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34 dispatches found

October 2026

Places

The Qinghai–Tibet Railway, 2006

On 1 July 2006 the first scheduled passenger trains left Golmud in Qinghai and Lhasa in Tibet, travelling in opposite directions across the highest plateau on earth.

High-key editorial illustration of a vast covered wholesale market hall in Yiwu, steel roof trusses and pale gold daylight, long rows of stalls piled with small goods, boxes of buttons and zips, stacked basins and paper decorations, merchants at their stalls and buyers with sack carts in the wide central aisle, one bundle of cinnabar red ribbon the single accent.

Places

Yiwu and the World’s Largest Small-Commodities Market

In the centre of Zhejiang province, about three hundred kilometres south-west of Shanghai, a county-level city of some two million people has become the largest wholesale market for small commodities in the world.

Painting of crowds, boats and shops around a bridge on the Bian Canal in Song dynasty Kaifeng

Places

The Grand Canal of China

There is a scene from the early twelfth-century Chinese capital of Bianliang, what is now Kaifeng, that the painters of the time recorded with the same care they gave the imperial throne.

Hand-painted watercolour of the Wuhan Yangtze River Bridge and the Yellow Crane Tower in pale morning haze

Places

How Three Towns Became Wuhan

Wuhan is not one city.

Painting of a many-tiered Dong drum tower and wooden houses in a misty hill village in Guizhou

Places

Kaili Has Wooden Hmong Drum Towers

In the rice-terrace foothills around Kaili, in southeast Guizhou, more than four hundred wooden saemh — drum towers — still stand in the villages of the Hmong (also called Miao) communities.

Painting of a misty Limehouse street with Chinese shops, seamen and dock cranes around 1900

Places

Limehouse Was a Chinatown Before Chinatowns

The Limehouse district of east London was the site of Britain‘s first Chinese community from the 1880s to the 1960s, with a peak population of roughly 1,200 in the 1930s.

Painting of Third Front workers building the Panzhihua steelworks in the Jinsha River gorge in 1966

Places

The Cities China Hid in the Mountains

There is a city in Sichuan where the steelworks came before the city itself.

Painting of travellers and carts crossing a stone bridge over the moat into a gate of the Kaifeng city wall in the late Qing

Places

City of Eight Dynasties

There is no single building you can point to and call “Kaifeng Gate” today and have that name cover the whole story.

Hand-painted illustration of the Huajiang Grand Canyon Bridge in Guizhou in pale morning haze, its turquoise twin-legged towers and steel truss deck slung on cables high above a deep green karst gorge and the Beipan River, with a small village and red-roofed houses on the slopes below

Places

The Bridge Over the Earth’s Crack

On 28 September 2025 a four-lane expressway bridge opened across the Huajiang Grand Canyon in Guizhou, in China’s mountainous south-west, with its road deck 625 metres above the Beipan River.

September 2026

Painted illustration of Chongqing East Railway Station, its long flat canopy with a warm wooden underside held up by white tree-like columns with lattice tops, seen from the approach road

Places

Chongqing East and the Lines Still to Come

Chongqing has never been a simple city to move through. It is a place of ridges and gorges, rivers and bridges, stacked neighborhoods and tunnels carved through stone.

Painted illustration of the check-in hall of Beijing Daxing International Airport, with white ribbed ceiling curves flowing down into two funnel-shaped columns and a central skylight

Places

Beijing’s Second Back Door

Some airports are machines for moving bodies.

Painted illustration of the Line 1 platform at People's Square station in Shanghai, with glass platform screen doors, a white train with a red stripe and morning commuters

Places

Shanghai Underground

At eight o’clock on a weekday morning, the largest machine in the world is running beneath Shanghai.