Tourism

Hainan had 10.55 million residents at the end of 2025, not the "over 7 million" of the 2000 census. It is not a World Heritage site — its rainforest and Li settlements are on China's tentative list only — though Li textile techniques are UNESCO intangible cultural heritage. The island became a free trade port and began island-wide special customs operation on 18 December 2025, and it has its own standing visa-free arrangement separate from the national one.

The wheel's name has changed five times and it is at present the lastminute.com London Eye; Merlin Entertainments has owned it outright since 2007, and Lambeth made its planning consent permanent in May 2024.

Gulangyu, which UNESCO calls Kulangsu, was inscribed as a World Heritage site in 2017 as a historic international settlement — 931 buildings and the birthplace of the Amoy Deco style, not the beach resort older accounts describe. It is reached only by ferry, with real-name tickets and a cap of 35,000 visitors a day, and neither cars nor bicycles are allowed. Shuzhuang Garden dates from 1913 rather than 1931, on its custodian's account.

Two centuries of wax, from guillotine death masks to Lando Norris. What to expect at Madame Tussauds London, and what became of the planetarium next door.

Harrods has been owned by the Qatar Investment Authority since 2010, not by the Fayed family. The pet department closed in 2014, the dress code has gone, and in 2025 the store applied to remove the Egyptian hall and the sixteen carvings of its former owner's face.

London Zoo's famous buildings are nearly all used for something other than their original purpose, and the aquarium under the Mappin Terraces closed for good in 2019.

Under construction from the 3rd century BC to the 16th century AD, the Great Wall of China stretches from east to west across one of the largest countries in the world.

The forty-million-pound restoration that older accounts describe as under way finished in June 2011. Nothing comparable is in progress now.

Three numbers in older accounts of Beijing are wrong in instructive ways. The Forbidden City's "9,000 rooms" is a translation error — the Chinese unit counts bays between eave columns. The Summer Palace's "290 acres" and the Temple of Heaven's "270 acres" are hectare figures with the unit swapped. And the Starbucks those accounts place inside the Forbidden City had closed two years before they were written.

Zhouzhuang is a water town in Kunshan, Suzhou, in Jiangsu province, covering about half a square kilometre. The date of 1086 marks the conferring of its name rather than a founding, the Quanfu Temple standing there was rebuilt in 1995, and the town has fourteen stone bridges — among them the Twin Bridges, whose key-like shape from above is the origin of a non-existent "Key Bridge". It is on China's tentative list, not the World Heritage List.