Industrial design in the middle of the highlands. Grassland stretching in every direction. Green all the way to the horizon, with the feeling that it continues well beyond anything you can see.

The surroundings give this hotel its particular appeal. You have somewhere beautiful to stay, and an enormous amount of space around you. You can spend an afternoon looking out across the grass and feel entirely satisfied with the decision.

Then comes the silence. At night, when the sky is clear, the stars give you another reason to stay outside.

In What Green Does to the Soul, we wrote about the effect this part of China has on us. We keep returning to that green. It changes with the light, the weather and the season, and somehow changes the pace inside your own head.

Azara gives us time to enjoy it. The roads leading there give us many of the reasons we love travelling through the Tibetan highlands.

Tibetan life, close enough for a conversation

The Tibetan cultural world extends across a vast area, including much of western Sichuan and southern Qinghai. Monasteries, prayer wheels, language and the rhythms of everyday life connect these places with the wider plateau.

For us, the people are a large part of the attraction. We have found extraordinary warmth and openness here. A little curiosity, a few words and enough time can make a very ordinary stop memorable.

We are particularly interested in the herb collectors and traders. The mountain slopes are also places of work. People search for plants, bring them down and sell them into a trade that connects the highlands with pharmacies and practitioners of traditional medicine. Looking at a hillside with someone who knows what grows there gives the landscape another dimension.

Then there are the prayer wheels. Some communities seem to have entered a friendly competition over who can build the biggest. We enjoy the combination of devotion, engineering and local pride.

Monasteries belong to the daily life of these towns. Monks go about their day. People come to pray, walk their circuits and turn the wheels. In Dege, the printing house adds another expression of that living culture.

This is one reason we prefer travelling through Sichuan and Qinghai. There is room to follow smaller roads and shape the journey around the people and places we encounter. Travel in the Tibet Autonomous Region requires a special permit and an organised tour. Here, we have greater flexibility, while checking local access conditions for each journey.

Yaks, horses and the happiness of distance

For long stretches of the higher route, we travel at around 4,000 metres. The air is thin. The distances are large. Eagles circle overhead, and vultures are part of the highland landscape.

Across the grasslands are yaks, horses, nomadic tents and yurts. Animals and weather give the land movement. The scale takes a little longer to absorb.

We find a particular happiness in that openness. There is space for your eyes to travel, and time for your thoughts to follow. A bend in the road can reveal another valley and another stretch of grassland, and we are quite happy to keep looking.

August can bring the excitement of horse racing. For a summer journey, we check local festival calendars to see what might fit. Dates and routes need to work together.

Our road deliberately leaves Shangri La and Tiger Leaping Gorge out of the itinerary. We find the quieter towns, the Maowu Canyon and the roads deeper into the highlands far more rewarding for the kind of journey we want to share.

And then, Chengdu

Chengdu gives the journey a wonderfully different energy.

Start with noodles. There are many ways to eat well in this city, and a good bowl is an excellent way to begin. Later, hotpot brings its own demands on your attention, appetite and tolerance for chilli.

Pandas deserve their place in the programme. So does Sanxingdui, where the extraordinary bronze faces open a very different window onto this part of China.

Then there is baijiu. A working distillery in the middle of the city makes this spirit feel very much part of Chengdu itself. Even for people who are uncertain about the taste, the craft and history are worth exploring.

And the bars. In our opinion, Chengdu has the best bar scene in China. We love the creativity, the people and the ease with which an evening can develop.

There is something about the city’s temperament that keeps drawing us back. People seem comfortable enjoying themselves. They make time for food, conversation and a good night out.

We sometimes wonder whether the proximity of the mountains has something to do with it. That is our own theory. Spending time in both places is a pleasurable way to consider it.

We had put music on in the car. Ahead of us, Muztagh Ata rose above the plateau, its glaciers bright beneath a clear blue sky. The road kept opening another view of the mountain. We wanted to keep looking.

After so many kilometres through western China, the landscape could still overwhelm us.

