Lodging & Dining

Quanzhou was the great port of the Maritime Silk Road, and its old town still hums with the food of a thousand years of trade — Fujianese, Southeast Asian, and…

Kunming is the gateway to Yunnan, and its food is the most botanically playful in China — they eat flowers, foraged mushrooms, and a dizzying range of rice noodles. I’ve…

I caught my first breath of Xining at 2,275 metres and immediately understood the food: at this altitude, you eat for warmth and fuel. Qinghai sits on the Tibetan plateau’s…

I flew into Haikou expecting beach food and found something gentler: an island kitchen built on coconut, free-range chicken, and the cleanest seafood I’ve eaten in southern China. Hainan’s food…

I arrived in Luoyang on a grey March afternoon with one mission: eat my way through the cradle of Chinese civilization. Henan sits at the geographic heart of China, and…

A proper Hubei cuisine guide has to start with a correction. Most foreign visitors who “eat Hubei food” have actually only eaten Wuhan food — the hot dry noodles and…

When clients email me asking about the best hotels in Dalian, I almost never start with a name. I start with a map. Dalian is a long, narrow peninsula city…

Most visitors treat the Great Wall as a half-day detour from the capital. I did the same on my first trip in 2015, arriving at Badaling with a bus tour,…

Before I ate in Guizhou I thought Sichuan owned Chinese spice. Then a bowl of sour soup in Kaili rewired my taste buds toward tart, funky, and fermented. This Guizhou…

People land in Chengdu expecting one thing — fire — and leave confused because the food is also sour, sweet, nutty, and weirdly fragrant. After eating my way across the…