Travelog
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Tainan, where the gods answer yes or no
An afternoon and an evening in Taiwan’s oldest city: a Dutch fort under Chinese roofs, two wooden blocks on a temple floor, and the lanterns of Shennong Street at dusk.
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Alishan, the forest that left by train
Two days at 2,200 meters: a sunrise train at five in the morning, a walk down through two-thousand-year-old cypresses, and a railway built to carry the forest away.
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Taipei, four kilometers of gondola
A luxury airline at a budget fare, a street that once shipped tea to New York, Taipei 101 at sunset, and a gondola ride that went on far longer than I expected.
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Hong Kong, nowhere to go but up
Fourteen minutes from Shenzhen, a guesthouse in Chungking Mansions, a ferry that has not changed in forty years, and two hundred meters I could not walk on National Day.
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Why China’s big cities are so quiet
China’s big cities are strangely quiet. More than 350 million electric scooters, all-electric buses and 16.5 million new-energy cars a year explain why, and who builds them.
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Shenzhen, from thirty thousand people
A first-class seat by accident, half an hour trying to get out of a metro station, six gadgets I did not need from Huaqiangbei, and a city of seventeen million seen from 562 meters up.
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Yangshuo, the view on the twenty
Five nights in Yangshuo: a pair of glasses returned by a taxi driver, a plastic bamboo raft to the view on the 20 yuan note, and two days on an electric scooter with no license, no helmet and one bus…
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Zhangjiajie, the mountain that was renamed after a film
A glass elevator up a 326-meter cliff, a day among the sandstone pillars, a mountain that took its name from Hollywood, and a bowling match watched from the top.
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Xijiang, the village that is paid to look like itself
A thousand wooden houses stacked up a hillside in Guizhou, a dawn that never arrived, and the eighteen percent of the ticket price that keeps the roofs on.