The Strangers
JAMES PALMERIn the winter of 2009, I was spending my weekends in the northeast Chinese city of Tangshan, and eating most of my food from the far-western province of Xinjiang. Like many minorities, the Uighur, the native people of Xinjiang, have made their chief impact on mainstream culture through cuisine. I have always favored their ubiquitous restaurants when traveling.But there was something unfamiliar about the place I usually ate at in Tangshan; the waiters were young children. Two solemn little girls of about eight,...
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Portraits of the Faceless
KATHARINA HESSE, DAVID M. BARREDANine years ago, photographer Katharina Hesse began to make portraits of North Korean defectors. To protect their identities she asked only that they “give something” of themselves to the photographs. Her subjects bury their faces in their hands, or slip them beneath the...
Rejuvenation (复兴)
ORVILLE SCHELL, JOHN DELURYIf any of the makers of modern China who agonized over their country’s enfeebled state and dreamed of better times during the past century and a half could have visited Beijing’s Pangu Plaza today, they would hardly believe their eyes. Pangu’s preening thirty-nine-story...
When You Grow Up
PETER HESSLERLittle Lu, Little Zhang, and Little Liu waited for me at the end of the bridge. They were ten, twelve, and fourteen years old, respectively, and they had come from the same village in northern Sichuan Province. They said that they had dropped out of school and migrated to the...
In the Footsteps of Pilgrims
MICHAEL YAMASHITAOne of my favorite pictures collected in the book Shangri-La: Along the Tea Road to Lhasa is of six pilgrims coming down an empty stretch of the Chamagudao, the Tea Horse Road. They are going to Lhasa, performing the chak tsal, the Tibetan Buddhist act of prostration. ...
Where to, China?
SIM CHI YINThe windows of buses and taxis going by Tiananmen Square have been taped shut. The paramilitary police stand at attention at all major traffic intersections—even near the old alleyway where I live some five kilometers away. Those are sure signs that political season is well...
Wenzhou’s Italian Uncles
ILARIA MARIA SALA0039 Ristorante Italia sits in the middle of West Jiangbin Street, one of many long and large stretches of concrete that cross Wenzhou east to west, parallel to the Oujiang River, running next to some of the city’s visible wealth—in the form of glitzy malls—and its...
In Longshang
CHIEN-MIN CHUNGBeijing-based photographer Chien-min Chung recently traveled to the village of Longshang, near Lin’an City in Zhejiang near Hangzhou. He was there to rock climb. Longshang, whose surrounding bamboo forests have long been central to the local economy, is now seeing an influx of urban visitors who are drawn to the village for its natural surroundings. Signs of change are visible on the town’s streets, where new tiled houses replace old wooden ones. But the bamboo forests shape old and new alike: Chung’s route took him past a...
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Desperately Seeking City
MICHAEL MEYERAt the world’s only International Sister City Museum, located in far northeast China, a guide leads a group of Harbin middle school students past displays for each of their hometown’s twenty-seven “twins.” “Our government’s friendship with these cities promotes peace...
The North Peak
IAN JOHNSONThe “voluntary” insurance at the entrance had cost just two yuan, about thirty-five cents, but I had been fleeced all the way from Beijing and somehow this was the final straw. Why did everything have to be so crass and commercialized? I whined to myself. I knew the answers...
The Lesser Wall
MICHAEL MEYERThere is no such place as Manchuria, but the word still resonates like a bell struck a century before. The region is now more prosaically called dongbei—the northeast—yet its contemporary toponyms sing of its imperial past, when it was the homeland of the Manchu, China’s...