My first experience of a city on Mainland China was that of Weifang in east central Shandong. I was out of the place within 24 hours, not willing to tolerate the noxious quality of its air. Happily it proved easy enough to find a bus bound for Yantai on the province’s northern coast, and thence […]

Enshi Grand Canyon Bit of a cockup on the naming front regarding this mountain crest in central China. There is a canyon, but it is narrow, hardly ‘grand’. Close to the cablecar’s lower station, a path leads down into this fissure, but it is a paultry affair compared with the splendour awaiting at the top. […]

  Internal tourism is big business in China. Along with weather reports for major cities Chinese TV includes the data for Jiuzhaigou. This ‘Nine Stockades Valley’ now has an airport and a motorway connection to the regional capital.  Consequently, the getting-away-from-it-all element of the area is greatly diminished. It was mid-afternoon under a leaden sky,

In mid autumn the overnight train from Urumchi disgorges passengers at its penultimate stop around dawn. A fleet of buses trundles us onward the few miles into an urban centre. We have arrived at Bole the principal town of Bortala Mongol Autonomous Prefecture in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. There is a nip in the air, […]

  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 […]

This month I am learning how to make best use of Wechat, the social networking app used regularly by the majority of people in China of working age. So far I have managed to round up a posse of five Wechat friends with whom I have had a few ‘chats’, and have posted a handful of […]

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, […]