That feeling returns when we think about Xinjiang. The scale of the desert. The people who have made their lives within it. The cultures carried along its edges. And then the mountains.

Blue, green and an eye in the desert

The salt lakes of Qinghai begin to rearrange your expectations early in the journey.

Blue water. Green water. White salt along the shore. Vast stretches of desert surrounding colours that seem almost improbable in such a dry landscape.

Near Mangya, Aiken Spring adds another palette. Known as Devil’s Eye, the hot spring spreads colour across the ground around it, making the earth itself look strangely alive.

We have learned to allow time for these places. The colours and the sheer strangeness of the setting can turn a short stop into a long one.

Centuries gathered along the road

Along the southern edge of the Taklamakan, the road passes through a landscape that has carried travellers, beliefs and goods for centuries.

At Milan, also known as Miran, the ruins bring the southern Silk Road into view. The site’s Buddhist frescoes, shrines and later Tibetan fort belong to different chapters of its history.

Buddhism, Christianity and Islam all spread through the wider Silk Road networks. Travelling here gives a physical setting to that history of movement and exchange.

In the Loulan Museum at Ruoqiang, ancient mummies bring another kind of proximity. A human face preserved across millennia can make the distance between ourselves and the past feel surprisingly short.

The road carries you through great spaces, while these encounters bring you close to individual lives.

The man who stayed

Deep inside the Taklamakan, we met Mr Zhang.

He had come to Tazhong to work in oil exploration around twenty five years ago. He stayed, making a life in a place whose position on the map had initially seemed reason enough for us to go and investigate.

His collection of desert vehicles, the abandoned airstrip laid across the sand and the nearby plant research give this small settlement an unexpected range of stories.

Mr Zhang knows how people live here, how vehicles cope with sand and how plants survive. With him, the immense desert acquires names, histories and familiar places.

His decision to remain here has become one of the stories we remember most clearly.

Coffee in bread and silk on the loom

The oasis towns bring their own pleasures.

Hotan carries the long story of jade, with people searching the riverbed for stones. Yarkant brings workshops, markets, knife makers and Atlas silk, whose colours and patterns can hold your attention as effectively as a desert lake.

Then there is the food. Coffee served in bread is the sort of detail you remember and find yourself trying to explain later. Lamb appears with gratifying regularity. A meal becomes another opportunity to stop, look around and spend time in a place.

We enjoy the old crafts particularly. Watching someone work changes your relationship with an object. A knife or a length of silk begins to carry the time and skill of the person who made it.

The city we keep thinking about

Kashgar has an extraordinary pull. Its old town, bazaars, pigeons and livestock market give the journey another density of sights and sounds. The city’s Uyghur culture opens a further perspective on what China can feel like.

Our own affection is especially strong in Yarkant. To us, it feels more rooted in its everyday life. We enjoy joining the rhythms of the town through its workshops, food and conversations. This is a personal preference that has grown through our earlier journeys.

Kashgar remains an important part of the route. It is also the gateway to two landscapes that have left a particularly strong impression on us.

An opening in the mountain

Shipton’s Arch is recognised by Guinness World Records as the world’s highest natural arch.

On our own visit, the drone footage helped us appreciate the formation’s dimensions again when we watched it afterwards. The mountain setting and the immense opening within it continued to reveal themselves after we had left.

Where the road rises into the Pamir

Beyond Kashgar, the road climbs towards lakes, high valleys and the glacier covered slopes of Muztagh Ata.

This was the landscape that brought us to tears and made us want to prolong every stop.

Our explorations took us towards the borders with Pakistan and Afghanistan. In the highlands, encounters with Tajik hosts and their homes gave these extraordinary landscapes a human warmth that we remember just as vividly.

For Andrea and me, this is what makes the far west so rewarding. The beauty of a place and the lives within it become part of the same memory.

Thank you for reading The China Serendipity Letter.

This is one of the moments we remember most clearly from northern Yunnan. We had come for the mountains, the river valleys and the cultures that make this part of China so fascinating. An afternoon at the hotel became part of that experience.

