Arts & Traditions Three materials so bound to China that one gave the country its very name in English. The story of silk, jade, and porcelain is the story of how Chinese craft conquered the world — and how to appreciate it today. Some materials are so completely bound to a single civilization that they … Read more
Arts & Traditions Lanterns and dragon boats, mooncakes and fireworks, the largest human migration on earth — China’s traditional festivals are windows into the culture’s deepest values. Here’s when they happen and how to experience them. To witness a Chinese festival is to see the culture with its heart on full display. These are not … Read more
Arts & Traditions Painted faces, soaring falsetto, acrobatic battles, and costumes of impossible splendor — Chinese opera can bewilder a first-timer. A little decoding turns it into one of the world’s great spectacles. A newcomer’s first encounter with Chinese opera is often equal parts dazzled and baffled. The stage blazes with color — performers in … Read more
Arts & Traditions Acupuncture, herbal formulas, qi, and a 2,000-year-old theory of the body — TCM shapes daily life for a fifth of humanity. Here’s a clear, balanced look at what it is, where it comes from, and what science actually says. Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is one of the world’s oldest continuously practiced healing … Read more
Arts & Traditions In China, handwriting is the highest visual art — ranked above painting, revealing character, cultivated for a lifetime. Here’s why a black mark on white paper can carry so much meaning. In the West, we tend to treat handwriting as a utility — a way to get words down, judged mostly by … Read more
Travel & Destinations Palm-fringed tropical islands, sacred Buddhist isles, colonial port towns, and a coastline of over 14,000 kilometers — China’s seaside is a whole holiday country that foreign visitors almost entirely overlook. Ask a foreign traveler to picture China and they’ll conjure the Great Wall, terracotta warriors, misty mountains, neon megacities — almost never … Read more
Travel & Destinations Few places carry as much mythology as Tibet. Setting the fantasies aside, what is it actually like to travel there today — the altitude, the monasteries, the permits, the practicalities? An honest, practical guide. Perhaps no place on earth is more thickly wrapped in mythology than Tibet. For over a century, outside … Read more
Travel & Destinations Across one river, a century of history: colonial facades on one bank, a skyline from the future on the other. Shanghai is the world’s great study in how a city holds its past and its tomorrow at once. Stand on Shanghai’s Bund at dusk and you are standing inside the city’s central … Read more
Travel & Destinations Snow peaks and rice terraces, ancient tea forests and mud-brick villages, twenty-five ethnic groups and a slower way of life — Yunnan is the China most travelers never reach, and the one many love most. In China’s far southwest, wedged against Tibet, Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam, lies a province that feels like … Read more
Travel & Destinations The misty peaks in classical Chinese scroll paintings aren’t stylized fantasy — they’re real places you can stand in. Meet the karst pinnacles, sacred mountains, and rainbow ranges that shaped an entire artistic tradition. Anyone who has seen a classical Chinese landscape painting knows the imagery: jagged peaks rising like teeth from … Read more