Food during the Chinese New Year break

Chicken soup & (very oily) stir-fried niangao (年糕), made by a half-drunk chef in Lishui (丽水).

Pickled cabbage (雪菜) and pink white sugar cake (白糖糕).

Red braised pork belly with meigan cai (梅干菜红烧肉) in Jiangwan (江湾). Not sure if I ever had meigan cai before, it’s pickled, dried, and steamed vegetables from the Shaoxing (绍兴) region with a sour but unique taste.

Xiaolongbao (小笼包) & mifen (米粉) in Jiangwan.

Jiangxi-style, purse red carp (荷包红鲤鱼) — fried and then steamed — in Likeng (李坑).

The famous fishhead from Qiandao Lake (千岛湖鱼头).

And lamb kebab (羊肉串) in Qiandao Lake. All these authentic fish restaurants near the lake, and then these guys from Xinjiang just being the coolest guys in the coolest guys in town with loud disco-Uyghur-folk songs over a loudspeaker and butchering a lamb in front of everyone.

Latest

Clothes Making Clouds

Clothes Making Clouds

There are so many ways to define Shanghai, yet a few popular icons do a lot of the talking. As the international metropolis and a symbol of China’s rising economic power, there’s the Lujiazui (陆家嘴) skyline — with the Oriental Pearl Tower (东方明珠) and high offices of Chinese and multinational corporations. There’s the Maglev train […]
May 5, 2026
Passing on the Baton

Passing on the Baton

Day 2876 in Shanghai and I’m walking with Hasse on Dongdaming Road (东大名路) in the Hongkou district. In 2018, I lived next to this road; here I registered my first Chinese bank account, bought my first baozi in a FamilyMart, and it’s here that I photographed so many random things because Shanghai was all new […]
April 13, 2026
Arriving at an emotion

Arriving at an emotion

Before moving to China, I wondered what it’d be like to live in an entirely different environment — and it was the same for holidays like Cambodia or Vietnam, or when Hasse was born. You try to imagine these things and how they’d make you feel, how you’d react, or what they’re like. But everytime […]
April 10, 2026
People of Nantong

People of Nantong

I’m carrying Hasse around in Nantong (南通), in the historical block surrounded by the Haohe River (濠河) — while Eva in the hospital visits a sick relative. Hasse, being a seven month old baby, is a true 显眼包 (eye-catcher), so dozens of bypassers turn their head or want to touch her (which I quickly have […]
April 4, 2026