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 on a cliff face. Hanging Temple [shwen-KOHNG suh] (悬空寺, the tri-faith cliff monastery near Datong) is...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 a hillside staircase on a bamboo pole. Both cities share peppers, dialect, and mahjong — […]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, while laundry hangs on the balconies above. The crowd reacts the same way every time: […]Read More
In 1718, the Qing court stationed a thousand soldiers in Chengdu [CHUNG-doo] and forbade them from doing any civilian work. So they drank tea, raised songbirds, and perfected doing nothing productive — and the garrison lanes now known as Kuanzhai Alley are where it all started. Kangxi Sent Soldiers. Chengdu Got a Lifestyle. The story […]Read More
At 7:15 on a Wednesday morning, the crowd outside the South Gate is already three hundred deep. Parents wrestle strollers into position, selfie sticks telescope upward, and a child on someone’s shoulders shrieks the moment the first panda appears twenty metres away, chewing bamboo sideways with the focus of someone who could not care less about...Read More
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