Dispatches to Monocle’s daily “Monocolumn” on Chinese issues during a three-month stay in Chengdu, China (with excursions to the TAR and rural Sichuan).
I’d never seen anything like it, but there it was, during a three-month stay in southwestern China – the gluts on Chinese roads in the run-up to Chinese new year. A full 700 million Chinese travel at the same time.
http://www.monocle.com/monocolumn/affairs/holiday-madness-chinese-style/
And that year, 2011, the Tibetan Autonomous Region shut down to non-Chinese visitors for the month of March. I’d luckily visited in January.
http://www.monocle.com/monocolumn/affairs/tibets-big-shut-down/