The places we stay influence how a journey feels. They give us a setting for a conversation, a taste of the surrounding country and a reason to spend a little longer somewhere. On this route, three very different hotels do that particularly well.

Afternoon tea at Meili

Sunyata Meili brings local design into rooms with warm colours and a welcoming atmosphere. The architecture belongs to the place. The comfort makes it easy to settle in.

The kitchen carries the same thought through to dinner. Chinese dishes take on local influences here, close to Tibet, with enough care and imagination to make the meal an occasion in its own right. The bar has a good selection of wine and whisky.

What stays with us is the connection between these things. The mountain view accompanies afternoon tea. The food adds another way of understanding where we are. A comfortable room gives us time to absorb it all.

Two nights here leave room for that pleasure. There is a whole day with the mountains, followed by another evening at a table we already look forward to returning to.

A wine story in Cizhong

At Songtsam Cizhong, the quality runs through the rooms, the food and the wine selection. The staff are exceptionally well trained and remain closely connected to local life. Their hospitality gives the stay a personal warmth.

Within walking distance lies a much smaller place with a story of its own.

On our visit to Cizhong, a woman led us into an old wooden house and down to her private museum. Photographs and letters connected the village with the French missionaries who brought winemaking to this part of Yunnan. She still made wine by hand, helped by women from the neighbourhood.

That encounter gave the wine a particular meaning. A bottle carried a story about the village and the people who had kept its traditions alive. It is the kind of memory that travels home with you.

Cizhong deserves time for both its hospitality and the lives beyond the hotel. A good stay creates room for curiosity.

Truffles and a Smeg refrigerator in Wuli

Further along the journey, Sunyata Wuli takes a remarkably discreet place in the valley landscape. Its industrial design, generous rooms and carefully chosen interiors give the stay a very different character.

On our visit, the local kitchen brought the surroundings to the table. Truffles gathered by farmers played a prominent part in the food. The relationship between landscape and dinner felt especially close.

We also saw wooden cottages adapted for family stays. The old timber and contemporary interiors are memorable together. So is the Smeg refrigerator, a wonderfully specific detail to encounter this far into the mountains.

Across northern Yunnan, the upper reaches of the Yangtze, Mekong and Salween run through neighbouring valleys. Protected areas within this landscape form the UNESCO World Heritage site of the Three Parallel Rivers of Yunnan.

The scale is extraordinary. The hotels bring that vast country into a more personal frame. Tea on a terrace. A village wine story. Truffles at dinner. These are some of the ways a landscape becomes a place we feel we have spent time in.

You want to know where he is going. How the dogs are enjoying it. What persuaded him to set off in the first place. A few minutes earlier, you were thinking about the distance to your hotel. Now there is someone beside the road whose journey has become interesting enough to interrupt your own.

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For Andrea and me, this possibility explains much of our attachment to travelling through China by car. Together with our guests.

Curiosity deserves a little room in the day. On the roads of western China, we have learned to leave quite a lot.

The view has already disappeared

China’s fast trains are a pleasure. Comfortable seats, remarkable speed and the ease of watching great distances pass make rail travel an appealing part of a visit.

In the mountainous west, the view can also be tantalising. A valley opens, a village appears, a river catches the light. Then comes another tunnel. By the time you have become properly curious, the place has disappeared.

We know that small frustration well. There is something outside the window that deserves your attention, and the timetable carries you onwards.

On our road journeys, we choose the route partly for what it allows us to see. We leave the motorway where a smaller road promises something worth the time. A mountain can remain in view long enough for its shape to become familiar. A river accompanies us through a valley. We can pull over when a landscape asks for a longer look.

The journey begins to acquire its own meaning.

China unfolds at the roadside

Travelling through western China by road gives you time to notice how places belong together.

As you climb, vegetation changes. Houses take on different forms. Fields give way to grazing land. The food at lunch carries something of the country you have spent the morning crossing. Distance becomes tangible, and geography begins to explain everyday life.

Then something catches your eye.

