Non-mainstream media often live with a compromise: fewer facts and less-professional writing in exchange for promoting their own viewpoint.

Not so with ChinaFile, a project of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society. Its  detail-rich, faith-related, enterprising feature story on a little-reporting topic: women's mosques in China that are led by other women.

The work of veteran China writer Kathleen McLaughlin, the story centers on the Hui, an ethnic group in the inland. McLaughlin delivers both a broad overview and personal anecdotes alike. She offers a taste of its three centuries of custom, and even tries to assess its precarious prospects.

And she adds plenty of color, making us almost feel part of the land and the communities. Check this out:

Sangpo, a dusty hamlet about two hours from the capital of China’s landlocked Henan province, is home to about 5,000 people, some 95 percent of whom are Hui Muslims. The Hui, China’s third-largest ethnic minority, number nearly 10 million followers of Islam in China. Many are direct descendants of Arab traders on the Silk Road who married local Chinese women, but the Hui today are mainly identified through their religion rather than by ethnic characteristics.

Packed into this town are six mosques run by women, whose congregants are all female, and only five headed by men—an imbalance the women point out with pride, and a rarity among Muslim communities in China, let alone the rest of the world.