PICTURE CHINA

I thought it would be fitting for the first post of this project to focus on what many people consider to be the heart of China- Tiananmen Square. This massive expanse of concrete is one of the world’s biggest public spaces and lies at the geographic center of Beijing. It has been the scene of many important events in modern Chinese history, from the declaration of the People Republic of China in 1949 to the student protests of 1989, and remains one of the main pilgrimage points for Chinese tourists.

On any given day, thousands of people come to fly kites, visit the mausoleum of Chairman Mao or have their picture taken in front of the famous backdrop of Tiananmen gate. While the mood of the place is generally lighthearted, it is impossible to ignore the fact that the square is a key symbol of the might of the Chinese government. From the imposing Communist architecture to the strong army presence to Mao’s portrait hanging on Tiananmen Gate, it is clear that the intention of the square is to let all visitors know exactly who is in charge.

Beijing’s Hutong neighborhoods are some of the liveliest and most interesting areas of the city to explore. Made up of one-story brick and wood houses connected by winding alleyways, the layout of these neighborhoods has changed little in the past thousand years.

The Hutongs are constantly buzzing with activity. Old men tend to their pet birds, circles of people play cards and all manner of goods are bought and sold. The intimate layout of these neighborhoods seems to inspire socialization and tight-knit communities are formed within them.

In Beijing’s race towards modernization many of these neighborhoods are being demolished. Critics claim that the houses are not fit for a modern city and it is true that many of buildings lack proper heating, plumbing and sanitation. While the Hutong’s residents may be better off in newly constructed suburban housing, it cannot be denied that some of the city’s character will be taken with them.

It can sometimes feel that all of Beijing is one giant construction site. Cranes dot the skyline, scaffolding covers whole blocks of buildings and you cannot walk far without navigating around a group of construction workers digging up the street. In an effort to show the world a “new China” during the 2008 Olympics, much of the city is undergoing a facelift of unprecedented proportions. An estimated 1 million migrant workers have come to Beijing to work at the 1000+ construction sites throughout the city.

This building boom has certainly made parts of the city seem more modern but has destroyed many areas which were traditionally residential. Working class people who have lived in certain neighborhoods for generations are forced to move to the outskirts of the city in search of affordable housing.

To see a sampling of the different construction projects underway in Beijing go to www.urbanplanet.com.

The Dashanzi Art District (aka Factory 798) is a huge complex of factories in the northeast outskirts of Beijing. The buildings where built in the 1950’s in the Bauhaus style in cooperation with East Germany and used to produce electronic components for the Chinese military. After the factories fell into disuse in the early 1990’s, several artists and teachers from the nearby Central Academy of Fine Arts set up studios in the complex.

Today the area is home to galleries, artist studios, bookstores, cafes and restaurants. In a country that has a history of censoring controversial art and artists, it is encouraging to see that Beijing’s art scene has found a home and is thriving.

For more detailed information about Factory 798 see the excellent Wikipedia article or visit www.798space.com.

A walk through Beijing’s streets reveals the strange mix of extremes that exist in contemporary China. Newfound affluence contrasts with grinding poverty, gleaming residential towers rise above crumbling Hutongs and pockets of bohemians exist among stoic young soldiers marching in formation through the city streets. While it would be a mistake to assume that Beijing is representative of China as a whole, the scene on the city’s streets is very telling of the direction in which the country is headed.

The Pudong New District is located across the Huangpu River from Shanghai proper and is widely considered to be the financial and commercial center of China. The area is home to thousands of multi-national companies and has come to represent Shanghai’s ascent to the premier business city in China, if not all of Asia.

Until 1990 when it was granted status as a “Special Economic Zone”, the Pudong area was covered by rice patties and farmland and was inhabited mostly by poor immigrant workers. Today it is a maze of skyscrapers and apartment blocks stretching out in all directions. It is home to the world’s third tallest building (the Jin Mao Building), the new Pudong airport and the world’s only commercial maglev train.