Yaks beside the road. Horses across the grassland. Vultures gathered on a slope. Further west, camels in a landscape whose scale takes time to absorb.

We stop, find a place to stand and let our eyes adjust to the distances.

Other stops begin with people. A meal with a local family introduces dishes we have never encountered. A small monastery invites a quiet visit. A prayer wheel becomes a reason to spend time in a village we had barely noticed on the map.

Each encounter has its own pace. A conversation may last five minutes or occupy much of the afternoon. The freedom to stay allows interest to develop into understanding.

Tomorrow can be decided over dinner

There is a particular pleasure in discovering that a journey still belongs to you.

Perhaps the hotel is so good that you would like another two nights. A longer driving day could make that possible. Perhaps everyone would welcome a quieter morning, or a place we passed deserves a return.

These are conversations we can have over dinner.

Our groups are small enough for everyone’s wishes to enter the discussion. Andrea and I are there ourselves, with the knowledge of the route needed to consider what a change involves. We can look at the distances, check what is possible and reshape the coming days together.

For people whose working lives require decisions weeks in advance, this freedom can feel unexpectedly generous. You can discover what you want while you are already travelling.

Your curiosity has the right of way

Everyone sees a different journey through the same window. A photographer notices the light across a mountain ridge. Someone else becomes absorbed by an improbable roadside invention, a remarkable bridge or the face of a person watching us pass.

We enjoy these differences. They make travelling together interesting, and each deserves room in the day.

When something catches your eye, tell us. We stop wherever it is safe to pull over. There is no group vote to establish whether your fascination is sufficiently important. You have time to step outside, find your angle and take the photograph you had in mind. Sometimes the most interesting detail only becomes visible once you have stopped.

We also like to send up the drone and let it follow a stretch of our route. From above, the bends reveal their relationship to the river. Our car becomes a small moving point, and the landscape acquires a scale we could barely grasp from the road.

For a moment, we can see ourselves inside the journey.

That freedom to follow your own attention is part of what makes the experience yours.

Freedom takes preparation

We spend considerable time on the roads before bringing guests along them. We drive the stages, inspect the hotels and consider where the journey needs a pause.

That knowledge gives us confidence to leave room in the plan. We understand what a longer day asks of our guests and where an additional night can make the experience richer.

Comfort matters throughout. A beautiful room, a good dinner and the prospect of an unhurried morning give a long journey its rhythm. So does the confidence that someone has thought carefully about the practical details.

Within that preparation, there is space for the man with the two dogs.

We think of this as a very personal kind of luxury. Your attention has somewhere to go, and your day has room to follow it.

Andrea and René

Can a colour restore a person?

After a week on its roads and three days in Chengdu, every time we drove through Sichuan something in us has shifted. The battery is charged again.

Can green be a feeling?

We have eaten too much hotpot, stayed out in bars much later than intended, looked across grasslands that seem to continue beyond the curvature of the earth, and spent long hours on roads where the next interruption might be a yak, a monk, a coppersmith, a woman looking for a lift, or simply a view that makes continuing feel slightly absurd.

Perhaps it is the color. The green. Sichuan green, do you know that colour?

Chengdu may be the cooler Shanghai

To us, Chengdu feels like Shanghai after it has loosened its collar and decided to stay out for one more drink.

It is unmistakably metropolitan, self assured and sophisticated, yet remarkably relaxed about it. People dress well without appearing to have dressed for an audience. Cafés remain busy into the evening. Bars appear behind discreet doors, inside converted houses and above streets filled with the steam of hotpot restaurants.

For our taste, Chengdu has the best bar scene in China. It has invention without theatre, elegance without stiffness and enough curiosity to turn one drink into a very long evening.

During the day, hotpot seems to be everywhere. Its scent escapes from doorways, hovers above pavements and settles into clothes. In another part of the city, Shuijingfang still makes baijiu around ancient fermentation pits hidden within the modern metropolis. Few cities carry their appetite and their history quite so openly.

And then there are the pandas.

Classic tourist attractions rarely determine our journeys. The first time we went to see Chengdu’s pandas, we cried on the way there.

