Portrait of an LBX

An old woman walks home with her cat in Langmusi.

Spotted in a small-town market on our way out of Yunnan.

A bargaining session gets a little heated.

Seen in a small market on our way out of Yunnan.

Many of the women in this small-town market on our way out of Yunnan were dressed like the ethnic minorities we've seen elsewhere in the province, but we were told everyone was Han Chinese. Either someone gave us incorrect information (which happens all the time), or these people are impostors!

Sometimes I wonder what story each line on a face would tell if it could.

One of the many colorful women in the Wednesday market in Ameng Town (阿猛鎮). As always, I'd be interested to hear if anyone has any thoughts on the ethnicity based on the clothing styles.

An elderly resident walks the halls of the former Wu Family Household, a 100-room mansion in Tangyin. After being confiscated by the communists during the revolution it was turned into county government and planned birth offices. It is now crumbling under the collective ownership of more than a dozen local peasant families, mostly consisting of the elderly grandparents and infants still left in the town.

A woman hangs pieces of cut fish up to dry in Zhangxiang, Jiangxi province while we wait for a local bicycle mechanic to re-true Alexis' wheel, which is already bent out of shape after having it replaced in Jingdezhen.

Tibet is a truly amazing place, as are the Tibetan people. Lhasa, paradoxically crisscrossed by streets with names like "Beijing Road," "Jiangsu Road" and "August First Road," is the destination of multitudes of devout Buddhist pilgrims. This Tibetan woman, praying in the early morning in front of the Jokhang monastery, seems so far removed from the influx of Han Chinese that is quickly making ethnic Tibetans like her a minority in their own home and from the development that is transforming the land of her birth. One day, I would love to return to Tibet or China's other ethnically Tibetan areas and speak with more of the local people to learn about their views on the development around them and its effects their lives and faith.