Nanjing and Suzhou with the dinosaur park”. True, and it undersells the place. Within forty minutes of the…
In the 760s Lu Yu settled in the hills west of the city, walked the tea gardens and springs, and wrote the first book on tea. Twelve centuries later the…
Here is a fact that reorganises most people’s mental map of eastern China: Wuzhen and Xitang, the two water towns half of Shanghai’s visitors day-trip to, are both administratively part…
The first thing you notice is the width of the roads. Baotou was laid out in the 1950s around a new steelworks by planners who assumed the city would grow…
The 6pm auction at Shenjiamen is the loudest room in Zhejiang. Crates of hairtail come off the boats still stiff with cold, buyers shout numbers nobody outside the trade understands,…
At 5:40 in the morning on the ridge above Chongtou, the valley below has disappeared. Cloud sits in it like milk in a bowl, and the only things breaking the…
In the winter of 1128 a man named Kong Duanyou fled south with the collapsing Song court, carrying his family’s most precious possession: a portrait of his ancestor, Confucius, painted…
Lie flat on your back on a plank boat, hands folded on your chest, and a boatman hauls you on a rope through a gap in the rock with maybe…
On a wet April morning at Guoqing Temple the only sounds are water running off camphor leaves and an elderly monk sweeping the same three metres of flagstone he has…
The Yi River runs through the middle of this city almost a kilometre wide, and on a summer evening the entire population seems to be walking along it — grandmothers…