Cities

At half past six on a warm evening the whole street starts to smoke at once. Every table has its own small charcoal grill sunk into the middle, and on…

Climb the steps of Beigu Mountain at seven in the morning and the Yangtze below you is a sheet of grey tin, barges sliding downstream in single file, the pavilion…

Climb the ridge road south of Xingyi at eight in the morning and the valley below looks like a mistake in the landscape: several thousand near-identical green cones, each a…

Kaili itself will not seduce you. It is a workmanlike prefecture capital of concrete blocks and noodle shops spread across a bowl of green hills, and most travellers who arrive…

At Dashanpu, on the eastern edge of Zigong, a museum has been built directly on top of a fossil bed and the floor has simply been left open. You walk…

Stand on the embankment at Hejiang Gate at dusk and you can watch two rivers become one: the grey, silt-heavy Jinsha coming down off the Tibetan plateau, the clearer green…

For a thousand years Yangzhou was one of the richest cities in China, a salt-trade capital where the Grand Canal meets the Yangtze. Poets wrote about its moonlit bridges; merchants…

There is nowhere else in China quite like Manzhouli. Pastel façades with onion domes line the main street, shop signs run in Chinese, Russian and Mongolian, and a 30-metre matryoshka…

Step off the train in Yanji and the first thing you notice is the signage: every shopfront, street sign and bus stop carries Korean script above the Chinese. This is…

Most travelers arrive in Tai’an for one reason: the mountain that rises straight out of the city’s northern edge. Mount Tai (Taishan) is the foremost of China’s Five Great Mountains,…