Travel Guide

Trains that leave the country There’s a particular thrill to a train that crosses a border: you watch the landscape change, the language on the signs shift, and the paperwork…

There is no border post where you can simply show up and walk into the plateau. To set foot in Tibet, China as a foreign visitor you need paperwork arranged…

The metro gets the praise — and deserves some of it Every China city guide tells you to take the subway, and for good reason: it’s cheap, fast, and avoids…

Booking without the headache The single biggest mistake first-time riders make is assuming they can just show up and buy a ticket the way they would for a European intercity….

I flew into Chengdu and left out of Guilin on a three-week loop through Sichuan, Yunnan, Guizhou and Guangxi, and the thing that surprised me was how little these four…

There are more Buddhists in China than in any other country, and the country responds by hiding its best temples in places that have no business being tourist sites —…

We have travelled with four teenagers across this country over eight years — our own and other people’s — and the thing we have learned is that China is one…

Shanxi is the province that quietly holds the oldest buildings in China. Before any other place on this list, it gave the country the Hanging Temple bolted to a cliff,…

Most ten-day plans in this corner of southwest China pick one province and refuse to leave it. That is a mistake, and we have made it ourselves more than once….

China protects its wild places on a scale most visitors have no idea about: well over a thousand designated nature reserves on the mainland, and since 2021 a parallel system…