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...
Fresh along the lower Yangtze, Tongling still feels like a city built from hammer blows, river wind and the steady pull of ore from the earth. It is smaller than many of Anhui’s better-known neighbours; yet it carries a...
Southern Anhui is characterised by the lower Yangtze, where Anqing carries an easy river calm that hides how much history sits under its streets. It is a port city, a theatre town and an old industrial base; yet it...
Steep peaks still dominate the horizon here, and that is the point. Huangshan is one of those rare cities where the mountain is not just a backdrop but the main character; the rest of the place has spent centuries...
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...
Fuyang sits in the north-west of Anhui, as broad as a map and busier than many outsiders expect. It has the feel of a city built on distance, yet also one that has learned to use that distance well;...
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...
West Anhui’s Lu'an sits where the Dabie Mountains begin to soften into hills and plains. It is a large city with a practical feel; the kind of place shaped less by display than by land, water, farming and the...
