  The discovery of the quantum Hall effect founded the field of topological
condensed matter physics. Its amazingly accurate quantisation of the Hall
conductance, now enshrined in quantum metrology, is topologically protected: it
is stable against any reasonable perturbation. Conversely, topological
protection thus implies a form of censorship, as it completely hides any local
information from the observer. The spatial distribution of the current in the
sample is such a piece of information, which however has now become accessible
thanks to spectacular experimental advances. It is an old question whether an
original, and intuitively compelling, picture of the current flowing in a
narrow channel along the sample edge is the physically correct one. Motivated
by recent experiments $\textit{locally}$ imaging the quantized current flow in
a Chern insulating (Bi, Sb)$_2$Te$_3$ heterostructure, [Rosen et al., PRL 129,
246602 (2022); Ferguson et.al, Nat. Mater. 22, 1100-1105 (2023)], we
theoretically demonstrate the possibility of a broad `edge state' meandering
away from the sample boundary deep into the sample bulk. Further, we show that
varying experimental parameters permits continuously tuning between narrow edge
states and meandering channels all the way to incompressible bulk transport.
This accounts for various features observed in, and differing between,
experiments. Overall, this underscores the robustness of topological condensed
matter physics, but it also unveils a phenomenological richness hidden by
topological censorship -- much of which we believe remains to be discovered.
