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Foreign Musicians in China on the halcyon days
We were summoned from the backstage tent by an anxious organiser. “Smiling Knives yuedui,” she said, scanning her clipboard and using the word “band” in Chinese, ushering us along with a curt, “You go.” Putting down our complimentary drinks, we readied our instruments and were guided onstage, which was actually a huge ship moored in the...
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Marseille: France’s ‘good natured’ city
It took the TGV train no time to thrust its way out of Paris and into a realm of swelling wheat fields peppered by quaint farmhouses – the quintessential northern French terrain I had neglected since my semester on the Erasmus study abroad programme almost 20 years ago. Although I had visited in the interim,...
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Gen Y Chinese ride out the Covid-19 pandemic in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia doing as the hippies once did
It was no coincidence that Lonely Planet’s second ever publication was Southeast Asia on a Shoestring (1975). The region has been synonymous with independent travel since its sun-soaked charms called out to a generation following the 1960s overland hippie trail. Alex Garland’s novel The Beach (1996) revived the mystique of Southeast Asia for Generation X,...
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China’s First Standard Gauge Railway
Standing a few blocks east of Tiananmen Square, Beijing Railway Station is one of the Ten Great Buildings constructed in 1959 to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Communist Party rule in China. In 2019, at the tail end of the Lunar New Year, entering this faux-Ming eulogy to socialist liberation proved almost as challenging as...
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Digital nomads find opportunities during the coronavirus pandemic, and adjust to living in one place rather than travelling
Hannah Maussang worked in commercial advertising for five years before setting out to see the world. “I arrived in Malaysia in February,” says the Parisian. “I was going to travel around Southeast Asia before heading to Nepal, India, Bali and then on to South America.” However, when Malaysia introduced a movement control order (MCO) to slow...
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Pandemic travel: 4 wanderers discuss visas, quarantine and staying on the move during Covid-19
The Covid-19 pandemic has turned many lives into minor versions of the movie Groundhog Day, but for a few who are unwilling, or unable, to live in suspended animation, continued travelling has proved challenging, bizarre, scary even. When the crisis began, wayfaring translator Bruce Humes found himself close to the epicentre. “I was in Taiwan,...
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Travel to Singapore, India, Malaysia, Greece, China and more from home with these book recommendations
Xu Xi is in the habit of dividing her time between New York, Hong Kong and, well, the world, and has long advocated a “transnational approach” to literature. Sequestered in upstate New York during the pandemic, she hasn’t found adapting to sedentary life easy. And, she says, she longs for Southeast Asia. “Although I was born...
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Hiking the Yuanyang rice terraces
Many of northern China’s migratory birds winter in bucolic Yunnan province and, as the mercury dropped in Beijing in November, I followed suit. A journey south from the Yunnan capital, Kunming, trades kilometres for degrees and I’m in short sleeves by the time I reach Honghe Hani and Yi autonomous prefecture. The air smells as...
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How Disease Has Fed on China’s Progress
In 1999, while most people were anticipating what the new millennium might bring, American academic Jared Diamond cast his gaze back 10,000 years to question whether the agricultural revolution that had germinated settled society had really been such a great leap forward. Writing in Discover Magazine, Diamond contended, “With agriculture came the gross social and...
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Langkawi: The Curious Island of the Strange Colugos
You don’t have to travel far before the hotels of Malaysia’s “honeymoon island” are supplanted with the colourful low-rise farmhouses of the verdant interior. This is rural Langkawi at its most bucolic; the domain of swamp buffalo gently grazing in company of their faithful companions, the cattle egret. Heading north-west, the lowlands give way to...
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Johnson Chang
Hong Kong born: My father, Chimou Chang, hails from Shangyu, not too far from Ningbo, in Zhejiang province, where my mother, Paochu Chou, comes from. They both went to school in Shanghai, where my grandparents had businesses. My father studied civil engineering. After the revolution, in 1949, they came to Hong Kong where my father...
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Making Tracks Through China
The mustard-coloured Kunming North railway station, in the capital of Yunnan province, integrates with the surrounding high-rises like foie gras at a vegetarian dinner party. Although its wooden window shutters and clock tower hint of French inception, this incarnation dates back only to 2015. Explaining the French facade, the station houses the Yunnan Railway Museum,...
