After some missed shots for Xinjiang and Xi’an, the team finally decided to go to Xiapu during November. We were lucky, the fast train from Shanghai to Xiapu (2 stops before Fuzhou) was opened at then end of September, it is just a convenient 5-hours train to get there directly. Xiapu is located at the North East of Fujian province, somewhere in between Wenzhou and Fuzhou. It has a long coastal line of 400km, with a large portion of sea shore protected by mountains and rocks (calm and safe), making it perfect for fishers to establish since the past thousand years.

For the last couple of years, an emerging touristic activity is photography, which attracts large number of photo enthousiasts from all around China, and still growing. Large scale of floating village, infinite seaweed field, thousands of rows of bamboo planted in sea shore, endless number of fisher boats going to high sea, crew of fishers carrying their catches to the land, colorful sand, breath-taking sunrise and sunshine, those are unique and abundant things that Xiapu has to offer to every photographer. In addition, the cost of lodging and eating at Xiapu is a fraction of what is costs in Shanghai, beside having much fresher and better selection of seafood!

The 6 of us have hired a local guide, Mr. Zhang, who is member of the association of photographers of Xiapu. He was born there and have lived all his life there, so he knows the place, the people, the weather, the view, and the timing. We wouldn’t be able to shoot any great pictures if any of the 5 elements was missing! Under his guide, we were able to witness amazing tidal effect at the sea shore, within 30 minutes, a seemingly boring place “suddenly” becomes a spectacular zebra-like oyster field; a muddy place suddenly becomes clear white as water fill up. For all of us coming from city, this was such a great show given by Mother Earth!

One last thing worth mentioning is, 2 of crew members are new to our team, Perry and Momo, because Max and Roger were not able to join us this time. It turned out we had a great time together, eating and drinking every night, playing cards and singing too. It was a memorable trip, and probably one of the cheapest I ever had. It costed us only 2000 yuan per person, for 5 days in total, all inclusive!

Click here to see the entire album.

Once again, we booked our trip on ctrip.com, upgraded to a better located hotel right on Xi Dan street [西单街] where all the major shopping malls are found, and just 1 subway station from the Imperial Palace [故宫]. It was really worth the minor cost addition for all the comfort and time saving everyday after the guide tour is over. We had guided tour up to 5pm everyday, sometime earlier, so we had plenty of time to walk around the busy street, actually my mom has done quite some shopping there on her own, while I was skimming through my email inbox. To my surprise, I prefer to walk among the local “cheap shop” rather than the western-look modern malls, because those are all alike everywhere you go, they have the same recognized brands and same products everywhere, nothing special.

What I was mostly pleased with during this trip is the gorgeous clear blue sky, with a bit of pure white cloud hanging around, everyday. Sometime I felt like, staring at the blue sky is already worth the trip, or maybe I left Canada too long time to badly miss a clear sky. Also the weather was dry, around 28C, it was simply the perfect time to travel. I couldn’t ask anything more on this.

I was very pleased to see the great renovation being done on the major touristic attractions, such as the Imperial Palace, the Tian Tan Park [天坛公园], the National Theater [国家大剧院], etc. Photographying those sites was a pure pleasure, plus the good weather in the background, all the sites were at their best appeal in front of my camera! We were in small group, mostly just 4 people (including us) plus the guide. So we had plenty of time to talk and ask questions on the historical relics. Our time was flexible when I need to stop down a minute to take a shot, or waiting for people to clear out.

That was for the old Beijing attractions. The new Olympic attractions are the Bird Nest [鸟巢国家体育场] and Water Cube [水立方国家游泳馆]. I went there to shoot night scene on my own, and was really lucky to have found an excellent spot to shoot the Birt Nest. That photo alone was worth all the troubles and sweat. Unfortunately the Water Cube was not so nice to look at close, nor photographying, because it’s too flat with a messy surrounding, there’s no way to get a clear shot of that building.