This surprised us almost as much as the animals themselves.

You quickly understand that Chengdu’s obsession with pandas reaches far beyond clever merchandising. The city speaks about them with the warmth normally reserved for eccentric relatives. They seem to belong to the civic family.

Then the road begins to climb

Leave Chengdu westwards and the land quickly rises from the Sichuan Basin towards western Sichuan and the Tibetan highlands of Kham.

The green changes as we climb. Eventually, it reaches the horizon and stays there. The distances become difficult to measure.

Yaks and horses graze beside black tents. Eagles ride the thermals. Even vultures gather near the road with the severe patience of creatures that have learned to wait. Herbalists search the slopes for plants that will later pass through the hands of traders, pharmacies and traditional doctors.

A snow leopard may be somewhere in those mountains. Seeing one would require extraordinary luck. Knowing that it could be there already changes the landscape.

The people we meet across Kham share Tibetan culture, language and religion with communities further west. In our experience, encounters often unfold more easily here than in the Tibet Autonomous Region. Conversations begin beside the road, over butter tea, in a monastery courtyard or in one of the small restaurants that become precious after several hours of driving.

The culture feels deeply rooted and very much alive.

Villages compete in devotion

Driving across western Sichuan, we sometimes wonder whether the villages are engaged in a kind of competition over who can build the largest prayer wheel.

These are no modest objects that turn gently in a temple corner. Some rise twenty five metres or more into the sky, monumental cylinders of colour, scripture and devotion that require several people to set them in motion.

The architecture around them changes from valley to valley. Some houses are radiant white, others earthy brown. Their windows carry intricate frames painted in deep reds, yellows, blues and greens. The proportions are generous, the walls solid, the courtyards protected from the wind.

Local history, available materials and different traditions of Tibetan Buddhism have left their traces. We repeatedly try to decide which style we find most beautiful. The decision rarely survives the next valley.

In one settlement, we meet a coppersmith working on a new figure for a nearby monastery. The sculpture is still incomplete, its face emerging slowly beneath his hands. There is no performance arranged for visitors. He is working because the monastery needs a figure and because this is his craft.

Those moments stay with us longer than many famous sights.

Where the road becomes public transport

On the more remote roads, regular public transport gradually disappears. The road itself becomes a social institution.

People wait beside it and raise a hand when a car approaches. Whenever it feels right, we stop.

A farmer may need to reach the next village. Someone has finished at a local market and wants to get home. They climb in, settle among our bags and we try begin to talk.

On Sunday afternoon, you will see children trying to hitch a ride towards a town with a suitable school. They were standing beside the motorway with their bags, but we kept driving. As foreigners, the situation felt too uncertain. Adult passengers are easy. Children bring a responsibility that cannot be solved through goodwill alone.

Road travel is filled with such small ethical decisions. It brings freedom and intimacy, together with the obligation to pay attention.

Luxury begins when the horizon has no audience

Western Sichuan contains some of the quietest landscapes we know, along with some remarkably ambitious hotels.

After hours on empty roads, you may arrive at a hotel complex whose industrial design would attract attention in New York. Here, it stands almost alone on the edge of the grassland, facing a mountain that has needed no architect.

The real luxury is the silence.

You eat breakfast while looking towards a peak rising more than six thousand metres into the morning light. By afternoon, someone serves coffee beside a cake shaped like the snow mountain visible through the window.

Many of these mountains are sacred. Others remain unclimbed because they are remote, technically difficult or simply overlooked, too many.

The rarity of human encounters gives them weight. A herder on horseback, a monk walking between villages or a family gathering medicinal plants becomes part of the memory of the landscape.

The distances are so immense that staging an encounter for passing visitors would rarely make economic sense. The herbalist collects herbs because there is a market for them. The coppersmith works because a monastery needs his art. The farmer asks for a lift because the road leads home.

Life belongs to the people who live here. Travellers are briefly allowed to observe it.

Perhaps that is the rarest form of luxury.

