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.

Jiangsu · Changzhou

Tianmu Lake: The Reservoir That Became a Lake

Jiangsu's most photographed stretch of water is a flood-control dam, dug by hand during a famine, on top of a village called Shanya Bridge. The bamboo sea, the hot spring and the most famous soup in Changzhou are all downstream of that decision.

13 min read

Jiangsu · Changzhou

China Dinosaurs Park: The Province With Zero Dinosaurs

Jiangsu has never yielded a single dinosaur fossil. Changzhou built a 5A theme park around one anyway — and the specimen at its centre is the one that settled where birds came from.

14 min read

Jiangsu · Changzhou

Yancheng: Three Walls, Three Moats and No Owner

The only surviving triple-ringed earthwork city of the Spring and Autumn period anywhere in the world sits in suburban Changzhou. Ninety years of archaeology have not established whose it was.

14 min read

Jiangsu · Lianyungang

Mount Huaguo: The Monkey King's Island, Now Attached to China

When Wu Cheng'en climbed this mountain it stood alone in the Yellow Sea, exactly as Journey to the West describes. Then the Yellow River filled in the channel and the island became a hill.

14 min read

Jiangsu · Lianyungang

Lian Island: A Han Border Stone at the Top of the Beach

At the edge of Jiangsu's largest bathing beach, sixty characters cut into a rock face divide two commanderies of the Han empire — and allocate the sea between them. It is the only firmly dated Han boundary inscription in China.

14 min read

Jiangsu · Yancheng

Dafeng Milu Park: Twelve Deer and Their Descendants

Every Père David's deer alive on earth descends from a handful of animals that survived in an English duke's park after the species vanished from China. On the Yancheng coast, 8,502 of them are back, and more than three thousand of those are wild.

15 min read

Jiangsu · Nantong

Haohe: The Moat Around China's First Modern City

Ten kilometres of tenth-century water still ring the old town of Nantong. Inside and along it stands almost everything one man built between 1895 and 1926 — the first public museum founded by Chinese, the first mills, the first public parks — which is why a group of scholars decided this was where modern China began.

15 min read

Jiangsu · Xuzhou

Yunlong Lake: Twenty Months of Su Shi

Xuzhou gave China two dynastic founders and was fought over for three thousand years. Its one 5A scenic area commemorates a poet who was posted here for twenty months, held off the Yellow River, wrote an essay about a hermit's pet cranes, and found the coal.

14 min read

Jiangsu · Taizhou

Qinhu: The Day After Qingming

Every year, the day after the tomb-sweeping festival, boats from two hundred villages converge on one lake in central Jiangsu to make offerings to soldiers who died eight hundred years ago and whose names nobody knows. The boats are ordinary cargo boats, dressed for one day and stripped again afterwards.

15 min read

Jiangsu · Huai'an

Zhou Enlai's Huai'an: The House He Wanted Pulled Down

For twenty years the premier of China sent instructions to Huai'an about the courtyard he was born in. Do not preserve it. Do not let visitors in. Do not repair it when it breaks. He also had his family's graves flattened. The site is now a 5A scenic area of just over three square kilometres.

15 min read

Jiangsu · Suqian

Hongze Lake: The Wetland That Was Engineered

One hundred and ninety-four species of bird, a thousand and eight varieties of lotus, and a reed maze on the northwest shallows of China's fourth-largest freshwater lake. The lake is not natural. It was raised above the surrounding farmland on purpose, in the sixteenth century, to keep the Grand Canal working — and in 1680 it drowned a city of nine hundred and forty-five years.

15 min read

Zhejiang · Lishui

Yunhe Terraces: Seven Hundred Tiers and a County Built to Police a Mine

A National Wetland Park with no lake in it, 1,200 metres of vertical drop between its lowest paddy and its highest, and a county that exists at all because in the 1440s several thousand illegal silver miners went into these mountains and did not come out quietly. The terraces are older than the county. Nobody can say by how much.

15 min read

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