Wonders Never Cease

A Late-Night Passage to China’s Hidden Realms

I have a weakness for the unscripted drift of late-night YouTube. The house goes quiet, the city exhales, and I slip down digital rabbit holes in search of something—what exactly, I never know. But a few nights back, the algorithm—equal parts oracle and mischief—handed me something rare: a transport to five unreal places in China, courtesy of My Unreal Planet TV. And I do mean unreal.

China, that vast and complicated puzzle of empire and modern ambition, has never been just one thing. It’s a living contradiction—ancient jade dragons curled beneath space-age scaffolding, sacred mountains pierced by bullet trains. But this video sidestepped the familiar postcard gloss of the Great Wall and panda preserves. Instead, it aimed its lens deep into the country's mythic topography—places where nature and time seem to defy reason.

There were rainbow-colored mountains that looked as if God had spilled his watercolour set across the earth. A glass bridge strung like a spiderweb over a gorge so deep it stirred your lizard brain into a primal flutter. Cliffside monasteries were clinging like barnacles to impossible verticals, where monks once carved eternity out of stone. One landscape resembled the Martian plains, another, a dream Botticelli might’ve painted if he’d been high on geologic time.

What struck me wasn’t just the beauty. It was the meticulous care taken to preserve these wonders. In a country galloping toward the future at breakneck speed, there remains a profound reverence for the past—thousands of years etched in rock, wood, and silence. These sites, some hidden from outsiders for generations, now echo with the footsteps of curious travellers and reverent wanderers.

My Unreal Planet TV doesn’t pander or over-narrate. It lets the landscape speak, filming in razor-sharp 4K that captures every nuance of colour and scale. There's something deeply meditative about their approach—each frame a still life, each moment a quiet revelation. It's not just travel content. It’s a portal.

If you’re like me— imagining the faraway—and you’ve ever wondered what’s just past the next ridge or hidden inside the folds of a distant culture, this channel offers that rare kind of digital alchemy: escape, education, and awe.

So yes, I watched. Wife Kristine, until the sun crept up, the spell still intact. Sometimes the best journeys begin at 3 a.m., bathed in the glow of a screen, when the world outside is still and the one inside feels infinite.