About a two hour drive to the north of Beijing lies a resort called Nanshan where, for very reasonable rates, it's possible to ski or snowboard. Rising early on Saturday morning, a group of us travelled to Nanshan in a tour minibus to see if we could get through the day without serious injury and possibly come away with a new skill to boast about to friends ...   more »

While Beijing has generally been the home of various Chinese dynasties and their seats in the Imperial Palace (AKA the Forbidden City), as well as having a huge political history, Shanghai has pretty much been where the money is. Before the Opium Wars and the Treaty of Nanking in 1842 (where China ceded Hong Kong to the British and gave them the right to trade and reside in five cities, one of which was Shanghai), Shanghai was just an isolated port town residing on the Yangtze River Delta. This very location, however, made it an ideal place to bring in trade of all kinds from the rest of the world, giving it the potential (which the brutal British saw) of being a major hub in world economics. After the British got in and began making enormous amounts of money, other countries wasted no time in following suit. Before long the French, Americans, Germans and Japanese had all taken parts of Shanghai for themselves and also began to accrue vast wealth at the expense of the Chinese people (who were employed to spin silk, mill grain, roll cigarettes and perform other forms of menial labour for the rich foreigners, often in pitiful conditions and for miniscule wages). The money kept coming in and in the 1930s Shanghai finally reached its decadent heights, with the city being described by Fortune magazine as "the fifth city of the Earth, the megalopolis of continental Asia, inheritor of ancient Baghdad, of pre-war Constantinople, of nineteenth century London, of twentieth century Manhattan". A city of so much money brings with it gangsters, drugs, warlords, brothels and spy rings all searching for their own way to use and abuse the "whore of the Orient" as Shanghai came to be known. Still it grew. Even through the second World War, Shanghai still found ways to prosper ...   more »