This rapid growth has made Shanghai the most modern and wealthy city in China but has created many problems as well. A blanket of smog covers the city on most mornings, the roads are congested with traffic and a housing shortage forces many of Shanghai’s 10 million residents of share very cramped living quarters.

Shanghai’s “Old City” is a four square kilometer section in the south of the metropolis that has yet to succumb to the gentrification and rebuilding which has taken place throughout the rest of the city. This area was the site of the original walled city of the 11th Century and was set-aside as the “Chinese City” when the rest of Shanghai became the base of French and British imperialism in China from the late 19th to mid 20th Centuries.

To walk into this area today is to take a step back in time. In stark contrast to the rest of Shanghai, which in parts could easily be mistaken for London or Tokyo, the old city is a tangled mess of twisting alleyways and dilapidated houses. Still, the area exudes a certain charm and feels more “Chinese” than the rest of the city. Laundry is hung out on telephone wires to dry, children play badminton in the street and everything from live poultry to women’s underwear is sold in impromptu stalls on the side of the road.

If Shanghai represents the direction that China is headed, then the old city may represent the reality of where most of the country remains. While many Shanghai residents have quickly grown accustomed to a more affluent consumer lifestyle, most of the rest of China has seen little of the spoils of this newfound wealth.

A new generation of young Chinese are growing up in a radically different environment than their parents and grandparents. While only a few generations before most people dressed in simple Communist approved attire, young Shanghaiese have taken to the styles of Japan, Korea and the West. In few places are the changes that have transformed Shanghai more apparent than inside one of the city’s huge malls where masses of young people gather to shop for the latest fashions.

The Huangpu River runs through the heart of Shanghai dividing the Pudong New Area from the rest of the city and connecting to the Yangzi 30km upstream as both rivers empty into the East China Sea. The river is one of China’s major shipping arteries and sees a full one-third of the country’s international trade. The water is constantly buzzing with activity as coutless barges compete for space with huge freight ships from places as far away as Panama and the Middle East.

Nanjing Road runs through the center of downtown Shanghai and is one of the world’s busiest shopping streets. At all hours of the day this alter to consumerism is packed shoulder to shoulder with Chinese shoppers at its hundreds of up-market shop and malls.

As Shanghai, and China as a whole, has become wealthier over the past decade, its citizen’s appetite for everything from electronics to clothing to cars has exploded. For the first time in China’s history an emerging upper and middle class has been faced with excess cash and their reaction as been to spend. This phenomenon has not been lost on the business world and more and more international companies are looking to China’s huge consumer market to drive their businesses forward.

The official party line is that 70% of what Mao Zedong did was right and 30% was wrong. This pretty much sums up the ambiguity with which most modern Chinese see their often criticized former leader. His detractors condemn him as a mass-murderer who was responsible for the deaths of millions of people in the wake of the disastrous reforms of the Cultural Revolution. His supporters point out that during his tenure he dramatically increased the living standards for most Chinese and send the country on its way to becoming a modern nation. Either way you look at it is impossible to deny that the China that we see today was at least in part shaped by his hand.

For the next generation of young Chinese who have grown up in the years after he died and reformers like Deng Xiaoping started to transform the country, Mao has become a more and more abstract figure. While his face still appears on the Chinese currency and his portrait hangs on Tiananmen Gate, he is seldom mentioned by the government and his teachings are not so strongly emphasized in Chinese schools. In a nation where it is second nature the tear down and rebuild, the legacy of Mao and the turbulent years that he represents will no doubt fade the collective conciseness and become fodder for the history books as China races ahead in the 21^st Century.

The former British colony of Hong Kong was returned to China in 1997 as a “Special Administrative Region” but still remains a world apart from the mainland. The Chinese government has allowed the area to remain a capitalist and quasi-democratic entity under the policy of “one country, two systems”, partly because Hong Kong’s robust economy is the single largest source of outside investment in the PRC and partly because the government would like to use Hong Kong as an example to show Taiwan than it can play nice and entice it to rejoin the mainland.

