South China Morning Post - Travel & Leisure\

Stepping into the Old Town of Lijiang, a city in China’s Yunnan province, feels like entering the set of a Chinese period drama. Passing timber homes dotted with red lanterns, you walk on slick, rain-polished cobblestones worn down by centuries of Himalayan traders’ footsteps. The 800-year-old network of timber-framed architecture – often associated with Naxi ethnic minority cul...

“If you go down to the Sichuan woods, you’re sure of a big surprise…” No, it is not a new species, exactly; but you might chance upon a famous British TV presenter seemingly cosplaying – as a giant panda. This unsettling mise-en-scène occurs during Ben Fogle’s Chinese Adventure, available on Now TV, at the Shenshuping Panda Base, a remote, government-run wildlife unit in Wolong,...

In June, I arrived at Sung Tieu’s Berlin studio on the second floor of a gated complex in the city’s northern Wedding district. It was 34 degrees Celsius (93.2 degrees Fahrenheit), the start of a punishing European heatwave, and the vast space was flooded with sunlight from large windows overlooking a green courtyard. The studio is divided into two rooms: one for “messy work”, w...

For many, a holiday ends with a suitcase full of souvenirs. For a growing number of travellers, however, it ends with skin that looks different – glowier – from how it did at the beginning of the trip. This is the whole premise behind the glowcation, a term everywhere in recent travel trend reports that describes a very specific kind of trip: one built around a wellness treatmen...

Everyone knows dinosaurs got really big. Some of ⁠the long-necked plant-eaters were the largest land animals ever on Earth, as shown by Argentinosaurus, perhaps 65 to 80 tonnes (70 to 90 tons) and upwards of 30 metres (around 100 feet) long. But why were there never tiny dinosaurs, like the size of a mouse? As far as we know, none ever existed. New research investigates this phe...