A province of whisky, Buddhas and rockets

Sichuan resists every attempt to reduce it to a single image.

Near Mount Emei, a modern whisky distillery is creating a Chinese interpretation of malt whisky through local barley, water and oak. Nearby, the Leshan Giant Buddha has watched the meeting of three rivers for more than a thousand years.

Further south, the province changes character again. Near Xichang lies one of China’s major satellite launch centres. With fortunate timing, a journey through Sichuan can include the sight of a rocket rising above the mountains.

Few places place contemplative monasteries, new whisky, giant Buddhas and space technology within one provincial border and make the combination feel entirely plausible.

Then there is E’ya.

The road to this remote Naxi township is demanding enough to act as a filter. People here still speak about family traditions in which a woman may have more than one husband, arrangements that grew from the economic and social realities of isolated mountain life.

By the time we arrive, we have the distinct feeling that foreign visitors remain unusual.

The effort of reaching E’ya changes the encounter. Remote places should ask something of the traveller. Easy access has its virtues. Difficulty preserves attention.

Some landscapes refuse to be consumed

Sichuan is too large to be completed.

Every road appears to suggest another. Every valley contains a turn we have yet to take. Behind the famous mountains are quieter mountains. Beyond the monasteries that appear in guidebooks are smaller monasteries reached by roads without signs.

This is a province where we can spend days trekking and meet only a handful of people, then return to Chengdu and enter a bar that would hold its own in London, Tokyo or New York.

After a week in Sichuan and three days in Chengdu, your internal tank is full again.

Why?

Perhaps green lowers the pulse. Perhaps distance restores proportion. Perhaps an open horizon reminds us that the world remains larger than the routines through which we usually understand it.

The green begins it.

The space deepens it.

The encounters make it stay.

(Last stop for breakfast before heading off to Berlin by car from Fujian, East China)

(An intermediate stop in Xi’an to see the Terracotta Army. What you can see behind us is only a fraction of the entire site. Most of the warriors have yet to be excavated.)

We left Fujian and crossed China from east to west. For more than a week, the road carried us across a country whose dimensions are difficult to grasp from a map. After more than 5,000 kilometres, we finally reached the first international border of our journey, the crossing between China and Kazakhstan. Berlin was still thousands of kilometres away, yet this felt like the moment when the great journey would truly begin.

It was also the moment when it ended.

Among all the documents we had carefully assembled, one paper was missing. Our car required an additional export document before it could leave China. We were free to walk across the border into Kazakhstan. The car had to remain behind. For the officers, the situation was perfectly clear. For us, standing there after 5,000 kilometres of driving and months of preparation, it felt almost absurd.

(Close to the border to Kazakstan - where China already looks like central Asia.)

We began making calls. We contacted authorities, searched for the responsible office and tried to find somebody who could issue the missing document. Every conversation led to another number, another explanation and eventually another dead end. There was no solution available at the border, and there was no realistic way to obtain the paper within the time we had.

That evening, we mourned our journey. We had crossed the entire width of China and had failed before crossing a single international border. The car that was supposed to take us to Berlin was still standing on Chinese soil, facing west, while the road beyond the checkpoint remained closed to it.

By the following morning, the disappointment had begun to make room for another thought. We had reserved six weeks for travelling, and China was surely large enough to fill them. We had already driven more than 5,000 kilometres through the country, yet there was still so much we had never seen. A new route slowly emerged. We would turn south, travel through western China towards Hong Kong, leave the car in Shenzhen and fly to Germany. On our return, we would collect it and drive back to Fujian.

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It began as a practical answer to a very impractical problem. It became one of the most consequential decisions we have made in China so far.

(Crossing the Taklamakan desert ….

… where your satnav tells you to take the next exit in a thousand kilometres.)

Over the following weeks, we began to understand, kilometre by kilometre, what China offers as a travel destination. The further we travelled through the west, the more the country changed around us. Deserts opened towards distant mountain ranges. Fertile valleys rose into high plateaus. Great rivers cut through landscapes that seemed to have been designed on a continental scale. Beyond each pass, the food, architecture, language and rhythms of everyday life shifted again.

