Traditional Tom in touch with city's hutong heritage

Tom Luckock's beautifully restored Qing Dynasty courtyard home instantly betrays his passion for siheyuan, the disappearing style of traditional housing symbolic of Beijing's heritage.

Global village

Beijing

Mixing Ming furniture with Siri's Norwegian wood

SHANGHAI: You can meet people from all corners of the earth in Shanghai, but when you meet an interior designer who was born in the United States, raised in Norway, trained in Switzerland, worked in London, and who also had a full-blooded Cherokee Indian for a great grandmother, you know you have met someone against the grain.

Life Travel

Getting there

There are flights from Kunming, capital of Yunnan Province, to Lijiang many times a day. A return ticket from Beijing with connecting flight cost 3,200 yuan ($418), but was in high season. A discounted low-season return airfare costs 2,500 yuan ($327), with accommodation.

Tourists flock to the temple of boom

Sitting outside the Tanzhe Temple under a 1,000-year old tree, Shun Xin feels a vibration in his pocket as his new mobile phone registers a text message.

Dude, where's my hotel?

The old town of Lijiang and its surrounds is paradise in anybody's tour book and for this reason attracts more than 50 million visitors a year. The 850-year-old World Heritage-listed place is a maze of charming cobbled streets and serene lakes. Gushing rivers and snow-capped mountains are within close driving distance.

Here's the real Jurassic Park

YANTAI: When we arrived at the Dinosaur Museum of Zhucheng - also known as "Dinosaur City" - in East China's Shandong Province, the sky was drizzling.

Life Culture

Spreading stories through song

A woman plays a pipa lute and a man plucks a three-string zither. In traditional Chinese changsan or gown, the two, sitting by a table, sing stories about either modern romance or centuries-old classics in Suzhou dialect.

Plucked from obscurity

Dozens of foreign ambassadors and their friends gathered at the Sun Shine Gallery in Beijing for a special art show last month. Alongside artists displaying calligraphy, video projection, installation and mouth-watering food, a young lady, Wu Na, played a charming instrument known as guqin.

Devils and darlings hide in the shadows

A century ago when movies were first introduced to China, they were called Western shadow plays, a foreign equivalent of the Chinese folk art piying (literally leather shadows in Chinese), or shadow puppet show.