A journey across time in eastern China

Visiting China these days, you can feel as if you are travelling two ways in time, said James Patterson in The Sunday Times: back into an “outlandish” past, and forward to a “strange” future.

The country is a place of “skyscrapers and temples, calligraphy and texting, AI and hand tools” and, on a recent trip to Shanghai and the nearby cities of Suzhou and Hangzhou, I got to see the best of this duality. In Shanghai, I stayed at the Amanyangyun hotel, where the guest villas are Ming- and Qing-dynasty houses...