I went shooting this Saturday around my home in Beijing. The area is south of Guomao, Beijing’s central business district. The CBD and the area where I live are separated by Tonghui River, a small, dirty waterway enclosed by high, concrete walls. There is little beauty in waterways running through China’s cities — they are designed to move polluted water into one end of the city and out the other as quickly as possible, not for peaceful, romantic strolls in the evenings.
That the river is polluted is not surprising. What is remarkable, however, is the contrast between the tall, glitzy office buildings on the north and the dilapidated, impoverished alleys to the south. In fact, much of southern Beijing is that way, but here there is literally a line that can be picked out on a map or from a bird’s eye view on Google Earth.
It’s been said so many times that I get bored writing it — China is a land of contrasts.
I spent about an hour and a half wandering down the river and then south and into a couple of the dusty alleyways. It’s rare that I get asked for money these days in Beijing, but here I was, and when that happened I began to feel a bit uneasy about walking around with so much camera equipment. Being ill at ease, I unfortunately failed to take the pictures I had set out to take.
Nevertheless, I’ll be posting what few pictures I did get throughout the week. Today’s is another picture of a delivery man, this time with a cart full of toilet paper. If I had to haul a load of stuff around Beijing on a tricycle all day, I would want the stuff to be toilet paper — or better yet, packing peanuts.