For such a small place, Hong Kong is extremely diverse- both in its people and its landscape. While the population is over 90% Chinese, Hong Kong has an international flavor as a result of its long occupation and large groups of immigrants from Europe, the Philippines, Africa and the Indian subcontinent. While many areas do live up to Hong Kong’s image as a densely populated city of towering skyscrapers, you don’t have to go far to find a secluded beach or a mountain hike through a sub-tropical rainforest.

All in all, Hong Kong is very different in many ways from the rest of China but has, and will continue to play a role in shaping the country in the future. Its strong economy has been a model for the liberalization of China’s economy, which has resulted in the explosive growth of the past decade. It is the hope of many mainlanders that the government will also follow the model of Hong Kong and introduce new freedoms to go along with their economic might.

The Mongkok district of Hong Kong is among the most densely populated places in the world with over 50,000 inhabitants per square kilometer. As a result of limited available land, Hong Kong’s city planners have decided to look skyward to accommodate the burgeoning population and the Mongkok area is no exception. The area is a dense garden of modern skyscrapers and aging residential blocks where whole families often share tiny apartments. On the street level the area is a lively shopping district with whole streets dedicated to markets specializing in pet fish, electronics and knock-off designer clothing.

The Pearl River Delta is one of China’s most developed areas and the provincial capital of Guangzhou is one of the countries main business centers. The area started to boom due to the economic reforms of the 1980’s and has not looked back in becoming a sprawling city dedicated to China’s new economy. After the Asian financial crisis in the 1990’s many businesses from Hong Kong sought to relocate to nearby Guangzhou in search of lower costs on the mainland and the area has since become a major center of manufacturing. Almost one-fifth of the cities population is comprised of migrant workers from the surrounding provinces who supply the workforce for the Guangzhou economy.

Less than twenty years ago the town of Huadu (formerly Huxian County) was just another rural Chinese village on the outskirts of the city of Guangzhou. Today it is a self-contained city of over 720,000 residents and an example of the “New Towns” that are being created throughout China to accommodate the surging urban populations. While some of the new housing is in the form of the bland Communist-style apartment blocks, which can be seen throughout China, many complexes cater to China’s neuvo riche and are styled after Mediterranean villas complete with red-tiled roofs and baroque fountains.

While ninety-two percent of the Chinese people belong to the dominant Han ethnic group, there are 55 other recognized ethnic minority groups scattered throughout the country. Muslim Uigur and Mongolian people populate the north of the country, Tibetans in the southwest and Miao in the southern areas bordering Vietnam, Laos and Burma. These groups have historically faced great hardship at the hands of the Han and have had their cultures threatened by Han resettlement. In recent times several groups have been granted status as Autonomous regions and are regaining some control over their lands.

The area straddling the border of Guangxi and Guizhou provinces in Southern China is the home of the China’s Dong minority group and the Sanjiang Dong Autonomous County. The Dong are renowned for their colorful dress, distinctive wooden architecture and incredibly engineered terraced rice fields.

In the villages of Zhaoxing, Che De, and Tang An the Dong people live much as they have for hundreds of years. Farmers work the fields, women use natural indigo dye to make traditional clothing and old men use bamboo to make baskets. Although many things remain the same, the modern world has made inroads even here. Satellite dishes have appeared on some houses, electric mills have replaced the hand milling of rice and in the towns accessible by road, villagers are prepared to greet the occasional Chinese tour bus with handicrafts to sell.

Every fifth day the dusty riverside town of Chong An is transformed into a bustling market as hundreds of people of the Miao ethnic group from the surrounding villages descend on the town. Villagers arrive in their distinctive traditional dress by road, by boat and from countless mountain paths. They come to sell their crops and to buy clothing and household goods.

There are separate sections of the market dedicated to everything that one might need. One street is filled with women selling vegetables, another with dyed cloth and clothing and another lined with butchers. There are areas where live pigs, poultry, fish, cats and dogs are sold and there is a street lined with barbers, dentists and practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine.

