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.

Gansu · Dunhuang

Mogao Caves: The Site That Never Applied for a Rating

China's most famous grottoes hold no A-grade tourism rating at all. That absence is not an oversight, and following it leads to the real subject: a heritage site engineered to resist the act of visiting it.

12 min read

Hunan · Zhangjiajie

Zhangjiajie and Wulingyuan: Four Names, Four Different Places

A city renamed itself after a forest park, the forest park is only a fifth of the World Heritage site, and the World Heritage site has a different name again. Sorting that out is not pedantry—it decides which gate you queue at.

11 min read

Hunan · Zhangjiajie

Tianmen Mountain: The Other Mountain, and a Hole in It

Half the visitors who fly to Zhangjiajie think Tianmen Mountain and the Wulingyuan pillars are the same place. They are different rock, different tickets, different owners, and about an hour apart—and Tianmen is the one that sells engineering.

11 min read

Zhejiang · Hangzhou

West Lake: The Lake That Was Designed, Then Redesigned

Hangzhou's West Lake is not what geology left behind. It is a silting bay that a thousand years of governors, dredging corps and committees decided to keep open—which is exactly why UNESCO listed it as a cultural landscape rather than a natural one.

11 min read

Zhejiang · Hangzhou

Lingyin Temple: The Best Thing Here Is Outside the Gate

Almost everyone walks straight up to the temple. The irreplaceable thing at Lingyin is the limestone hill you pass on the way in, where five centuries of carvers left a sequence of Buddhist sculpture that ends with something almost nobody else in southern China has.

11 min read

Shanghai

Shanghai Disneyland: What Disney Gave Up to Get In

A Disney park with no Main Street, no perimeter railroad and no earthen berm, run by a company that owns 43 percent of it. On this map the concessions are the most interesting thing to read.

12 min read

Beijing

Universal Beijing: A Film Park for People Who Missed the Films

Twenty years of approvals, a resort footprint larger than Orlando's, and seven lands whose audiences arrived with wildly unequal knowledge of the movies. On opening day the queues told the story.

12 min read

Shanghai

The Bund: A Catalogue, Not a Skyline

The row on Zhongshan East First Road is not one building repeated. It is three generations of construction stacked along a mile of riverbank, a clock that has changed its tune four times, a ceiling that spent forty-one years under paint, and a promenade that is really a levee.

11 min read

Shanghai

The Huangpu River Cruise: Sixty Years Across the Water

A boat between two bridges crosses one river and two eras. The west bank stopped growing in the 1930s, the east bank started in 1990, and the working channel between them still carries the traffic that made both of them possible.

11 min read

Shanghai

Yu Garden: Three Places That Share One Name

Most people who say they have seen Yu Garden have not been inside it. The Ming private garden, the free bazaar wrapped around it and the Taoist temple next door are three institutions with three gates, and the confusion has four centuries of paperwork behind it.

11 min read

Shanghai

Oriental Pearl Tower: Built to Be Looked At

A broadcasting mast is a technical object. This one went up in a district that had no skyline yet, and its real commission was to give Pudong a face before Pudong had anything else to show.

11 min read

Shanghai

The Korean Provisional Government Site: A State in a Lane House

A three-storey stone-gate house off Madang Road held a government-in-exile for six years. Shanghai was only the first address on a list that ran through nine cities and did not end until 1945.

11 min read

Showing 145–156 of 246 guides