This bronze statue of Buddha is housed in the main building at Todai-ji, which is itself the largest wooden building in the world. When the temple was first built in the 700s, it required the labor of more than two million people and nearly bankrupted Japan. I love the faded reds and turquoise of the [...]
This Buddha statue stood out from others at Wat Xieng Thong in Luang Prabang because the gilt on his face and neck was not the usual smooth gold paint that I had seen on other Buddhas in Laos. Instead it appeared as if small postage-stamp-sized pieces of gold leaf had been haphazardly applied over the [...]
Kiyomizu Temple was our first stop in Kyoto, due mostly to its status as a World Heritage Site (I’m traveling with a collector) and its proximity to our hostel. It turned out to be an ideal introduction to the city. Kyoto is famous among tourists for its temples, shrines, and gardens, and quaint streets like [...]
I’m pretty sure everyone who knows me in real life is tired of hearing me talk about how wonderful Malaysia is. I first visited in October, for a whirlwind tour of KL, Kota Bharu, the Perhentians and Penang. I had a marvelous time eating street food, snorkeling and learning how to batik. Such a good [...]
When I first came to China in 2007, Xi’an’s Terracotta Warriors were the thing I was most excited to see. And by most excited, I mean “jumping up and down squealing from the moment I saw that they were on the itinerary.” I had wanted to visit the site ever since I first read about [...]
Changsha, the city where I live and the capital of Hunan, sits on the flat plains of the northwest of the province. But head west, and the plains are eventually replaced by spectacular mountains. Last spring, I visited the karsts of Dehang; this year, I saw their even more beautiful cousins in Zhangjiajie, also known [...]
Ever heard of Lushan? Unless you’re Chinese, probably not. Although the mountains are popular destination for Chinese tourists, they are hardly on the radar for foreign travelers. But on a sunny autumn weekend in late October, I found myself on a bus bound for “Mt. Lu.” One of my fellow teachers is attempting to visit [...]
On my October trip to Malaysia, we had scheduled a mere 24 hours in Kuala Lumpur — hardly enough time to get one’s bearings, much less see all that the city has to offer. So we had to pick and choose. We skipped a few of the biggest attractions, including the Petronas Towers. (Vertigo makes [...]
In the late 1860s, a poor teenager from Guangdong Province named Cheong Fatt Tze fled the Opium Wars and escaped to Dutch-controlled Jakarta, then called Batavia. From his beginnings in a sundries shop, he grew into the head of a major trading company with stores across southeast Asia. One of those stores was in Penang, [...]
This is the fifth and final post of a weeklong series recapping my August trip to the western Chinese provinces of Gansu and Qinghai. See the first, second, third and fourth posts in the series.
When I think back on the two weeks we spent in Gansu and Qinghai, the food and the funny-frustrating stories are [...]
