Feature Stories

Let’s pretend I was 18 when I got my first tattoo. That’s still a considerable whack of years to have been inked.  The word tattoo means literally “a puncture, or mark made on the skin”, first noted in Captain Cook’s...

I must confess from the get go that I don't have any tattoos. I flirted with the idea of getting song lyrics in my teenage years; I would have gone for somewhere understated, like a tricep or inner thigh....

As Miranda's eyes fixated on the blinking red lights of the Level 5 Vernacular Lock, a surge of adrenaline coursed through her veins. The cold, unyielding metal of a gun pressed against the back of her scalp. Glancing at the...

Showing off one’s self in the best possible light is a natural human attribute. But, just as with everything else, in China that concept is taken to new levels. Political correctness be damned; body pride is the way to...

Chinese weddings are no meagre affair. Copious amounts of food, baijiu, the colour red filled the wedding venue; lest we forget the guests themselves. With this “姐” (“jie”; sister) and that “哥” (“ge”; brother) all staring at the grinning...

A kettle sits in my front garden, inside a wedge of polystyrene in a cardboard box. I know for sure it is a kettle, because I justbought a new one. On Taobao.  The piercing whistle of the old one has...

Stephanie read the address out loud, hoping that this time, it would ring a bell. Sadly, just like every time before now, she came up blank. In her almost fifteen years of being a delivery person, she had never...

Alexander Von Humboldt. Carl Ritter. Alfred Russel Wallace. Paul Vidal de La Blache. Jared Diamond. Yifu Tuan. David Harvey. Milton Santos.  All of these geographers spent the greater part of the 18th, 19th and 20th century, hopping about the planet,...