While the market serves a very functional purpose for the villagers, it is also a social occasion. Old men smoke and admire each other’s caged songbirds, groups of children buy sweets and there are even gambling tables where people wager a few Yuan on the roll of the dice.

In the backstreets of the Chong An market there is an entire areas dedicated to medicine and dentistry. Some villagers come for traditional Chinese medicine such as herbal remedies, cupping and acupuncture while others come to have an old tooth pulled or have a new set made. Far from the sterile hospitals or modern traditional medicine clinics in China’s large cities, this brand of medicine is practiced out on the streets for all to see.

As a result of the rapid industrialization of the past decades and loose regulations on emissions, China has become one of the world’s biggest polluters. In fact, a recent study by the World Bank found that China was home to sixteen of the twenty most polluted cities in the world.

China’s pollution is having a devastating impact on its citizens. An estimated 300,000 people die each year as a result of respiratory illnesses caused by air pollution and most of China’s waterways are heavily polluted from the dumping of untreated human waste as well as toxic waste from coal and chemical plants. Half of the country’s population has to contend with contaminated drinking water and acid rain is having a negative impact on crop yields in many areas. Meanwhile, clouds of smog envelope many of China’s cities making blue skies a thing of the past.

The main cause of China’s pollution problem is the heavy consumption of coal which is used for everything from creating electricity to cooking and heating in Chinese homes. With a growing number of vehicles on the road, expanding urban populations all over the country and new factories opening daily, pollution seems to be a problem that will get worse before it gets better.

Chongqing has long been the economic focus of southwest China due to its strategic location at the halfway point of the Yangzi river. It is a major center for shipping and commerce moving from the rural western part of China to the cities of the east. The population of Chongqing proper is just over 12 million people, the third largest city in China, but is expected to grow by another 10 million in the next decade. When the surrounding Chongqing municipality is added, the population reaches a staggering 32 million, making it, by some people’s estimates, the largest city in the world.

Chongqing has boomed in recent years as a result of the Chinese government’s “Go West” policy to develop and utilize the western half of the country. Chongqing is seen as a strategic link between the east and west of China and much of the over $100 billion spent in the past five years on infrastructure has directly benefited the growing metropolis.

As in many Chinese cities, Chongqing’s rapid growth has lead to a host of problems for the city and its residents. The city is one of China’s post polluted and the gap between the businessmen who have benefited from the city’s boom and the poor immigrants who have provided the labor is glaringly evident. The city continues to build and grow in anticipation of the 2009 completion of the Three Gorges Dam which will create a giant reservoir leading to Chongqing and allow international ocean freighters to reach the city from the Yangzi’s mouth in Shanghai.

Every year over 8.5 million peasants from China’s rural areas move to its cities and nowhere in the country is this urban migration more evident than in Chongqing. Workers from the surrounding provinces have flocked to Chongqing in search of higher paying jobs and a better life. The reality is much less appealing as they often end up doing long hours of back-breaking labor for very little money.

Many of these migrant workers end up as part of what locals call the “Bang Bang Army”. This 100,000 plus army of laborers are identified by the bamboo poles (or bang bang in Chinese) that they use to carry heavy loads around the city. Due to the hilly topography of Chongqing, the bicycles used to transport goods in other Chinese cities have been abandoned and manual labor used instead. Bang bang workers are hired by everyone from business owners to tourists to move all sorts of goods from ships at the port into town or around the city. For their efforts a bang bang man will make an average of 20 Yuan ($2.50) for working a 12 hour day.

China’s economic boom has succeeded in expanding the upper and middle classes but has also left many citizens behind. The gap between China’s wealthiest and poorest is constantly increasing; at present the top fifth of wage earners are receiving fifty-percent of the income while the bottom fifth receives less than five-percent. Thirty million Chinese live in absolute poverty while another 60 million live on less than 865 Yuan ($109) per year, which is well below the dollar-a-day standard for poverty established by the World Bank.

