People & Places · Beijing
What Beijing’s hutongs teach about neighborhood life.
Behind the postcard alley is a changing residential world of courtyards, shared space, memory, infrastructure and contested preservation.
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People & Places.
Read a place through its homes, streets, food and living traditions. From Beijing courtyards to communities celebrating abroad, these stories ask how architecture and everyday practices create a sense of belonging.
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Cities, homes & neighborhoods
Enter the lanes, courtyards and shared homes that shape a sense of belonging.
People & Places · Shanghai
Shikumen: the house that explains Shanghai.
Stone gates, brick row houses and shared lanes hold the hybrid history of a port city—and the tensions of preserving it.
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People & Places · Fujian
Inside Fujian tulou: architecture for living together.
The famous circles are only the aerial view. At ground level, earthen walls surround courtyards built for kinship, defense and everyday cooperation.
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People & Places · Migration architecture
Kaiping Diaolou: architecture made by migration.
Across the flat agricultural landscape of Kaiping in Guangdong, concrete towers rise above rice fields and village roofs. Some carry domes, arcades or classical columns; others resemble compact fortresses punctured by narrow windows. They are called diaolou, multistorey buildings used for defence, residence or communal refuge. Their silhouettes are memorable, but their real subject is movement: people leaving home, earning money abroad, returning with ideas and building security into the landscape. UNESCO inscribed Kaiping Diaolou and Villages on the World Heritage List in 2007. The designation recognizes not an isolated architectural curiosity but a cultural landscape. Towers, houses, lanes, fields, ponds and village relationships belong together. To understand a diaolou only as a photogenic “Chinese castle” is to miss the networks that made it possible.
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People & Places · Walled cities
Pingyao is a city best understood on foot.
From the top of Pingyao’s wall, the old city appears almost legible: tiled roofs, courtyard compounds, temple axes and commercial streets held inside a clear boundary. At ground level, the order becomes more intimate. A lane narrows. A doorway reveals one courtyard behind another. A former banking hall opens onto a story of money moving across an empire. Pingyao is often marketed as a perfectly preserved “ancient city.” The phrase is useful but dangerous. It can turn a living, repeatedly repaired place into a stage set. The more interesting question is not whether Pingyao has escaped time, but how its urban structure has carried different times together.
5 minute read
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Local food & living traditions
Get to know a place through breakfast, its night markets and the craft people carry forward.
People & Places · Festivals & belonging
A festival becomes part of a city.
How does Mid-Autumn take root beyond China? Historical examples from Singapore, San Francisco and New York invite us to look beyond the mooncake and notice the people, spaces and invitations that make a celebration possible.
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People & Places · Hong Kong
One festival, different kinds of light
Explore Mid-Autumn lanterns through Hong Kong's craft, public displays and Tai Hang fire dragon, without mistaking local traditions for a national rule.
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People & Places · Food & place
China, one breakfast at a time.
There is no national plate that can explain how China begins the day. Breakfast becomes more interesting when we stop asking for the typical meal and start following particular streets, climates and routines.
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People & Places · Nightlife
What renao feels like at a Chinese night market.
Steam, light, voices and temporary stalls create more than “buzz”: they make a public atmosphere people enter with the whole body.
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People & Places · Guizhou
Guizhou Miao silver is history worn on the body.
Headdresses, collars, embroidery and indigo carry craft knowledge across generations—but no single costume represents every Miao community.
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People & Places · Craft cities
Jingdezhen is a city built around porcelain.
Jingdezhen is called China’s “Porcelain Capital,” but the title can make a complicated place sound like a single famous kiln. The city’s real achievement was coordination: raw materials arrived from surrounding landscapes, specialists divided production into many stages, imperial and civilian workshops operated beside merchants and guilds, and finished ceramics traveled through domestic and maritime networks. Porcelain here was not one craft. It was an urban system.
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Heritage landscapes
Read a place through its surviving monuments, original settings and missing pieces.
People & Places · Grand Canal
The Grand Canal: reading China through water
A city can look self-contained until you ask how its food, materials and people arrived.
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People & Places · Longmen
A Landscape with Missing Pieces
Longmen is not simply a collection of Buddha statues. It is a relationship between river, rock, carved rooms and people—and part of that relationship now has to be reconstructed across continents.
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People & Places · Port cities
Quanzhou, the Chinese port that faced the world.
Quanzhou is often introduced as a stop on the “Maritime Silk Road.” The phrase is evocative but incomplete. During the Song and Yuan periods, especially from the tenth to the fourteenth centuries, Quanzhou was not simply a picturesque harbor touched by distant ships. It was an integrated trading city in which production zones, bridges, docks, official institutions, religious communities and ocean routes worked together. Its surviving sites reveal that global China is not a recent invention.
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