Oh James! I'm Sorry About the Jade!
James is bookish, bespectacled, educated in Kunming and Chiang Mai, a walking encyclopedia of Chinese history and culture. He’s thirty, with a three-year-old son, yet...
Category: China
Learning Mandarin: Week 4
“If you finish this book,” Sophie reiterates, “You’ll be able to get all around China with no problems.” I wouldn’t have thought it possible when...
When Does the Chinese Century Begin?
“Why do you want your son to get to know China?” James asks. We’re sitting in the sun, by a rushing canal in beautiful Lijiang...
The Friday Photo: Black Dragon Pool
This is Black Dragon Pool, one of the most tranquil places in beautiful Lijiang, China. It was built as a pleasure garden for the feudal...
The Prettiest Town We’ve Ever Visited
Ever heard of Lijiang? It’s an old town in northern Yunnan, in what was once the Dali Kingdom, the fought-over hinterland between China and Tibet....
Learning Mandarin: Week 3
A week to go before we head out of Kunming into the great wide open, over 30 hours of language lessons in, and we are,...
The Friday Photo: Nine Dragon Pond
It’s been sunny lately. So t’other day we went to the park. And the park was a lake. With nine dragons. Now, the Chinese have...
Learning Mandarin: Week 2
So the boy and I have completed our second week learning Mandarin in China. We’ve only got a week’s more learning before we’re out on...
How to Ride a Bus in China
Even after boarding Indonesian ferries, riding rural Cambodian buses and squeezing onto the London Tube during the Christmas Eve shopping frenzy, taking the bus in...
Learning Mandarin: Week 1
Learning from our experiences in Indonesia, I figured it would be wise to start our sojourn in China by actually studying a bit of Mandarin...