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 · Huzhou

Nanxun: The Water Town That Ranked Its Millionaires as Elephants, Oxen and Dogs

Nineteenth-century Nanxun sorted its silk fortunes into a zoological league table — four elephants at the top, eight oxen below them, seventy-two dogs after that. The money came from one thread, spun in a village outside town, and it bought French etched glass, a garden that took three generations to finish, and a library built ten years after the region lost its greatest one.

14 min read

Zhejiang · Shaoxing

Lu Xun's Shaoxing and Shen Garden: One Ticket, Two Men, Eight Centuries Apart

A single 5A designation covers a writer's back garden and a poet's wall. They are twenty minutes apart and have nothing to do with each other — except that both are places where somebody wrote down, very precisely, a thing they could not fix.

15 min read

Zhejiang · Quzhou

Root Palace, Buddha Kingdom: The 5A One Man Carved

China's highest scenic-area rating usually goes to a mountain, a walled city or a lake with two thousand years of poetry attached to it. In a forested county in western Zhejiang it went to the collected works of a living sculptor, made almost entirely out of dead tree stumps.

15 min read

Zhejiang · Quzhou

Mount Jianglang and Nianbadu: Three Slabs of Rock and Thirteen Dialects

One 5A rating covers two places an hour's drive apart with nothing obvious in common: a World Heritage rock formation of three vertical slabs, and a small town in a mountain valley whose few thousand residents are said to carry one hundred and forty-two surnames and thirteen dialects between them. The connection is not scenery. It is the pass.

15 min read

Zhejiang · Jinhua

Shuanglong Cave: The Ten Metres Everyone in China Has Read About

Most famous caves are famous for what you can see in them. This one is famous for ten metres in which you can see nothing at all, cannot sit up, and are forbidden to lift your head — because a school essay written in 1957 put that ten metres into the national curriculum, where it has stayed for most of a lifetime.

15 min read

Zhejiang · Jinhua

Hengdian: The Town That Built Its Own Forbidden City Because Nobody Is Allowed to Film in the Real One

In 1996 a farming town in central Zhejiang put up a nineteenth-century Guangzhou in a few months because a director needed one and it no longer existed anywhere. Thirty years later the same town owns full-scale copies of the Qin imperial palace, the Forbidden City and a Song scroll painting, and roughly one Chinese costume drama in every two is shot inside them.

15 min read

Showing 241–246 of 246 guides