Everyday China
Inside Qingdao’s underwater film studio
A heated six-metre-deep tank, underwater windows and hundreds of fixing points help Qingdao crews turn real water into controlled film scenes.
Read the storyCities & urban life
Chinese food
Can a recipe hold two histories at once?
Macao’s tourism guide lists bacalhau cakes: croquettes made with minced salted cod and mashed potato. It also describes roast duck rice, in which duck sits…
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Everyday China
Can an old landfill become a garden?
The C40 account dates the landfill’s closure to 2005 and describes restoration work beginning in 2014 across about fifty-two hectares. The project then…
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Everyday China
Could bridge design become a city’s signature?
The Wuhan Yangtze River Bridge gives those design questions a real structure. It opened in October 1957, linking Hanyang and Wuchang across the river.…
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Places & Regions
Could a city wall have a reading corner?
Nanjing’s Book Bars put reading beside an old city wall. It is a different way to meet a place.
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Places & Regions
What does Qingdao’s film city need besides cameras?
Set workshops, facial capture, 3D scans and careful footage backups reveal how work moves through Qingdao’s film complex.
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Everyday China
What happens at a Han-dynasty dinner in VR?
At Hunan Museum in Changsha, a real VR experience combines excavated objects, filmed actors and a fictional dinner mystery.
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Places & Regions
Is Harbin only an ice city?
The famous winter images belong to a city with music and a complicated migration history.
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Everyday China
The Jinhua park designed to let floodwater in
Yanweizhou Park combines floodable terraces, planted areas and an elevated bridge, showing a concrete approach to a water-resilient landscape.
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Everyday China
Who uses a park before breakfast?
A park's first visitors can turn paths and open spaces into places for exercise and company.
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Everyday China
Who owns the pavement after a bike ride?
Dockless bicycles make starting a ride easy. Finishing it fairly is the harder design problem.
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Places & Regions
Where is the ground floor in Chongqing?
Steep terrain can make a city's idea of “street level” more complicated than a map suggests.
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