The disparity between China’s rich and poor is particularly severe when the thriving urban centers are compared with the poorer rural areas but is increasingly evident within the cities themselves. It is a common site in Chinese cities, both large and small, to see the disabled begging for change, young children reduced to working as street performers to help support their families and the elderly scouring trash bins for plastic bottles to recycle.

The Three Gorges Dam is one of the most ambitious and controversial building projects ever undertaken. Over a mile and a half wide and 600 feet high, when completed, it will be the world’s largest hydroelectric dam and capable of generating as much electricity as eighteen nuclear power plants. The dam will create a giant reservoir stretching over 400 miles and will allow 10,000-ton freighters to reach China’s interior from the Yangzi’s mouth on the East China Sea.

The Dam project has received intense scrutiny both from within China and abroad. Critics insist that the dam will cause more harm than good and it is true that the effects have been and will continue to be extreme. The rising waters of the reservoir have displaced over 1.2 million people and 100 towns, ancient sites have been lost forever and the habitats of several endangered species are seriously threatened. For all that has been sacrificed it is still questionable whether the dam will function as promised. Cracks have appeared as a result of faulty materials and some experts predict that the dam will become so clogged with silt that it will be rendered useless in seventy years.

Proponents of the dam look to solve many of China’s problems at once. The dam is designed to control the river’s flooding, which has claimed the lives of more than one-million people over the past century, as well as provide electricity that is desperately needed by the exploding populations of China’s cities. The dam is also a key component of China’s plan to develop the western half of the country.

For better or worse, the Three Gorges Dam is scheduled to be finished and operational in 2009. In the meantime the Yangzi basin is busy with construction to prepare for the rising waters, businessmen from Chongqing to Shanghai are figuring out the best ways to capitalize on the new possibilities that the dam creates and cruise boats of Chinese tourists are plying the waters of the Yangzi to catch a glimpse of the legendary Three Gorges scenery before it is altered forever.

The city of Fuling, like many communities on the Yangzi, has been profoundly affected by the building of the Three Gorges Dam. Just an hour from the booming metropolis of Chongqing, this city of a million people has been completely transformed over the past decade. The rising waters of the Yangzi have prompted the government to demolish much of the city and build a series of dikes, highways and bridges in its place. A new section of the city has been built further up the hill from the river to accommodate the displaced people.

It is the hope of the people of Fuling that all of these changes will bring prosperity to the area. In the meantime the city has a distinct feeling of a place in transition. Half-finished buildings and bridges dot the waterfront while farmers work the land where homes have been demolished and new high-rises have yet to be built. Only time will tell if the dam, and all of its effects, will be good or bad for Fuling and the other communities along the Yangzi.

The streets of China’s cities and towns are filled with all manner of vehicles both large and small, from hand-pulled rickshaws to luxury SUVs. Only a decade ago the bicycle was the preferred method of urban transportation but it is rapidly being faded out in favor of the automobile. Car ownership is seen by many Chinese as a status symbol and is increasing at a rate of fifteen percent per year. While some people point to these developments as a sign of China’s advancement, it is not coming without a price. More so than ever, commuting in China’s cities is an unpleasant experience; smog fills the air and congestion often slows traffic to a crawl.

On a national level, the Chinese government has invested billions of dollars in recent years to improve the countries transportation infrastructure. A plan to build 85,000km of expressways connecting every provincial capitol and city with a population over 200,000 is well underway and China’s rail system is constantly expanding, with well-publicized projects such as the Qinghai-Tibet railway opening this year. New airports, tunnels, bridges, dams and shipping ports are being built throughout the country, all in an attempt to keep up with China’s ever-expanding need to move its people and goods around the country and abroad.

Up until the Communist Revolution, Chinese women occupied the bottom rung of the social ladder. Undesirable from birth, women were treated much like property, first by their fathers and then by their husbands. Women were forced into arranged marriages and were not entitled to divorce or to own property.

