https://www.scmp.com/rss/314117/feed en https://assets.i-scmp.com/static/img/icons/scmp-meta-1200x630.png https://www.scmp.com What is it? A glam restaurant blending Cantonese banquet fare with dinky baskets of dim sum, in the five-star Palais de Chine Hotel, in Taipei. The hotel sits atop Taipei Main Station, where the island-wide bus network, high-speed rail, metro system and airport train all converge to form the urban transport equivalent of a ball of tangled flexes. What’s special about the restaurant? Earlier this year, the Michelin Guide awarded it three stars, making it the only restaurant in Taiwan to get the... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/travel/article/2153115/why-taipeis-only-three-michelin-star-restaurant?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/travel/article/2153115/why-taipeis-only-three-michelin-star-restaurant?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 30 Jun 2018 04:30:15 +0000 TRAGEDY AT 12 I was born in 1985, in a very small, remote village in Jiangxi province. My dad was a huge influence on me; he was a Chinese literature teacher and a great storyteller. He wrote a lot, and he encouraged me to write; encouraged me to be a storyteller, too. We were the best of friends. But my dad passed away when I was 12. He was just 34 years old. He had had a heart problem. Because of the poor health facilities in our village he didn't get good health care. He wouldn't have died if... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/film-tv/article/1976158/hooligan-sparrow-director-dangers-filming-china?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/film-tv/article/1976158/hooligan-sparrow-director-dangers-filming-china?utm_source=rss_feed Thu, 16 Jun 2016 09:01:38 +0000 EXILE TO IRELAND I was born in London, because my parents were living there at the time. When I was less than a month old, they moved back to New York. They had just been waiting for me to arrive. So I grew up in Flushing, Queens, which coincidentally is now completely Chinese, but wasn't when I was growing up. At 14, after getting kicked out of school - for academic reasons, no big deal - I ended up at a boarding school in Ireland. The government pays for your university in Ireland, so I... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/article/1850847/comic-des-bishop-aka-bi-hansheng-what-makes-chinese-laugh?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/article/1850847/comic-des-bishop-aka-bi-hansheng-what-makes-chinese-laugh?utm_source=rss_feed Thu, 20 Aug 2015 04:00:45 +0000 For the first time, Bhutan is facing China in a football World Cup qualifier. While few expect the Little Dragon to win the June match, the atmosphere in Thimphu's stadium moments before kick-off is electric. More than 10,000 Bhutanese - fathers with toddlers on their shoulders, monks wrapped in swirling burgundy robes, young couples with faces daubed in the team's orange and yellow - thump drums, blow horns and wave flags and streamers to the chant of "Bhutan! Bhutan!" They easily drown out the... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/article/1843284/bhutan-woos-chinese-tourists-fears-backlash-india?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/article/1843284/bhutan-woos-chinese-tourists-fears-backlash-india?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 25 Jul 2015 14:59:13 +0000 DREAM WORLD I was born in Beijing in 1983, but spent my early childhood in Shanxi and Henan, and then went back to Beijing for junior high school. I wasn't interested in making films at first, I studied painting. As a child, I used to write down everything I could remember from my dreams but, when I retold the stories to my friends, they were bored. I felt like I didn't have the ability to use words to express myself well. Then, one day, we all went to the cinema and it struck me how much like a... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/article/1710743/oscar-nominee-hu-wei-filming-changing-china?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/article/1710743/oscar-nominee-hu-wei-filming-changing-china?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 14 Feb 2015 14:30:45 +0000 He's not your average 79-year-old. The Dalai Lama looks strong and moves with purpose. He's a powerful, towering presence. Last week, the exiled spiritual leader of Tibet delivered Buddhist teachings day after day to thousands of people at his temple in Dharamsala, in northern India, in sessions lasting four hours at a time. He has predicted that he won't die until he's 113 - that's another 34 years - and so it seemed rather premature, back in September, when he told German media that he was... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/article/1654701/tibetans-cant-conceive-life-without-dalai-lama?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/article/1654701/tibetans-cant-conceive-life-without-dalai-lama?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 06 Dec 2014 14:30:30 +0000 It's July 6 and, on a rundown bridge in Kathmandu, half a dozen police officers have set up a roadblock. Examining the occupants of each car - including the one carrying this reporter - they turn back all those in which Tibetans are riding. Ten minutes up the road, at a Tibetan settlement in the Nepalese city's southern suburb of Jawalakhel, an event to mark the Dalai Lama's 79th birthday is taking place. Events connected with the exiled spiritual leader, like most other public activities... