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.

Shaanxi · Xi'an

Datang Everbright City: A Street Built for a Dynasty

A 2,100-metre pedestrian street begun in 2002 and rebuilt in 2018 to look like the Tang, with a pagoda founded in 652 at its northern end and the line of Chang'an's outer wall at its southern one. The two ends are old. The street between them is not, and that is what makes it worth reading.

11 min read

Sichuan · Chengdu

Kuanzhai Alley: An Old Plan Holding New Buildings

Three lanes in Chengdu that keep the street grid of a Qing banner garrison, filled almost entirely with courtyards taken apart and rebuilt between 2005 and 2008. Of 944 households in the protected core, 110 stayed. The layout is inherited; nearly everything standing in it is not.

11 min read

Chongqing

Hongyadong: A 2006 Building That Speaks a Real Dialect

It is not an ancient town. It is a shopping complex that opened in September 2006, eleven storeys tall, climbing a 75-metre cliff between two city streets at different heights—and the vernacular it imitates is the one thing about it that is completely genuine.

11 min read

Liaoning · Dalian

Xinghai Square: A Hundred Hectares of Made Ground

Dalian's great civic space was a bay until the 1990s. It was filled with construction spoil, laid out as a circle whose diameters are dates, and paved with a thousand bronze footprints taken from a thousand real residents. Its subject is its own size, and the size claim needs checking.

11 min read

Guangdong · Guangzhou

Canton Tower: The Tower That Got Named Last

The shape was picked in 2004 and finished in 2009. The official name arrived on 28 September 2010, three days before the doors opened — by which time the city had already named it after the one part of the structure doing the most work.

11 min read

Guangdong · Guangzhou

The Pearl River Cruise: The Bank That Kept Moving

The reach the boats work is a record of a shoreline being pushed at a river. Two thousand years of foreign trade happened along it, each licensed quarter set a little further out onto the water, and the rock the river is named after now lies under a road.

11 min read

Shanghai

Xintiandi: The Shell Was Kept, the Contents Were Not

Two blocks of Shanghai lane houses whose brick walls and alley pattern were retained while every resident was moved out and every interior rebuilt. The method worked, was named after the project, and was copied across China.

11 min read

Shandong · Qingdao

Badaguan: The Rulebook Is the Architecture

Two hundred-odd villas in twenty-odd national styles, laid out under a 1930s Chinese municipal ordinance that capped site coverage, banned solid walls and gave each street a single species of tree. The rules, not the styles, are why it still looks like this.

11 min read

Hainan · Sanya

Sanya Bay: The City's Own Beach, and What It Cost

Twenty-two kilometres of free, ungated sand in front of a tropical city — the one bay in Sanya that belongs to nobody in particular, plus the reclaimed island that showed, in public and at length, what that arrangement costs to keep.

11 min read

Hainan · Sanya

Yalong Bay: Who Owns the Sand

A seven-kilometre crescent that was a State Council policy before it was a beach, ringed by international hotels — and a statute that says the water and the wet sand still belong to the state, which is the whole practical question here.

11 min read

Fujian · Xiamen

Gulangyu: No Cars, and a Great Many Pianos

Two things make this island different from anywhere else in China: nothing with an engine drives on it, and it is full of keyboard instruments. Neither is charm. Both are what is left of an administrative arrangement that ran from 1902 to 1945.

11 min read

Beijing

Beijing Zoo: A Farm That Kept Its Animals

China's oldest public zoo did not begin as a zoo. It began in 1906 as an agricultural experiment station set up under the late Qing reforms, with a menagerie attached, and the ground you walk on is still that reform project — gate, palace, halls and all.

11 min read

Showing 181–192 of 246 guides