Cities

I’ll be honest with you: before my first trip to Chengdu in 2014, I thought it was just “that place with the pandas.” I was wrong, and happily so. Chengdu…

Forty years ago there was no city here worth marking on a map — just a scatter of fishing villages along the Pearl River Delta. Today Shenzhen is a metropolis…

Most visitors to northern China build their trip around Beijing and call it a day. They’re missing something. A proper Tianjin travel guide should start with a simple fact: this…

Most travelers flying into China never make it past Beijing and Xi’an. That’s a shame, because about 350 km west of Beijing sits a dusty, underrated city that holds two…

Most Chinese towns wear their history in fragments — a repaired gate here, a rebuilt temple there. Pingyao is different. Step through its south gate and you walk into a…

Some cities wear their history like a badge. Macau, China wears it like a layered coat — Portuguese church bells over a Cantonese street market, neon casino towers rising behind…

The first thing you notice in Lhasa, Tibet, China isn’t a building or a view — it’s the air. Thin, dry, and somehow brighter than anywhere else you’ve stood. At…

Stand on the cracked earth of the Jiaohe ruins at dawn and you feel it immediately — Turpan, Xinjiang, China is a place where the desert tried to win and…

Most travelers hit Fenghuang on the way to somewhere louder. That’s a mistake. Tucked into the hills of western Hunan, this riverside town of wooden stilt houses (diaojiaolou) is one…

There’s a moment, somewhere around minus twenty, when your breath hangs in the air like smoke and the whole world goes blue and white. That’s the Harbin Ice Festival. Every…