North China Travel Guide

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Spring, summer and autumn are beautiful in Beijing. Winter not so much. Still, there are dozens of fun activities to partake in in the warmer months that are simply closed down or not feasible when it’s cold. Take the Great Wall, for example. It’s a miserable place in winter. The surrounding trees are leafless and the views are brown and stark. There isn’t the beauty of snow to justify suffering in the cold. The Forbidden City is another... Read More

For an experience that’s exclusively Tianjin, your best option for nighttime entertainment is xiangsheng, also known as “comic dialogue” or “crosstalk”. This is one of the quyi, or traditional forms of Chinese entertainment. Usually with two people on stage (although sometimes one or several), xiangsheng is the quyi art that largely originated in Tianjin several hundred years ago. In xiangsheng, the performers engage in a... Read More