(Jiuzhaigou, north of Chengdu, Sichuan)

The road allowed these transitions to unfold gradually. A flight would have carried us from one destination to the next within a few hours. Driving gave every landscape a beginning and an end. We could watch vegetation disappear as the altitude rose, follow rivers towards their sources and see how geography shaped villages, agriculture and daily life. China became less abstract with every kilometre. It also became larger, more diverse and more surprising.

Travelling by car changed our rhythm. We could follow a smaller road because it looked interesting, turn around when we had passed something worth seeing and stop when a view demanded more than a photograph through the window. A brief exchange at the roadside could grow into a conversation. A recommendation over lunch could alter the afternoon. A barely visible turn off could lead towards a valley, a monastery or a village that had never appeared in our original plan.

(Farmer with hot green peppers in Sichuan)

Again and again, one question followed us along the road. How could a country be this beautiful, this varied and still so little known among our friends, colleagues and business partners?

International perceptions of China are often formed in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, alongside the country’s best known historic sights. Western China reveals dimensions that rarely enter the familiar image. There are remote valleys where geography continues to define everyday life, villages in which different cultures and religions have coexisted for centuries, and landscapes shaped by tea forests, vineyards, glaciers, deserts and some of Asia’s great rivers.

There are also remarkable hotels in places where few international travellers would think to look. There are small restaurants where the food explains the surrounding landscape more vividly than any guidebook. There are encounters with people who are living their lives, with no stage, performance or prepared programme for visitors. These moments arise through time, openness and the willingness to remain curious.

(Homestay in a remote village in Guizhou)

The further we travelled, the more an old idea returned to me.

Create a room for serendipity.

Years earlier, I had used this phrase in my work as a consultant. During workshops on organisational development, it described the value of creating enough openness for an unexpected idea to emerge. On the roads of western China, the phrase acquired a more tangible meaning. A journey needs direction, careful preparation and knowledge of the terrain. It also needs space for something unforeseen to enter.

Serendipity cannot be placed on an itinerary. The conditions for it can be created.

That idea became China Serendipity.

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Since that first journey, Andrea and I have driven many thousands of kilometres through Yunnan, Sichuan, Qinghai, Xinjiang and other parts of western China. We scout every route ourselves, drive each stage and personally inspect the places where our guests will stay. We learn where a long day on the road becomes rewarding, where another hour adds something valuable and where the route needs more time, more quiet or a better place to arrive.

Our journeys are carefully prepared while remaining flexible enough for discovery. We know the destination and understand the road ahead. We also keep our eyes open for the almost invisible turn off, the mountain farmer who begins a conversation, the unfamiliar sound from a courtyard or the landscape that suddenly changes the rhythm of the day.

(Coffee with a view in North Yunnan)

This is where serendipity meets serenity.

The freedom to explore becomes a form of luxury when someone has already considered the road ahead. In western China, luxury may mean a beautifully designed lodge overlooking a mountain range. It may be a quiet room after crossing a demanding pass, a warm meal in an unexpected place or the reassurance that there is no need to hurry. It is found in access, attention, calm and the rare privilege of experiencing something that may never happen in quite the same way again.

From this Wednesday onwards, The China Serendipity Letter will take you with us. Each week, we will follow one road, explore one place or share one encounter from the lesser known regions of western China. We will write about spectacular landscapes, remarkable people, unexpected hotels and food that tells you where you are. Above all, we will share the moments that became memorable because the journey had left enough room for them to happen.

(Evening mood at ErHai Lake, Dali, Yunnan)

The road to Berlin never carried us beyond that first border.

Looking back, the closed road led us towards a far more exciting journey. It continues today.

One road. One place. One unexpected China.

Our first issue will be published on Wednesday, 16 September 2026.

It begins with a road trip that was supposed to take us from China to Berlin. The journey ended at the very first border. What followed took us deep into western China and eventually led us to found China Serendipity.

Subscribe today and join us from the very first road.

René and Andrea