Hutongs, hand-pulled noodles, and the cities a guidebook never quite reaches.
Food lands on your plate unasked, the liquor comes with a clock, and "anything is fine" rarely is. A field guide to being pressed at a Chinese table — and refusing without offence. CN: 劝菜劝酒：中国饭桌的让与推
At a Chinese table the chopsticks talk when you set them down — the pair you never eat with, the taboo of standing them in the rice, and the codes that bend from dim sum to hot pot. CN: 第二双筷子：中国餐桌的公筷礼
At the end of a meal in China, the bill is often paid before it reaches the table. Here is how to read the polite tussle that follows. CN: 抢着买单：饭桌尽头的一场客气
In Qingdao, draft beer comes knotted in a plastic bag with a straw, and dinner is whatever clams you carried to the cook yourself. A ground-level guide to the coast's least-translated meal. CN: 青岛：拎着一袋啤酒去吃海鲜
A clay grill arrives before the menu. In Zibo the skewers come half-cooked, and you close them out yourself — rolled in a warm pancake with raw scallion and cumin. CN: 淄博烧烤：自己收尾的山东炭火
In Liuzhou, river-snail rice noodles are less a specialty than a climate. The smell stops strangers; the locals just keep walking toward it. CN: 柳州螺蛳粉：先到的是那股气味
The car arrives in minutes. Finding it, confirming the plate, and answering a call in a language you don't share is the part nobody explains. CN: 在中国用滴滴打车：外国手机也能叫到车
The internet you land with in China depends less on your phone than on which pipe the data travels down. A field guide to roaming, eSIMs, local cards, and the VPN you install before you fly. CN: 在中国上网：漫游、eSIM与本地卡的取舍
China rarely defeats a traveller at the planning stage. It defeats them at a turnstile, ninety seconds before departure, in the wrong queue. CN: 护照就是车票：中国车站通行指南
Zhenjiang sits where the Grand Canal meets the Yangtze. It is twenty minutes from Nanjing and easy to walk in a single day. CN: 镇江一日：锅盖面、西津渡与一瓶香醋
Tianjin's Five Great Avenues hold the treaty-era villas Beijing never had — a low grid of British, Italian and Spanish houses best read on foot, one street at a time. CN: 步行五大道：天津的洋楼街
A small Yangtze city most travellers pass through on the train. One unhurried day covers an old ferry lane, noodles cooked under a floating lid, and a riverside view at dusk. CN: 镇江一日：古渡、锅盖面与江边两座山
A near-complete river loop in northern Sichuan holds one of China's best-kept old towns — where the grey courtyards are still homes, not just gift shops, and the vinegar is something you drink. CN: 阆中：四合院仍有人住的古城
Two kilometres east of Harbin's Russian postcard, Chinese merchants built European façades over courtyards. On the restored blocks it reads as a set; one lane over, it is still an address. CN: 道外中华巴洛克：修缮停下的下一条街
A Ming-dynasty grid in the hills of western Yunnan, birthplace of the Nanzhao kingdom, where baked-tea houses, one-strand noodles and a rebuilt watchtower hold a town most travellers skip on the way to Dali. CN: 巍山：明代格局仍在的滇西小城
Fenyang and Pingyao, two Shanxi towns an hour apart, sit behind two decades of Jia Zhangke's films. Most of what the camera saw is still easy to find. CN: 贾樟柯的山西：一座塔、一段城墙与一个县城
Wong Kar-wai's first television series sent viewers into Shanghai with the script open on their phones. Three places from it are still easy to walk. CN: 《繁花》的上海：黄河路、进贤路与和平饭店
The bamboo-top duel in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was no set. It was the living groves of Anji, in northern Zhejiang — and the ridges are still there to walk. CN: 安吉大竹海：卧虎藏龙的那片竹林