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Chinese Artists Locked Down By Cornavirus Got To Work
As much of the world locks down in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic, many people are experiencing the boredom and uncertainty that was the province of mainland China during the initial outbreak, a period now popularly dubbed “zui chang de guonian”, or the longest spring festival. For those quarantined in their flats, it was...
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Chinese Artists Locked Down
As much of the world locks down in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic, many people are experiencing the boredom and uncertainty that was the province of mainland China during the initial outbreak, a period now popularly dubbed “zui chang de guonian”, or the longest spring festival. For those quarantined in their flats, it was...
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My Life: William Lindesay
Wall to wall: I was born in 1956, in Wallasey, England. If you take a ferry across the Mersey, as the song goes, you’re there. Significantly, the ferry goes past Liverpool’s Shanghai Bund-like waterfront to a place with “wall” in its name, so perhaps I was destined for China. I was schooled at St Aidan’s where...
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Nicky Harmen: My Life
Country girl: I grew up in the village of Dauntsey, in rural southwest England, where my parents were farmers. At the age of 12, I was sent to a boarding school in south Wiltshire. I was rather lonely but there was one major compensation: it gave me a wonderful opportunity to learn languages. My French teacher...
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Across the Great Divide
On 13 March Xi Jinping dusted off his Maoist vocabulary textbook and called on the Chinese people to wage a “People’s War” against Covid-19. China’s leader appeared resolute for the television cameras despite confronting an unprecedented crisis coming immediately after a tumultuous year. “The trade war with America has hit everyone,” Xue Ye, a curator from Hebei province...
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One Thousand Families
We stay in 24 hours a day,” says Luō Dàwèi 罗大卫 via telephone from his home in Tianjin. “You can’t go anywhere, you can’t even order things, as no one is delivering. The best word to describe life right now is imprisonment.” Luo has, like many of his compatriots, endured a sobering Chinese New Year....
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In Lianzhou, China’s Edgiest Photography Festival Turns 15
Lianzhou Foto has emerged over the past decade and a half as the vanguard platform for contemporary photography in China, a veritable Chinese Recontres de Arles. Ask any shutterbug worthy of their Canon or Nikon where they’d like to be exhibited and they’ll likely tell you Lianzhou, rather than other Chinese photography festivals which tend...
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Dissident author Ma Jian: “We used all our strength to tell Hongkongers what loomed ahead”
I’m standing in a mid-summer downpour in northwest London interpreting for a Chinese dissident novelist and the lorry driver charged with delivering a skip on to the Ma household driveway. “Tell ‘im I’m worried I’ll knock his fence over mate,” yells the bear-sized man from the truck’s cabin. The 65-year-old writer responds and I translate: “Ma...
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My Life: John MacKinnon
On the wild side I was born in Leeds (in northern England) in 1947 to Scottish parents. I was the grandson of Britain’s first Labour prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, though he died before I was born. I can recall some furniture and paintings that had belonged to him but I was never much interested in...
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Zhan Tian You
This February, the state-owned China Railway Corporation inaugurated the Year of the Pig by announcing railway spending in the region of 800 billion yuan in 2019. While the UK and USA watch their antiquated railway lines crumble, the Communist Party of China views railway development as a core project both at home – sewing the...
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Birds of Beijing
Beijing’s old quarters, the area 19th century foreigners dubbed the Tartar City, is made up of hutong alleyways snaking between courtyard houses that were once the residences of Manchu bannermen. Overhead can often be heard the “chirpy cheep cheep” (according to the pocket book Birds of China, by John MacKinnon) of the Eurasian tree sparrow....
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Shenzhen’s history didn’t start in 1979
The fishing-village-turned-metropolis hook thrown out by countless journalists when writing about Shenzhen neatly encapsulates the fact that a relative nowhere became a serious somewhere after Deng Xiaoping earmarked it as ground zero in the spearheading of reforms, in 1978. To this day, 40 years after the Chinese leader unleashed its long-dormant entrepreneurial zeal, there is...
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‘World being pushed out of control’ the central theme at Lianzhou photo festival
It has become something of a cultural pilgrimage for those concerned with contemporary Chinese photography. With the first breath of winter loosening the remaining autumn leaves, a familiar band of journalists, critics, artists and art lovers migrate to subtropical Guangdong province for the annual Lianzhou International Photography Festival. Although the G107 national highway now links...
