When China gets cheaper, the itinerary is often getting better, not worse. A station hall that had been a wall of backpacks can suddenly show floor tiles again once the holiday rush passes. A hotel desk that was moving passports...Read More
It is just past eleven at night at London Heathrow when a couple rolls their cases up to the Air China desk. On paper their China tour has not started — the brochure says Day 1 is tomorrow afternoon in...Read More
Jiaohe at Sunset: Where Turpan’s Ancient Fortress Turns Into a Stage At the end of a Turpan [TOOR-pan] day, when the heat finally begins to leave the ground, Jiaohe Ancient City stops reading like a ruin and starts reading like...Read More
No sign out front. Plastic stools on the sidewalk, a handwritten menu taped to a greasy wall, and a line of people in office clothes waiting for a table that seats four. Your instinct says keep walking. Every local’s instinct...Read More
The eyes reach you before the face does. Ten centimetres of bronze cylinder project outward from each socket, aimed at whoever stands in the dim gallery light. Nothing in this face invites warmth — and nothing else in Chinese art,...Read More
Stand at the base of the gorge and the Hanging Temple barely registers — a scatter of wooden buildings clinging to a wall of grey and ochre stone so vast that the halls and walkways look no larger than birdhouses...Read More
At seven in the morning in Chengdu, a man in a white undershirt is already in his bamboo chair, lidded tea bowl beside him, mahjong tiles clicking. Three hundred kilometers east in Chongqing, a porter is hauling a refrigerator up...Read More
At Liziba in Chongqing, phones are already up. A few hundred people crowd the viewing platform, all facing the same 19-storey apartment block — then a Line 2 monorail slides out of the eighth floor on rubber tires, almost silent,...Read More
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