Workers paint one of those brilliant slogans that the Chinese government is so well known for on a wall in Ningxia. This one appears to relate to the railroad.
Aug
04
2010
04
2010
Photo: Racial Propaganda’s Finest
"The Han are inseparable from ethnic minorities; ethnic minorities are inseparable from the Han; ethnic minorities are inseparable from each other - CCP Xiahe Organization Department" If you follow our Flickr feed, you know one of my side pursuits out here is recording modern propaganda. This is tangential to the goals of this site, but seriously, wow, I had to show this to the world. It was taken in Xiahe (known in Tibetan as Labrang), the site of the most pilgrimized Tibetan monastery outside of Tibet. The southern half of town is old and Tibetan, and the northern half is modern Han/Hui. The old side is being torn down bit by bit to make way for new development, and the monastery itself is being tapped for tourism.
Oct
09
2009
09
2009
The Writing on the Wall
Before I get into the post, I need to thank the patron saint of bike chains, as the franken-fix I imposed on my poor chain the other night has actually not given me any problems through 170 km. I still wish I had known earlier not to push the chain pins all the way out, but c’est la vie.
Moving on, people who have been on bike rides with me in the past know that I have a nasty habit of planning bike routes without taking topography into consideration. Having learned my lesson finally, we checked Google Earth for our planned routes before setting out from Beijing and found that there was only one mountain range between Beijing and Shanghai, right in the middle of Shandong, which we, as sane individuals aware of our poor physical condition, decided to avoid. Nevertheless, we completely forgot about the mountains when we went to Qingdao, and our only route west to Henan was straight smack through them.
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