Lodging & Dining

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…

I ate my first bowl of thick, unsweetened plateau yogurt in Lhasa in September 2025, served in a wooden tub with a drizzle of local honey for RMB 15, and…

I spent three nights inside the walls of Pingyao in October 2025, sleeping in a converted courtyard residence that was older than the country I flew in from. The bed…

I slept in a canvas tent in the Tengger Desert in September 2025, and at 2 a.m. the sky was so dense with stars that I could read the camp’s…

I first understood the appeal of China houseboat stays the night I slept on a converted barge on Qiandao Lake in October 2025. The wind dropped after sunset, the water…

I have slept in a bamboo cabin on stilts in Moganshan and a raised wooden loft above a Xishuangbanna stream, and both nights taught me the same thing: China’s forest…

I have spent the last three springs chasing China’s calm water rather than its skyline, and the stays that stuck with me were the ones where I could roll out…

Ten years ago, recommending China ski resort hotels to a foreign client meant explaining that the “resorts” were mostly crowded beginner hills with concrete blockhouses for lodges. That has changed…