In the early 1950’s, with the declaration that “women hold up half the sky”, Mao Zedong and the new communist government dramatically changed the status of women in China. At least in theory, women were given equal rights in economic, cultural and family life and equal pay for equal work. A new marriage law granted the right for women to choose their partners, get divorced and inherit property. However, the legacy of thousands of years of servitude did not wear off overnight and only now are some women starting to achieve true equality.

Today in China’s modern cities, the status of women is higher than it has ever been. Certainly compared to many other developing nations, modern Chinese women enjoy a high degree of respect and rights. While Chinese society is still, at times, chauvinistic, women have started to enter the upper echelons of the business world and government. The next generation of young women will, no doubt, enjoy even more equality and play an invaluable role in shaping the China of the 21st century.

Tibet has long been a place shrouded in mystery, in large part due to the difficulty associated with reaching it. Located on a plateau at 4500 meters and surrounded on all sides by imposing mountain ranges, until the turn of the 20th century, few outsiders had laid eyes on the so-called “roof of the world.”

After the 1950 occupation of Tibet, air and road links were established by the Chinese but the expensive and arduous journey was not undertaken by the masses. All of this is likely to change with the opening of the Qinghai-Tibet railway, which began operation in July 2006. For a mere $48 one can get on a train in Beijing and arrive two days later in Lhasa, the capitol of the Tibetan Autonomous Region. The train is a true engineering marvel, reaching over 5000 meters and passing over 240 miles of permanently frozen ground, it is the only train of its kind in the world.

The train, like most large Chinese building projects, has been the focus of much international scrutiny leading up to its opening. The Chinese government claims that the rail link will bring modernity to Tibet and help improve the standard of living. Critics worry that the new rail link will lead to even more Chinese migration, further dilute the Tibetan culture and expedite the pillaging of Tibet’s natural resources.

Whether or not the railway will bring prosperity or more hardship to Tibet remains to be seen, but to ride the train is undeniably spectacular. Over the course of forty-eight hours the scenery transforms from concrete jungle to desert steppe, over permanently frozen glaciers and by snowy peaks to arrive at the grasslands of the Tibetan plateau.

Lhasa is the capitol of China’s Tibetan Autonomous Region and the epicenter of the Tibetan cultural world. Situated at 3700 meters in a valley surrounded by jagged snow-capped mountains, it is a place that is both beautiful and tragic. Once the home of the Dalai Lamas and the center of Tibetan Buddhism, Lhasa, and Tibet in general, has undergone tremendous hardship since the Chinese “liberated” the country in 1950.*

The Lhasa of today is a divided city. The western half looks much like any other Chinese city. Rows of shops line the wide boulevards and modern glass and concrete buildings are starting to dot the skyline. A mini Tiananmen Square lies opposite the Potala Palace and Chinese flags are strategically places throughout the city.

The Tibetan quarter, on the other hand, retains much of the feel of old Tibet. It is filled with ragged pilgrims who travel from throughout the country to visit the Jokhang, the most holy site in Tibetan Buddhism. From dawn until dusk the area is filled with prostrating believers and permeated by the smell of smoke from giant incense burners.

Despite all that has been lost, Lhasa is still an exciting and evocative place to visit. The Tibetan people are friendly and surprisingly resilient despite all that they have suffered. Like the rest of China, Lhasa is changing rapidly and new train connection will, no doubt, increase the speed of these changes. One can only hope that the Tibetan culture will be able to continue to survive the pressures of Chinese assimilation and modernization.

*In this post, I, like the international community, have referred to Tibet as a province of The People’s Republic of China. The issue of the Chinese occupation of Tibet is complicated and multi-faceted and I will not attempt to delve into it here. To find out more, I recommend these websites:

Wikipedia Article on Tibet
Free Tibet Organization
Official Site of Tibetan Govt in Exile

Over the past few decades, China’s tourism industry has gone from almost nothing to become the largest domestic market in the world. As a result of the new disposable income being earned by China’s urbanites and eased restrictions on movement by the government, historic sights all over the country have become overwhelmed with camera happy tourists.

