Portrait of an LBX

A teenager on a scooter passes in front of the Zhibi Tulou (植碧楼), the older and smaller of the two remaining tulou in Fujian's Luxi Town (芦溪镇). On our way out of town today we finally passed through one of the UNESCO World Heritage Tulou areas. While the concentration of the unique buildings was impressive, the Disneyland-like atmosphere of the area left us feeling extremely grateful for being able to see the tulou in their unrestored form in Luxi.

We've been passing a lot of these tombs over the past couple days in Jiangxi. The grasses in the front appear white because they are covered with ice from the ice storm the night before. From what I understand, burying the dead is illegal in China; but like many things, that can be solved by paying a fine. The reason for the ban is that China is short on arable land. After the famine of the Great Leap Forward, the government has emphasized a need to be self-supporting in food production, estimating that approximately 120 million hectares need to be kept under till. A preference for burials over cremations is probably not the biggest problem, however. Despite national mandates, many local governments rely on illegal land appropriations and sales to developers for fiscal revenue. This, combined with the desertification we've talked about before, means China is barely above its self-supporting line. The Ministry of Land estimates that at the end of 2008, China had 121.7 million hectares of arable land remaining.

Both the mother and the child saw me with the camera from a distance, but apparently only one of them found the situation amusing. And P.S., what's the deal with the abundance of arm warmers in this part of the country? The don't even look very warm...

The man in this picture is a Uighur elder in the soon-to-be-demolished Old Town of Kashgar, a southern Silk Road city in Xinjiang. Less than a month after my girlfriend and I left Xinjiang, a truly horrendous scene has erupted there. I don't want to get into it on this site beyond saying that I would never have thought any of the people we met there -- Han, Uighur, Kazakh, Tajik, whoever -- capable of committing such acts of violence. But when you put anything under sufficient pressure, you never know exactly how it's going to explode. I had intended to post a lot more Xinjiang pictures here over the past few weeks, but I've been busy with my last month of work and getting the apartment packed up so I can move my life onto a bike for the next year or so. When we're finally on the road, Evan and I will undoubtedly meet many of China's 55 nationally recognized minorities. As we've seen in the past few days, tensions between some of those minority groups and the Han Chinese majority is often simmering just below the surface. Our goal will be to get beyond that in order understand those people for who they are beyond how they are defined by their relationships with other ethnic groups or the ruling government. I look forward to sharing those stories here.

Just happy to be trimming trees with a tiny saw.

This man is one of the many residents of Beijing and other Chinese cities who make a living digging bottles and cardboard out of trash cans around the city to sell to recycling centers. Others have a set spot in their neighborhood where residents will bring them their recyclables. But with the downturn in the economy and prices for recyclable goods dropping, competition in the business is fierce. The neighborhood recyclables-collecting types have said that if they leave their spot for a day, they will be replaced by someone else desperate to make a buck.