Departing from Wushan, the ‘Little Three Gorges’ cruise is an enjoyable day-long excursion up a tributary of the Yangste river. It includes such curiosities as suspended ‘iron coffins’, and holes in the sheer cliff-face bearing witness to an ancient plank walkway. Rock formations include ‘Fairy Maiden Cave’ and ‘Fairy Throwing a Silk Ball’. Whilst the […]

  Having yet to bathe in a river that never makes it to the sea, I could not resist a visit to the one river that flows out of China yet fails to reach the ocean.       So I get to Xinjiang province in China’s far west, and take a bus from Yining […]

  Sleeping through Gorges The ship cruises a hundred miles upstream through the hours of darkness. When I awake around dawn the journey’s nearly over, soon my destination Fengjie comes into view. I have completed a Three Gorges cruise without seeing a single gorge.

  Living not that far from the centre of London, it is relatively easy for me to get into town to attend regularly at the London Mandarin Learners Meet-up group. Here I get to meet up with others to attempt translation from Chinese into English of a piece of text. Last time we tackled a […]

  To view the Three Gorges of the Yangtze river the standard itinerary has embarkation at Chongqing, followed by a down-river cruise, so I decided to start from the other end, the city of Yichang in the west of Hubei province, and work my way upstream.

Another set of Chinese characters I succeeded in memorising whilst waiting at traffic lights in Taipei were those forming the text of one of the ‘Nineteen Ancient Poems’. ‘Altair is Far Away’ tells of the Weaving Maid weeping with grief as she stands parted from her husband and their children who dwell on the far […]

I have completed the first of my films to emerge from the material I collected on this year’s autumn trip to China. It features some of the attractions of “China’s Hollywood”, the scenic, historic town of Huanglongxi a river port forty miles or so south-southwest of Chengdu. As we near the end of the trail, […]