What’s China’s Game in the Middle East?
RACHEL BEITARIE, MASSOUD HAYOUN, TAI MING CHEUNGRachel Beitarie:Xi Jinping’s four point proposal for a Palestinian-Israeli peace agreement is interesting not so much for its content, as for its source. While China has maintained the appearance of being involved in Middle East politics for years, its top leaders, so far,...
Yak Butter Tea for Eight Hundred
MICHAEL YAMASHITAThe monks in this photograph were preparing tea to serve 800 at Shechen Monastery. It is in these kitchens, where monks are brewing yak butter tea, where I have made some of my favorite photographs. They work at these huge cauldrons, and usually it’s very early in the...
Dancing in Empty Beijing
IAN JOHNSONThe Lunar New Year began last week as it always does, with a new moon. The empty sky seemed to empty Beijing of up to half its residents—authorities estimate that an incredible nine million people left the city, which usually has a population of eighteen to twenty million. This...
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. ...
Shangri-La
MICHAEL YAMASHITAThe legendary Chamagudao, the Tea Horse Road, winds through dizzying mountain passes, across famed rivers like the Mekong and the Yangtze, and past monasteries and meadows in a circuitous route from Sichuan and Yunnan provinces in western China to the Tibetan capital city of...
Beijing’s Doomsday Problem
IAN JOHNSONOver the past ten days, China has been riveted by accounts of what authorities say are its very own doomsday cult: the church of Almighty God, which has prophesized that the world will end today. Authorities have said the group staged illegal protests and basically spun out of...
Last Call to Prayer
KATHLEEN MCLAUGHLIN, SHARRON LOVELLChina’s Hui Muslims are unique in many respects. The country’s second-largest ethnic minority share linguistic and cultural ties with the majority in China that have allowed them to practice their religion with less interference and fewer restrictions than others, like Uighur...
A Mosque of Their Own
KATHLEEN MCLAUGHLINThe women of Sangpo know well they are the guardians of a 300-year-old custom that sets them apart in Islam and they are increasingly mindful that economic development could be that tradition’s undoing.Sangpo, a dusty hamlet about two hours from the capital of China’s...
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...
Jesus vs. Mao?
IAN JOHNSONIn the intellectual ferment leading up to the 1989 Tiananmen protests, a much-watched series on Chinese television called River Elegy became closely identified with the hopes of China’s reformers. The six-part series, which used the Yellow River as an allegory for Chinese...
Refresher Course: The Silk Road
VALERIE HANSENThe “Silk Road” was a stretch of shifting, unmarked paths across massive expanses of deserts and mountains—not a real road at any point or time. Archeologists have found few ancient Silk Road bridges, gates, or paving stones like those along Rome’s Appian Way. In fact,...
News from the Dalai Lama
JONATHAN MIRSKY“I told President Obama the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party are missing a part of the brain, the part that contains common sense,” the Dalai Lama said to me during our conversation in London in mid-June.But it can be put back in. I am hopeful about the new Chinese...