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On the Trail of Deng Xiaoping in the French town where he embraced Communism
Baoding is a sizeable city in central Hebei province, in north China, and synonymous with heavy industry and its attendant ills. Its hardy people – mostly of the country’s Han majority – wear no-nonsense expressions and display a hardheadedness born of stoicism. A showcase city Baoding is not. Yet neither is it poor. As I...
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Mining the Zeitgeist
I follow the map on my phone as it leads me into the backstreets of Songzhuang Art Colony, the world’s largest art village, located on the eastern fringe of the Beijing municipality. Just when I think I’ve been lured into a labyrinthine trap, the unmistakable bald head of Shanxi-native Luo Dawei (罗大卫) emerges from a...
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China’s Bike Sharing Bubble has Burst
Imperial China’s four great inventions – papermaking, printing, gunpowder and the compass – were milestones in the long march of human progress. Last year, China’s state-run media highlighted the nation’s “four great new inventions” of modern times, but astute readers were quick to point out that high-speed trains, mobile-phone payments, e-commerce and shared-bicycle schemes had...
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Changing China: photo show focuses on impact of Wenzhou’s economic success story
For three days, attendees of the Lishui Photography Festival have been shepherded from gallery to workshop to seminar. The itinerary has been packed with talks, banquets and trips to the surrounding countryside. In my free time, I have lost myself in the old winding streets of this small city in the south of Zhejiang province,...
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Halong Bay’s Cat Ba: a jewel in Vietnam’s island crown
I spend the journey from the Chinese border lying on a bed, softly rocking with the motion of the overnight train. The air conditioning hisses overhead and the carriage smells of the wood that bedecks the interior. Outside, bats are navigating the purple sky as the world slowly turns invisible. A fellow traveller is snoring...
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Chinese Photographer Captures ‘horror and beauty’ of modern China
Li Zhengde lives on the edge of Mount Wutong National Park, in Shenzhen. His one-bedroom flat is on the fourth floor of a forlorn, reform-era tenement building, beside some shabby farmhouses that date back a century or more. The interior is decorated with Li’s own photography and brimming with enough books for a small library....
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The first Chinese-built railway, the enthusiast trying to save it and his hero…
It’s a little after 6am when the sun rises over Changping, a nondescript district in the northwest of the expansive Chinese capital. Flanked by the Mangshan hills, which form a natural limit to Beijing’s urban sprawl, Changping North railway station is small and devoid of distractions. With no cafeteria or convenience store in which to...
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Marinduque: The Heart of the Philippines
I walked through a rusty gate and stepped down the rocks onto the chalk-white shore. Two bleating goats, white as the sand, scurried by. Down the bay I could see children making playhouses of bangkas – outrigger canoes that are ubiquitous in the Philippines. “Helloooo!” they yelled at me, laughing and radiating with the geniality...
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In Deepest Yunnan
A night train connects Yunnan’s capital, Kunming, with the popular holiday spot of Lijiang. Climbing 500 metres above Kunming, the 500km journey takes 10 hours, making the K9602 one of China’s slowest commercial trains. But a second-class ticket buys you a cosy bunk bed in a carriage bookended by bathrooms and hot-water dispensers. A flask...
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The Big Picture
The 2017 Lishui Photography Festival 丽水摄影节 in Zhejiang Province was held in November with the kind of razzmatazz one has come to expect from a large-scale Chinese event bearing the official seal. Festivities began with the obligatory opening ceremony comprising predictable song-and-dance routines punctuated by vaguely jingoistic speeches from local honchos. The pomp set the tone for a festival gigantic...
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Snap Judgement
China’s second tallest skyscraper, the Ping An Finance Centre, was completed in the center of Shenzhen in 2017. The 115-storey superstructure is a testament to the city’s remarkable, four-decade ascent since its origins as a fishing village. Hong Kong has nothing as tall. Walking around mainland China’s third wealthiest city, Shenzhen feels rather well-to-do. Residential...
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On the Trail of Taiwan’s Hakka
As the train cruises toward the coast, the conurbation of greater Taipei dissipates into small towns and fields sandwiched between Taiwan’s mountainous interior and the sea. Soon enough Hsinchu hones into view, a city established by Hakka Chinese in the early 1700s. The Hakka are an interesting bunch. They’re not an ethnic minority per se, but...