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/article/1572819/caught-middle?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/article/1572819/caught-middle?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 16 Aug 2014 15:30:15 +0000 As we rattle across the moonscape towards the lost Kingdom of Mustang, the jeep's rear window falls out. One of the passengers, a middle-aged Indian man, with a dusty holdall jammed between his knees and chest, kindly raises the alarm. We screech to a halt and begin weaving back up the track in reverse at a similar breakneck speed until we find the mislaid window. Miraculously, it is in one piece - which is more than can be said for my sanity. Mustang is Nepal's "Tibet" - a remote and beautiful... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/article/1555545/high-road?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/article/1555545/high-road?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 19 Jul 2014 15:00:30 +0000 Next to the Potala Palace in Lhasa, Tibet, is the city's main post office. Buried under postcards of yaks, tacky tourist maps, guidebooks and Buddhist paperbacks in the post office's dusty and tumbledown bookshop is a copy of Tibet is my Home, the autobiography of Tashi Tsering. The Tibetan nationalist lived through the cruelties of pre-1950 Tibet and the madness and injustices of the Cultural Revolution. He spent six years in a Chinese jail accused of being a counter-revolutionary. The book is... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/article/1520312/mainland-censorship-authors-cut-their-losses?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/article/1520312/mainland-censorship-authors-cut-their-losses?utm_source=rss_feed Tue, 01 Jul 2014 16:00:30 +0000 When Sonam Dorje took his microphone to the windswept grasslands of eastern Qinghai province in September, he just wanted to record local folk tales. It had been many years since the Tibetan elders of Xunhua county had had an audience for their stories, but when they saw Dorje's recording equipment, they clammed up. 'They thought we were making a television programme, so I had to quickly explain we were just recording their voices, and then they felt more comfortable,' Dorje says. They were... https://www.scmp.com/article/989519/laying-down-lore?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/989519/laying-down-lore?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 07 Jan 2012 16:00:00 +0000 When her best friend died from leukaemia last year, Ran Jing made a promise to herself; she would travel to Tibet as soon as she graduated from high school. Her classmate had been a Buddhist, and it had been her dream to see Lhasa. A few months after her 18th birthday, Ran set off alone from her home in Henan province, taking buses and sharing cars, on a pilgrimage to the Tibetan capital in memory of her friend. 'I'm doing this for her,' she says, breaking her inbound trip in a youth hostel... https://www.scmp.com/article/985339/road-enlightenment?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/985339/road-enlightenment?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 19 Nov 2011 16:00:00 +0000 Lu Rong was in her late 50s when she first met a gay man. She was surfing the internet four years ago when she stumbled across a curious blog entry: 'I'm in a real dilemma over my mother's phone call.' 'When I saw it, I thought it was very strange,' says Lu, 61, a retired market researcher. 'He obviously loved his mother very much, so why was he afraid to pick up her call? I have a son myself.' After rereading the blog several times and examining those of his friends that were linked to the... https://www.scmp.com/article/980698/how-beijing-retiree-became-go-between-gays-trying-come-out-their-parents?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/980698/how-beijing-retiree-became-go-between-gays-trying-come-out-their-parents?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 01 Oct 2011 16:00:00 +0000 When Lisa Cathey was visiting her 76-year-old father, Clay, six years ago, she noticed a 'Free Tibet' bumper sticker on his golf cart. Thinking it odd, she asked him about it. She was stunned to find out he had been part of America's Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Tibet Task Force in the late 1950s and 60s, a covert operation to train Tibetan guerillas in the United States and parachute them into their homeland, to fight the Chinese. 'I knew dad had been in the CIA but he never shared any... https://www.scmp.com/article/737111/secret-army?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/737111/secret-army?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 29 Jan 2011 16:00:00 +0000 There's an open paved area at one end of Houhai Lake in Beijing where retirees practise calligraphy with giant brushes dipped in buckets of plain water. On a sunny day their beautiful script may last just five minutes before it evaporates in the heat. Earlier this summer, a group of young people wielding a camera, whiteboard and marker pens approached one calligrapher and asked him if he would support their campaign called Tongzhi Nihao, which translates roughly as 'hello, comrade'. The... https://www.scmp.com/article/721459/no-straight-faces?