non-fiction

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Songs of Shambala

Glimpses of Shangri La on the tourist trail – by Iain Manley

 

Dusk gently settled over Shangri La. A mist rose off the grasslands, while music started up in the cobbled squares at the centre of the old town, where men and women gathered to dance. Standing in a wide circle, they repeated the same few steps while edging clockwise, like pilgrims circumambulating a shrine.

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Spring City

Lie back and think of Kunming – by Brent Crane

 

The same security guard sits in his office by the door to my old university dorm. “Remember me?” I ask him. He studies my face. “I studied here three years ago. American.”

His eyes light up.

“I remember! I remember! American! Three years ago!”

His name is Tang Zao’an and he has worked as a security guard at Yunnan Nationalities University in Kunming for eight years one at the front gate, three at the male dorm across the way, and four at the all girls foreign students dorm.

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Joyriding the Taklamakan

You’re never alone in the desert – by Nikolai Blackie

 

A few years ago, I found myself in far western Xinjiang province, a small town called Sanchakouzhen, 150 miles east of Kashgar on the old northern Silk Road. It was less a town and more a pit-stop for trucks carrying minerals from the mines in China’s west to the refineries out east.

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Stinky Tofu

That first taste you never forget – by Brent Crane

 

What first struck me in Hangzhou were the trees. Along South Mountain road, a trendy corridor of cafés, modern art galleries and Western eateries that runs along the eastern shoulder of the lake, there is a line of strong, tall sycamore trees. It’s rare to find an old tree in a Chinese city, where the old tends to give way to the new and young.

Hangzhou is famous in China for its sprawling tea fields and the mythical West Lake, the waters of which have enraptured poets, painters and imperial royalty for centuries. Now they attract an endless stream of camera-toting tourists, with robotic tour guides and knick-knack hawkers.

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Dude, where are my socks?

The anatomy of a door-to-door Taobao delivery – by Alec Ash

 

If you live in China and are anything like me, you order a lot from Taobao. The last dozen items I purchased from the online shopping site are: foam ear plugs, a wooden moxibustion set, USB speakers shaped like a panda head, a hemp cushion with a union jack design (vote no, Scots!), a laptop stand, a wireless keyboard and mouse, a piano stand clip-on light, a fridge magnet that you can snap open bottle caps against, a bottle of Bruichladdich whisky, a portable iPhone battery charger, and a tai chi sword. I have just revealed too much about myself.

If you have lived outside of China and are anything like me, you are in awe of Taobao. First, there's the old saw that Taobao has everything.

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