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Taiwan’s northern tip: weird nature, wonderful street food
Two ports flank Taipei and both played a role in forging what is now the Republic of China. To the west, Tamsui stands alongside a well-sheltered and thus strategic harbour and has become something of a suburb of the capital, connected by the metro. I find my guide, Mathias Daccord, who recently moved from Shanghai...
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How China’s Shangri-La earned a name for craft beer after 2014 fire
In 2014, a fire blazed through Shangri-La, reducing more than half of the Old Town to dust and ash. It was a savage blow to old Zhongdian – a poor Tibetan city in a remote corner of Yunnan province that had spent a decade rebranding itself as the Himalayan paradise depicted in James Hilton’s 1933 novel,...
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The Hotel Beijing
I. Life is getting complicated in the capital. Here’s how: I’m presently living in a 150 kuai-a-night, no-questions-asked hotel overlooking a vacant industrial lot somewhere beyond the fourth ring road. A few gigs I had lined-up toppled like Mao-era tenements confronting the wrecking ball, forcing me out of the bedroom window. There was simply no...
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The Lunatic Express
“Belt and Road Cooperation for Common Promutual Benefit,” proclaims a large street sign suspended above Beijing’s ever-congested second ring road. China is investing massively in its 21st-century reimagining of the Silk Roads, even if the budget for fluid English translation remains insufficient. This rekindling of ancient trade routes is President Xi Jinping’s signature project and,...
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The Rise and Fall of Luoyang, China’s forgotten capital
My photographer and I alight from our taxi in the centre of Yanshi, a shabby township straddling the Luo River, our presence eliciting curious stares from the locals, many of whom are employed at a nearby power plant. The only visible distractions in this part of Luoyang, in Henan province, are a few massage parlours,...
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M2B
If there’s one thing more common in Beijing’s labyrinth of hutongs than a bearded foreigner, it’s the tricycle. The former tend to be bohemian castaways taking advantage of the capital’s creative climate, the latter, low-cost vehicles first imported from British India and immortalised in novelist Lao She’s homage to Beijing, Rickshaw Boy (1937). The common incarnation today...
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The New City
The first thing you should know about the new city is that it was dreamed up by a little old man, locked up far away in his fortress. The old man was an important man and people listened to him when he spoke, even when all he had to discuss was his dreams. The old...
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The Magic Mountains of Guilin
An eminent poet and scholar-official during the golden age of Song dynasty China, Fan Chengda was also something of an early travel writer. One of his diaries recounts a four-month journey from Suzhou to Guilin on what was then the Middle Kingdom’s southwestern frontier, where, in the spring of 1173, he took up a post...
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Frescos on the Frontier
The Monk Xuanzang is known to almost all Chinese. As one of the key characters in the classic Ming dynasty adventure story A Journey to the West, he features in everything from advertisements to blockbuster movies. But the real Xuanzang was a Tang dynasty scholar who embarked on a 16 year expedition to retrieve sanskrit...
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Holistic Haven
One enters Baimo Cave through a small, water-curtained orifice. Once inside, a lofty vault in the limestone is revealed – an illuminated chamber decorated by evocative natural rock sculptures. While our tour guide points to a tangled stalagmite, observing with classic Chinese symbolism, “This one is called Peacock in his Pride Worshiping Avalostesvara,” I find...
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Guizhou’s breathtaking scenery and historic sites
The cities of eastern China are regularly wreathed in smog, so for pastoral scenery and fresh air, many Chinese head south-west. Going on holiday is increasingly common for city dwellers, thanks to new airports and a growing motorway network. But this has put a strain on classic destinations such as Guilin (famous for its karst...
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Kompong Cham – Cambodia’s East Gate
Phnom Penh is ground zero in a reawakening Cambodia. Gleaming SUVs navigate streams of tuc-tucs and motorcycles. Outside celestial Wats vendors hawk hats, sunglasses and “something special sir” on litter blighted streets. And in the riverfront bars, men reddened by too much Cambodia Beer and the fierce Cambodian sun, cavort like beasts freed from the...
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The Ancient Towns of Xiangxi
Shen Congwen was a prominent Chinese writer in the 1920s and 30s before war and chaos enveloped a generation. Though Shen hailed from a remote region in Western Hunan – a mountainous, ethnically diverse place known as Xiangxi – his stories concerning “the human spirit” found wide readership with the urban young in places like...
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