Destinations

Places with stories worth hearing

Each guide is adapted from a LoreLens audio narration — the same stories the app tells you on location, in article form for your planning.

Chongqing · Yangtze River

Qutang Gorge: The Landscape on the 10-Yuan Note

The shortest of the Three Gorges is also the most dramatic — a river squeezed to a hundred meters between kilometer-high cliffs, guarded by a fortress where an emperor died of heartbreak.

5 min read

Chongqing · Yangtze River

Fengdu Ghost City: Visit the Afterlife, Come Back Alive

For two thousand years, Chinese imagination has located the capital of the dead on this one mountain — complete with courts, passports, and paperwork. It all began with a pun.

4 min read

Chongqing · City

Liziba: The Train That Runs Through an Apartment Building

Every few minutes in Chongqing, a full-sized metro train flies straight through the middle of a 19-story residential tower. It was designed that way — and the reason is the city itself.

4 min read

Chongqing · Yangtze River

The Hanging Coffins of the Yangtze

A hundred meters above the river, wedged into cliff crevices, wooden coffins have hung for over two thousand years. Who put them there — and how — is one of China's great mysteries.

5 min read

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Shandong · Sacred Mountains

Mount Tai: The Mountain Emperors Climbed to Talk to Heaven

For over two thousand years, when a Chinese emperor wanted to prove his right to rule, he climbed this mountain. Confucius climbed it. Poets climbed it. Tonight, thousands will climb it in the dark — to catch the sunrise.

6 min read

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Beijing · Great Wall

Juyongguan: The Great Wall's Front Door to Beijing

Every army that ever wanted Beijing had to solve the same problem: a narrow mountain valley sealed by one fortress. Genghis Khan solved it. Most didn't. This is the pass the capital lived and died by.

6 min read

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Hubei · Yangtze River

Three Gorges Dam: The Wall That Tamed the Yangtze

The world's largest power station began as one line in a poem and one sentence in a 1919 plan. A century, 1.3 million relocated people and 28 million cubic meters of concrete later — here it is.

6 min read