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.

Shandong · Qingdao

Tsingtao Brewery Museum: A City's Identity Document

One brewery on Dengzhou Road changed hands three times in forty-two years, kept a spelling that China officially abolished in 1964, and now runs a museum whose corridor looks down on a production line that is still running.

11 min read

Hunan · Xiangxi

Fenghuang: A Garrison Rebuilt as a Photograph

A Qing military seat on the Tuo River, a novel set in a different county that everyone attributes to it, a Ming border wall renamed the Southern Great Wall in April 2000, and three years in which walking down the main street cost 148 yuan.

11 min read

Yunnan · Lijiang

Lijiang: The Town Rebuilt Into a World Heritage Site

At 19:14 on 3 February 1996 an earthquake wrecked the Lijiang basin. What the province and the World Bank decided to rebuild, and what they decided to demolish, is the reason the old town was inscribed twenty-two months later — and the reason its water still runs.

11 min read

Sichuan · Aba

Jiuzhaigou: The Colour Is a Deposit, and the Earthquake Edited It

The blue-green is calcium carbonate coming out of solution, not minerals dissolved in the water. Understand that, and both the scenery and the 2017 earthquake that drained one of its lakes become readable.

11 min read

Sichuan · Chengdu

Chengdu Panda Base: A Breeding Institute That Sells Tickets

It began in 1987 with six pandas rescued from a bamboo famine, and it is still a research institution first. Everything that frustrates visitors, the early hours, the sleeping animals, the closed nursery, follows from that.

11 min read

Zhejiang · Zhoushan

Putuoshan: The Buddhist Mountain You Can Only Reach by Boat

Twelve and a half square kilometres of island, the only one of China's four sacred Buddhist mountains that sits in the sea, and a founding legend about a Japanese monk whose ship would not leave. Every part of this place is shaped by the crossing.

11 min read

Heilongjiang · Harbin

Harbin Ice and Snow World: A City Built to Melt

A park the size of a district is cut out of the Songhua River each December, assembled in about fifteen days by roughly ten thousand people, and abandoned to the thaw. That schedule is also why it holds no national scenic rating.

11 min read

Heilongjiang · Harbin

Central Street, Harbin: A Concession You Can Walk On

The street is 21.34 metres wide because that is exactly ten Russian sazhen. It was called China Street because that is where the Chinese labourers lived. The granite was laid in 1924 by frontage owners who were billed for it. None of this is atmosphere; it is administration, and it is still underfoot.

12 min read

Heilongjiang · Harbin

Saint Sophia, Harbin: A Church That Stopped Being One

A regimental timber chapel, moved and re-erected in twenty days. Bricked around in 1912. Rebuilt in masonry by 1932. Closed, warehoused, and walled in by apartment blocks. Then a demolition programme gave it a square and a new job: it is a municipal architecture museum, and there is a scale model of Harbin under the dome.

12 min read

Heilongjiang · Harbin

Siberian Tiger Park: The Gene Bank That Sells Tickets

Harbin's tiger park is two institutions in one body: a forty-year captive breeding programme that calls itself a source-stock reserve, and a paid attraction where visitors feed predators through a port in a caged bus. The gap between them is the subject.

11 min read

Guangxi · Guilin

The Li River: A Cross-Section of Karst in the Act of Changing

The 83 kilometres everyone books between Guilin and Yangshuo is not simply a pretty river. It is the stretch where one kind of limestone landscape is turning into another, and where the water level, not the season, decides whether a boat sails at all.

11 min read

Guangxi · Guilin

Yangshuo: The County Town That Was Rebuilt Twice by Outsiders

A small county seat at the end of the Li River cruise was remade in the 1980s and 1990s by foreign backpackers and climbers, and then remade again after most of them left. Both rebuildings are still legible on the same street.

11 min read

Showing 157–168 of 246 guides