Cities

Foping (佛坪) is a small county tucked into the Qinling Mountains of southern Shaanxi Province, and it may be the easiest place in China to see a giant panda in…

Xinhua (新化) is a county in central Hunan Province that most foreign travelers have never heard of—and that is exactly why we love sending people there. Its claim to fame…

Jinchuan (金川) sits in the deep valleys of western Sichuan Province, where a narrow river corridor becomes, for a few short weeks each spring, one of the largest pear-blossom landscapes…

Menyuan (门源), in northern Qinghai Province, is one of the most underrated seasonal spectacles in northwest China. Each summer the county turns into a sea of yellow as tens of…

The first time we stood in a Lancang tea forest, the old trees were taller than the houses back home, and a Blang woman handed us a leaf to chew…

Most travelers race through Eryuan on the highway between Dali and Lijiang without realizing the county they’re crossing is the very place that feeds the famous lake ahead of them….

The first time we drove into Cangyuan, a Wa elder greeted us at a village gate with a wooden drum beat that seemed to come out of the ground itself….

Most people who drive the Anhui stretch between Huangshan and the Yangtze pass right through Shitai without stopping, and on our first scouting trip we nearly did the same. Then…

When travelers tell me they’re doing the classic Anhui loop — Huangshan, the Huizhou villages, maybe a Yangtze delta city — I always ask whether they’ve left a day for…

Most travelers blow through Dangyang without stopping, treating it as a blink-and-miss county between Yichang and Xiangyang, and that is a mistake we have spent years correcting. This small city…