Travel articles
Practical, on-the-ground stories and guides written by people who have been there.
Your First Week in China: A Practical Checklist
Payments, SIM cards, metro passes and the small things nobody tells you before you land.
Booking High-Speed Rail Tickets as a Foreigner
Passport rules, seat classes and why you should arrive 45 minutes early.
Chengdu: The City Where Doing Nothing Is the Day's Plan
Chengdu runs on its own clock — bamboo chairs in a teahouse at 10 a.m., pandas napping by 9, and a hotpot that will hurt you if you don't order half-and-half. It's the one Chinese city where skipping an attraction is a legitimate itinerary choice.
Beijing at 6 A.M.: The City Before the Tour Buses Arrive
Everyone tells you to see the Forbidden City. Nobody tells you to get up at six. That's when Beijing is actually Beijing — tai chi under the pines at the Temple of Heaven, jianbing on a hutong corner, and an empty city wall you can cycle.
Shanghai Is Two Cities: The One Across the River and the One Under the Plane Trees
Stand on the Bund and Shanghai looks like glass and ambition. Walk twenty minutes inland and it's plane trees, wet markets, and a soup dumpling that will burn you if you rush. Most visitors only see one of these. The trick is refusing to choose.
Under the Plane Trees: Nanjing, the Capital That Keeps Listening
Nanjing means 'southern capital', and it has been one six times over. What you remember isn't a monument but a green tunnel of century-old plane trees, a complete Ming city wall you can walk, and a painted boat on the Qinhuai River after dark.
Shenzhen Is Not Soulless: Forty Years, and a City That Built Itself
Everyone calls Shenzhen soulless — a fishing village that became a tech metropolis in forty years, with no old town to show for it. That's half right. Spend three days off the skyline and you find electronics markets, a 600-year-old fortress, and some of China's most relaxed street food.
Three Days in Changsha: Too Spicy to Leave, Too Good to Go Home
Changsha is not a city for ticking off every landmark. It exists for your stomach and your night owl habits — rice noodles, crayfish, and cups of milk tea under neon on Jiefangxi. This is not a standard guide; it's a record from a traveler who just finished his third bowl of fen.
I Finally Understood Chinese Painting on a Boat Down the Li River
Guilin and Yangshuo explain why Chinese landscape painting looks the way it does: karst peaks shooting straight out of the plain, bamboo rafts drifting past water buffalo, and the exact view printed on the back of a 20-yuan note. There's no metro here — the transport is a boat, a bicycle and a bus.