It’s such a cliché to say a city is “sprawling”, but sometimes, it’s the only word. And when it comes to Wuhan, China, home of 10 million people and a whole lot of smog, sprawling seems appropriate, says Alexandra Patrikios.

They were halfway done resurfacing the road in the town of Linying. I say halfway because although the old road has been dug up and left in big dirt mounds on the side of the road, they haven’t gotten around to putting in any bitumen for a new one yet. It was the kind of [...]

The nineteen hour overnight train from Guilin to Chongqing had been a multisensory experience. My new collection of horsefly bites, angry red welts, braided around my legs and itched like mad. The squat toilet next door gave off extravagant wafts, which roamed the hard-sleeper carriage hassling its occupants like a drunk. Opened windows, thanks to [...]

Ask anyone who has seen the 1959 movie Ben Hur which is the best scene and most will instantly reply “the Chariot race”. The sense of speed achieved by the camera, set on the ground, angled up, at close range tracking the horses as they tear around the track is profound. It was this scene that [...]

According to Lonely Planet China, the Han Chinese especially love their children. Me, I’m not so hot on them. At least not while one of them is kicking the back of my chair while his mother looks on adoringly and his grandmother pats his head.

They say the best scams are when you’re not sure you’ve been scammed. But you do have to decide and the options aren’t great: you’re either a sucker or a cynic. Marty and I, after extensive deliberation, decided that anything is better than being a sucker.

An anonymous Crikey reader writes: The odds were quite small. My father was in China on a consulting job at the same time as I was there, lazily observing the country’s hyper-growth, breaking up my flight to Europe. It was a strange coincidence, but not entirely unlikely. He’d been there plenty of times before in [...]

For a nation accustomed to receiving blank looks when bargaining, and whose only haggling technique consists of asking “What’s your best on that?”, buying toothpaste in China can be a shock to the Australian system.

Shanghai has been one of the destinations I’ve been most looking forward to on our Asia itinerary. That is, until I arrived and underwent public humiliation over a flowery toiletry bag.

Dan Miller captures Zhang Qun’an, 69, and her husband of 51 years, Deng Mingyuan, 77, in a ‘wedding photo’ at the edge of a camp for earthquake survivors, northern Sichuan, China.