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.

Sichuan · Leshan

Mount Emei: The Mountain That Gets Newer as You Climb

Five climate bands stacked from subtropical forest to subalpine shrub, a bodhisattva who has been here since the Song dynasty, and a Golden Summit whose gold was consecrated in 2006. The oldest object on the mountain is halfway down it.

11 min read

Sichuan · Leshan

Leshan Giant Buddha: Carved for a River, Not a View

A 71-metre Maitreya cut into soft red sandstone over roughly ninety years, aimed at a three-river confluence that wrecked boats. The hidden gutters in its hair are why it is still there. Its face is not the one the Tang carvers left.

11 min read

Hubei · Shiyan

Wudang Mountains: A Mountain Built to a Script

An emperor with a legitimacy problem spent a decade putting a god's biography onto a Hubei mountainside. The road from the stone gate to the bronze hall on the summit is not a walk that grew; it is a sequence somebody wrote.

12 min read

Tibet · Lhasa

Potala Palace: One Silhouette, Two Buildings

The most reproduced outline in China is the sum of two jobs. The white part was a residence and a government; the red part is a set of tomb chapels. Once you know which is which, the whole hill becomes readable.

12 min read

Hubei · Xianning

Red Cliffs: The Battle Site and the Famous Poem Are Not the Same Place

Two cliffs in Hubei answer to the name. The one with the 5A gate is the leading candidate for the battle of 208; the one that produced the most quoted lines ever written about that battle almost certainly is not, and the poet who wrote them said so himself, in a letter, in 1083.

11 min read

Jiangsu · Yangzhou

Slender West Lake and Daming Temple: Salt Money, and the Monk Who Went to Japan

A city moat that salt merchants turned into a five-kilometre garden scroll, and on the ridge at its head a temple that sent a blind monk across the sea on his sixth attempt — and that now holds a memorial hall copied from the building he founded in Nara.

11 min read

Hainan · Sanya

Nanshan: A Temple Built in 1995, and a Tang Record That Holds

The Guanyin park on Hainan's south coast is routinely sold as an ancient monastery. It broke ground on 11 November 1995. The Tang monk it commemorates really was blown onto this coast in 748, and the account of that is better than the legend built on it.

11 min read

Heilongjiang · Harbin

The An Jung-geun Memorial Hall: A Museum That Keeps Moving

Two marks on a platform at Harbin Station, five or six paces apart, have not moved since 1909. The building that explains them has been built, removed, rebuilt and relocated four times, and the grave the man asked for has never been found.

11 min read

Chongqing

The Chongqing Provisional Government Site: Everything but Recognition

Five grey-brick buildings on a slope at Lianhuachi, the largest surviving site of Korea's government-in-exile. Here it acquired an army, a head of state and a declaration of war against Japan, and still went home in 1945 as private individuals.

11 min read

Shanghai

Lu Xun Park: Three Histories on One Piece of Ground

A sports ground laid out beside a rifle range for the International Settlement, the site of a bombing in April 1932, and the grave of a writer moved here in 1956. Most visitors see one of the three.

12 min read

Jilin · Yanbian

Yun Dong-ju's House at Mingdong: A Poet Three Countries Claim

A Korean-language poet was born in a village in Jilin, studied in Pyongyang, Seoul and Kyoto, and died in a prison in Fukuoka in 1945. Korea, China and Japan each commemorate him, and they do not mean the same thing by it.

12 min read

Shanghai

Xisha and Mingzhu Lake: Ground That Is Not Finished

Shanghai's newest 5A scenic area sits on an island that first broke the surface in the Tang dynasty, drowned its own county seat five times, and has doubled in size since 1950. The name on the gate belongs to a shoal that sank six hundred years ago.

11 min read

Showing 193–204 of 246 guides