Take to the far edge of southwestern Shandong, where the province meets Jiangsu, Henan and Anhui. Here, Heze has spent years proving that a city can be both rural in texture and ambitious in direction. It is best known...

Steel-hearted at first glance yet softer on second look, Ma’anshan in Anhui Province is a city that lives in two registers at once; one forged by blast furnaces and river docks, the other by poems, legends and Nanjing breathing...

Huaibei arrives in the imagination as a coal city, blackened and blunt, but the real place in northern Anhui is stranger and brighter; it sits where Jiangsu, Henan and Anhui meet, carries more than 4,000 years of history and...

Chuzhou does not need to shout to be noticed. It sits on the edge of Anhui, looking east towards Jiangsu and the wider pull of the Yangtze River Delta; yet it still keeps the manners of a city that...

Suzhou sits in northern Anhui with a very practical kind of confidence. It is close to the border with Jiangsu, linked to the wider plain around it and shaped by land, rail and trade rather than by dramatic scenery...

Xuancheng sits in south-east Anhui with a very clear outline. It borders Jiangsu and Zhejiang, which has long made it both a gateway and a crossroads. It is a city that looks outward, but still keeps a strong local...