The bulk of China’s domestic tourism is concentrated into the three “golden week” holidays. Initiated in 1999 by the Chinese government, the golden week scheme promotes three weeklong holidays per year as a means to stimulate tourism, consumption and the economy. During these periods China’s air, rail and road networks become clogged with travelers, leading to many people being stranded each year.

Independent tourism is still relatively rare in China. Most Chinese tourists choose to visit sites as part of a tour group and the ubiquitous tour busses complete with flag waving guides, megaphones and matching neon baseball-caps are a common sight throughout the country.

The Han ethnic group, known to most simply as “Chinese”, represents ninety-two percent of China’s people and has long dominated the country. Often at the impetus of the Chinese government, Han migrants have spread throughout the country to areas that have long been inhabited mostly by smaller ethnic groups.

The most striking and condemning example of this is in Tibet. Until the Chinese invasion in 1950, Tibet was an independent and insular country that rarely dealt with outsiders. Today in the capitol city of Lhasa, there are more Chinese than Tibetans and over two-thirds of businesses are Chinese owned. Much of the city looks identical to any other small Chinese city and this is being repeated in many other cities and towns throughout Tibet.

Many people see the Han migration as an attempt on the part of the Chinese government to exploit Tibet’s land, water and natural resources and worry that the influx of modern Chinese culture will further dilute Tibetan culture and corrupt the Tibetan society. The effects of migration are set to become more severe with the opening of the Qinghai-Tibet railway and the arrival of thousands of new migrants each year.

Religion has always been an important part of Chinese life. China’s native religions of Confucianism and Taoism have been practiced for thousands of years and Buddhism was introduced from India during the Tang Dynasty (618-906 AD). Christianity and Islam were brought to China via the Silk Road and today there is a significant Muslim minority of ten million people residing mostly in China’s northwest provinces.

During the Cultural Revolution, religion was portrayed as feudal superstition and was ferociously attacked by the Chinese government. In the decade from the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies, the Red Guard destroyed most evidence of the religious history of the country. Hundreds of thousands of temples and monasteries were ruined and religious and philosophical texts were burned. No area of China was more severely impacted by the religious backlash of the Cultural Revolution than Tibet. In 1959 Tibet had a thriving community of 2700 Buddhist monasteries and temples; after the destruction, only eight monasteries remained with fewer than one thousand monks and nuns.

With Mao’s death in 1976 and the liberalizations of the 1980’s, religion began to slowly reenter Chinese life. Despite remaining restrictions, nowhere in China is religion a more integral part of daily life than in Tibet. Monasteries are being rebuilt and, though at much lower numbers, monks and nuns are beginning to refill them. Pilgrims flock to Tibet’s religious sites and the most holy places are constantly awash with the devout who come to pray and prostrate.

From the lofty peaks of the Himalayas to the sands of the Gobi desert, China’s landscape is extremely varied and has played an integral role in shaping the country. The natural environment has provided inspiration for artists, created boundaries between ethnic groups and, more recently, provided the natural resources to sustain the China of the 21st century.

China’s natural landscape is beautiful but has become threatened by loose environmental policies, pollution and development. Huge areas of the country remain relatively untouched but with westward expansion and uncontrolled building on the rise, they may not remain this way for much longer.

The Tibetan countryside is one of the most beautiful areas of China. Surrounded by awe-inspiring mountains and dotted with monasteries and holy lakes, it is in the rural areas that the Tibetan culture remains most intact.

Unfortunately, rural Tibet is also among the poorest areas of China with lower incomes and life expectancy than anywhere else in the country. One quarter of Tibetan counties cannot feed or clothe themselves, one third of children don’t go to school and the literacy rate is only 30 percent. Tibet relies heavily on Chinese aid, which had totaled more than 40 billion Yuan ($5 billion) since 1952.

Spread across thousands of villages and small towns, many rural Tibetans live much as they have for thousands of years. Despite the obvious hardship that their lives entail, most Tibetans remain warm and lively and a journey through rural Tibet reveals just how friendly the Tibetan people are.