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/721459/no-straight-faces?utm_source=rss_feed Thu, 05 Aug 2010 16:00:00 +0000 When women fell in love with each other in the Qing dynasty, what did they do? If the 17th-century play Lianxiang Ban is anything to go by, they had quite a bit of sex and then schemed to become wives of the same man. Surprised? Perhaps even more astounding than that is the fact this overtly homosexual play (adapted into opera form) was staged at a top mainstream theatre in Beijing last month. The promotional material proudly proclaimed it as the mainland's first lesbian opera and used a... https://www.scmp.com/article/716294/sing-out-sisters?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/716294/sing-out-sisters?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 05 Jun 2010 16:00:00 +0000 For any true chocolate lover, the Chocolate Wonderland theme park that opened last week in Beijing is a criminal waste of good cocoa. About 80,000 kilograms of imported Belgian chocolate has been hand-sculpted into a Willy Wonka world with Chinese characteristics. There are hundreds of chocolate terracotta warriors, a life-sized chunk of the Great Wall, Buddha figurines, a fudgy-looking laptop, a Prada bag and a life-sized BMW. However, it will all be thrown out once the park closes in April.... https://www.scmp.com/article/705356/changing-tastes?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/705356/changing-tastes?utm_source=rss_feed Wed, 03 Feb 2010 16:00:00 +0000 Lhamo Tso knew something was wrong when her husband told her last year that they and their four children had to leave Tibet . But she didn't ask and Dhondup Wangchen didn't tell. The family packed up their belongings, sneaked across the Himalayas, crossed through Nepal and slipped into India. In October, once they had settled in the northern town of Dharamsala, headquarters of the Tibetan government in exile, Dhondup Wangchen told her he had 'some important work to do in Tibet', and that he... https://www.scmp.com/article/654742/enemy-state?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/654742/enemy-state?utm_source=rss_feed Wed, 01 Oct 2008 16:00:00 +0000 The chance to meet cute girls was a definite plus, although it wasn't the main reason 28-year-old Niu Bin embarked on an epic bicycle journey around the mainland. The affable Shanxi native had long dreamed of exploring the beauty of his country, and last December set about realising that goal. He quit his job as a car salesman, bought a mountain bike, sketched a route and, within 15 days, set out from his hometown of Changzhi to pedal through every Chinese province, municipality and region. It... https://www.scmp.com/article/639293/chain-reaction?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/639293/chain-reaction?utm_source=rss_feed Tue, 27 May 2008 16:00:00 +0000 Take a geeky-looking US student, an idealistic young mainlander, and an actor from Toronto, mix in video, some naff rap lines - 'Wind energy, hey/ Reduce emissions, hey/ It's green energy/ Hey! Hey! Hey!' - and the result is the China's Green Beat website. Calling themselves the Green Brothers, the unlikely trio of John Romankiewicz, Zhao Xiangyu and Rene Ng have been highlighting efforts to tackle China's environmental crisis through quirky videos that they post on their site, and now hope to... https://www.scmp.com/article/633683/pod-we-trust?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/633683/pod-we-trust?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 13 Apr 2008 16:00:00 +0000 Sister B' is a middle-aged Chinese prostitute. She is often attacked and robbed and her clients frequently don't pay her. 'Sister A' from Jilin looks after a 60-year-old man for bed and board and an occasional handout. She used to work as a nanny for a Chinese family with two children. She was sacked after she collapsed from the gruelling conditions - rising at 5am and working until midnight, six days a week. But this abuse didn't take place on the mainland. The two women live in France. Their... https://www.scmp.com/article/630345/end-line?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/630345/end-line?utm_source=rss_feed Mon, 17 Mar 2008 16:00:00 +0000 A grinning man clad in army fatigues brandishes a rifle, a dead boar lies at his feet. He wears a helmet and an ammunition belt stuffed with gun cartridges. His image, plastered all over Beijing's subway, is the face of a new hunting reserve, a half-day's drive from the capital. East International Hunting Place, which allows guests to shoot deer, wild boar, foxes, pheasants and endangered leopards, sprawls over a so-called protected primeval forest near Taiyue Mountain in Shanxi province . 'You... https://www.scmp.com/article/622259/mainlanders-show-major-attitude-shift?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/622259/mainlanders-show-major-attitude-shift?utm_source=rss_feed Tue, 08 Jan 2008 16:00:00 +0000 A grinning man clad in army fatigues brandishes a rifle, a dead boar lies at his feet. Leaves are stuck to his hunting helmet and an ammunition belt stuffed with gun cartridges hugs his portly waist. His image, plastered all over Beijing's subway, is the face of a new hunting reserve, a half day's drive from the capital. East International Hunting Place, which allows guests to shoot deer, wild boar, foxes, pheasants and endangered leopards, sprawls over a so-called protected primeval forest near... https://www.scmp.com/article/621949/reality-bites?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/article/621949/reality-bites?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 06 Jan 2008 16:00:00 +0000