Cities

There is a line etched into the memory of tens of millions of overseas Chinese: “Ask where you come from, and the answer is the Great Locust Tree at Hongtong.”…

Most travelers who plan a Fujian trip fixate on the tulou round houses or the coastal buzz of Xiamen, and they sail right past a walled river city that historians…

Far south in Zhejiang, where the province bumps against Fujian, lies a mountainous county that most foreign travelers have never heard of and that Chinese architecture lovers revere. A Taishun…

In the hills of northern Guizhou, along a slow red river, sits a small city that produces the most famous spirit in China. A Renhuai Maotai town guide is a…

Most visitors to Guangxi never reach its southwestern edge, where the hills give way to the Vietnam border and a single stone gate has witnessed a thousand years of trade,…

When most foreign travelers picture Guangxi, they imagine the postcard karst of Guilin and the lazy rivers of Yangshuo. A proper Jingxi travel guide, however, points you to the far…

The road from Kashgar to Tashkurgan, Xinjiang, China climbs so steadily that I did not notice I was already above 3,000 meters until the poplar trees gave way to bare…

I almost skipped Wulong, Chongqing, China on my first Sichuan–Chongqing loop. I am glad I didn’t. This county, two hours southeast of central Chongqing, holds some of the most theatrical…

The first time I stepped off the train in Yangshuo, Guangxi, China, I expected a sleepy riverside town. What I found instead was a place where the karst peaks rise…

A quick note before the details, because the name tricks people: this guide is about Hainan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Qinghai, China — an inland prefecture on the northeastern edge of…