Peter Neville-Hadley

More than 150 years after British and French troops sacked and razed the Summer Palace, in Beijing, the incident is regularly revisited in the Chinese press. Articles usually appear around the October anniversary of the destruction, after yet another announcement of plans to catalogue looted antiquities now overseas, or when Summer Palace items appear at foreign auction houses.

As well as their incomplete and inaccurate descriptions of the palace and its destruction, these stories often contain transparently false accusations against foreign institutions holding collections of Chinese treasures, as well as unsustain­able claims of a legal right to them and demands for their uncompensated return.

The Kangxi emperor is unhappy.

By 1686 the second Qing monarch to rule from Beijing has largely completed the pacification of previously Ming territory, and is following earlier rulers of China in defining his newly established domain on paper.

To ensure the stability of their minority rule the Manchu invaders have adopted the traditions of the Chinese Confucian bureaucracy, at least in public, and support the view that everything of importance is part of their empire. Anything else is minor, barbarian, peripheral and supplicant.

Using a Western interpretation of a 2,400-year-old document, Beijing seeks Unesco’s stamp for the centre of its ancient capital – much of it razed, badly restored, completely rebuilt, or actually modern communist monuments only decades old.

The anniversary of the Summer Palace's destruction is an occasion for flagellating foreigners, writes Peter Neville-Hadley in a Wall Street Journal op-ed....

Vast numbers of tourists arrive in Guangxi’s Guilin each year to view the city’s surrounding karst peaks, or to weave between them at water level, floating down the Li River through scenery celebrated in Chinese paintings and on the back of the 20 yuan banknote.

But large swathes of the province have the same geology without the crowds.

The visit to Longzhou begins unpromisingly.
Why, the policeman at a checkpoint on the edge of the city wants to know, am I going to a little-known town two hours’ drive southwest of the Guangxi provincial capital of Nanning.
“Lüyou,” I say. Tourism.
“Mei you shenme hao wan,” he objects. There’s nothing interesting there.

Looking down from atop Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, it is difficult to believe that the tiny territory’s first paved road was completed only in the early 1960s.

Now this great spire of a tower acts like the gnomon of a sundial, throwing a long shadow far below that slowly swings across a cityscape of multi-lane highways and a forest of eye-catching constructions by every fashionable foreign architect from Tadao Ando to the late Zaha Hadid.

Agencies working with narrow margins on high volumes of straight-from-the-brochure sales have been hit hard in the era of click-to-order everything. And for many of them Covid-driven comprehensive refunds and constraints on new bookings delivered the coup de grâce.

But Covid also drove many travellers to reconsider whether they still wanted to move around in large groups through a series of high-traffic “must sees”, and has contributed to growth in personally tailored travel.

Old-school travel agencies may be a thing of a past, but bespoke experiences curated by a small but global network of advisers are blossoming.

Ever wanted a dialogue with your dog? A chat with your cat? Don’t hold your breath. Why Animals Talk, by Cambridge University’s Arik Kershenbaum, unravels into the world of animal communication

“Let’s face it”, writes Arik Kershenbaum, “we all want to believe we can talk to animals – even animal communication scientists like me. I’m guessing that not one of my colleagues hasn’t at some time dreamed of holding a sophisticated conversation with some species or other.”
And...

From high-tech architecture to communing with endangered deer, along with heavyweight historic sites and hutong (alley) culture, here are the best countryside experiences south of Beijing.

The accelerating growth of the synthetic cryosphere is contributing to the shrinking of the planet’s natural counterparts. And while we may no longer be able to tell whether the apple we are eating was picked five minutes or a year ago, its nutritional value may well have been reduced by time – and far fewer varieties now exist.

Refrigeration has had numerous benefits but in its ability to ship food through both time and space, it has also robbed us of flavour and nutrients.

The seaside community of Aranya, about 2.5 hours from Beijing by high-speed rail, is luring in young Chinese visitors with its minimalistic design and otherworldly serenity. The “lie flat” youth in China, who’ve rejected the rat race like those “quiet quitting” in the U.S., come for space, slowness, and spirituality reflected in structures that sometimes merge with sand and sea.