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.

Zhejiang · Lishui

Xiandu: The Rock Column, the Emperor's Compliment and Nine Reopened Quarries

A rhyolite column stands free of every hill around it in a river valley in southern Zhejiang, and the height given for it changes with the document. In 748 an emperor renamed the whole mountain on the strength of one official's report of coloured cloud and music. Twelve centuries later a county with three thousand abandoned quarries hired an architect to turn nine of them into rooms.

15 min read

Zhejiang · Taizhou

Taizhou Prefectural City: The Wall That Is Still Load-Bearing

Most old Chinese city walls are monuments. This one is still equipment. When a typhoon comes up the Ling River, crews pack the gate openings of Linhai's Ming wall with sandbags — around 120,000 of them in one recent operation — and the fourteen-hundred-year-old flood defence goes back on duty.

15 min read

Zhejiang · Taizhou

Mount Tiantai: The Mountain That Exported a Religion

China's National Tourism Day falls on 19 May because that is the date, in 1613, on which a twenty-six-year-old opened a diary and walked into this mountain. Twelve centuries earlier a Japanese monk had walked out of it carrying the texts that became Tendai, and, if the shrines are right, a handful of tea seeds.

14 min read

Zhejiang · Taizhou

Shenxianju: The Bridge Nobody Believed In, and the Mountain Two Counties Claim

In late 2020 a Canadian astronaut posted a drone clip of a curling glass walkway suspended over a Zhejiang gorge, and a large part of the internet decided it was computer-generated. Snopes had to fact-check it. By then more than two hundred thousand people had already walked across.

14 min read

Zhejiang · Jiaxing

South Lake: A Replica Boat, and Six Dates for One Afternoon

The most-visited object in Jiaxing is a wooden pleasure boat built in 1959, reconstructed from one woman's memory of a boat she hired for a single day in 1921. Nobody pretends otherwise. What cannot be settled is which day it was: the candidates run from 31 July to 5 August, and five years of research narrowed them only to two.

14 min read

Zhejiang · Jiaxing

Xitang: A Town With a Roof Over Its River

The defining structure of this water town is a covered walkway along the riverbank, and its origin has no documentary record at all — only two folk stories, both hanging on the same pun. Behind it: 122 lanes, 27 bridges, a local god who gave away the emperor's grain, and villages making sixty billion buttons a year.

15 min read

Zhejiang · Ningbo

Tianyige: The House Rules That Kept a Library Alive for 400 Years

A retired Ming defence minister built a book tower in Ningbo in 1561 and left his sons a rule in eight characters: never divide the books, never let them leave the building. It held for two hundred years. Then an emperor asked to borrow some, and the borrowing never stopped.

15 min read

Zhejiang · Ningbo

Xikou and Tengtou: A Birthplace, a Buddha and a Model Village on One Ticket

In April 1949 Chiang Kai-shek came down from his mother's grave above Xikou, got into a boat on the Shan Stream, and never saw the mainland again. His salt-shop birthplace, the temple mountain behind it, and — a short drive away — a village that became nationally famous in the 1990s for its refusal of polluting factories are all bundled into a single 5A designation. Nothing connects them except the county line.

15 min read

Zhejiang · Hangzhou

Qiandao Lake: 1,078 Hilltops and Two Drowned County Seats

The islands are not islands. They are hilltops left uncovered when a valley in western Zhejiang was deliberately flooded in 1959 — and in the drowned country between them sit two former county capitals: one demolished first, one that ran out of time and is still standing, walls, gates and arches, twenty to sixty metres down.

14 min read

Zhejiang · Hangzhou

Xixi: The Wetland That Farmers Built and the City Bought Back

China's first national wetland park is not wilderness. The thousands of ponds are fish ponds, the reeds and persimmons are crop infrastructure, and between 2003 and 2017 more than four thousand households were moved out so the marsh could be restored. On the first Duanwu after the park opened, the dragon boat gathering was the thinnest anyone could remember — the rowers had been rehoused.

15 min read

Zhejiang · Wenzhou

Liu Bowen's Birthplace: The Strategist and the Prophet

A county in the mountains of southern Zhejiang is named after a compliment paid to a dead man 138 years after he died. The 5A area inside it is named after the man, and he exists twice over: Liu Ji, a Ming founding strategist who wrote satirical fables about corrupt officials, and Liu Bowen, a folk wizard credited with prophesying six hundred years of Chinese history and with laying out a city built thirty years after his death.

15 min read

Zhejiang · Wenzhou

Yandang: The Mountains You Cannot See From Outside

The man who invented Chinese landscape poetry governed this stretch of coast in the 420s and walked into every valley he could reach. He never mentioned these peaks. Six centuries later a Song scientist explained the omission — from outside the range there is nothing to look at — and then, in the same paragraph, worked out how the peaks had been made.

15 min read

Showing 229–240 of 246 guides