To summarize, this trip has totally changed my perception of the capital. The warm reception of my special colleague (Cool) during Saturday night also helped this cause. Enough is to say, last time when I came, I almost swear that I’d never come to live in the capital. But after this time, I feel like I can take this very well, not only that, I’m considering maybe give it a try soon, whenever an opportunity shows up. Just to remind myself again, never say never…

Click here to see the entire album.

To be honest I didn’t expect a lot from Shanxi, not hearing anything nice from there ever. The only thing people keep saying about Shanxi is the mines, the miners and the boss of the miners [煤老板] who are insanely rich and dumb. In fact I didn’t even know the capital of Shanxi until I have the flight ticket in hands.

What I read in magazine is that Shanxi is a living museum of the Tang [唐朝] and Song [宋朝] dynasties, which are two of the most prosperous dynasties in China history. Unfortunately at the end of Song dynasty is hundred years of long lasting war with the various northern tribes, until it was entirely taken over by the Yuan dynasty [元朝]. That pretty much ended Shanxi’s famed period.

What is left of Shanxi today is a poor province with only one type of natural resource as revenu, coal mine. Not much else as economy, not much agriculture, no trade, no port, no hub. They might be able to count on touristic industry but transportation isn’t fully developped yet based on my observation.

Anyway, pessimistic as I am, we did have a great trip with all those guys. We took lots of photos, had fun in hotel room (that was memorable), and saw amazing historical heritage of ancian time. For 4 days short trip I feel that we’ve gotten much more than what’s worth. On the bus returning to airport at last day, we even had a karaoke and sung for 3 hours, for free!

You can see the entire album here.

Unsurprisingly, the majority of the CIO/CTO in the list are working for american companies (these are american magazines after all), the usual recipients are from Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Fedex, UPS, JPMorgan, Prudential, NASDAQ, Eli Lilly, Pfizer, Shell, 3M, Xerox, IBM, HP, Microsoft, Nike, Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, Amazon, eBay, Walmart, etc, etc, etc. Those are the world wide recognized innovative companies where their CIO excel in transforming business practices and processes by leveraging cutting edge information technologies. That is what I’m used to read for the past decade and a half, until now…

In the latest Global CIO 50 survey of InformationWeek, I was extremely surprised and delighted to see that there are 7 Chinese CIO in the list, I don’t remember seeing that many in any previous list. Seven mainland Chineses companies have made it into the list of Global CIO 50, that is something worth celebrating, let me explain…

The 7 CIO are:

First of all, the fact Chinese companies show up in the list of an american mainstream IT publication is quite significant to me. Many Chinese companies have been listed on NASDAQ for years without showing up on the radar of the average american investors. Now with globalisation a fact of life in every major industry, some well managed and innovative Chinese companies are having exposure on the international arena, not as a “3rd-world-country-companies picking up on modern technologies” headline, but as an equal peer with the very best of the world like Boeing and Rolls-Royce and IBM! This is one giant step toward the day where people don’t just think of the lead paint in toys and milk scandal when they think about Chinese companies.

Secondly, the fact that some Chinese companies can stand on this list will bring more attention to other companies that might have similar spectacular achievement to be recognized and learned from. Just imagine the gargantuan size of the Bank of China, ICBC, China Telecom, Chinese health care system, social security system, etc. Running those organizations’ IT department certainly have many challenges of their own that no other peer companies in the world could imagine and handle.

More over, these Chinese CIO not only use IT to support the business operation, but they manage to squeeze much competitive advantages out of it. I’m sure many other CIO are doing that too, this is just the beginning of a phase where Chinese companies are forced to become competitive globally to survive, forced to evolve and innovate continuously, just as their counterparts in the West.

I think that, by treating Chinese innovative companies as equal of organizations in the developed world, we can encourage them to try harder to bring their IT usage and infrastructure inline with the developed world, and that means that IBM will have a huge opportunity to capitalize on such movement, and so do I!

You can download the report in PDF here.

With the rise of its reputation across China, the many scenic areas within Wuyuan have gotten together to create a multi-sites pass that costs 180 rmb, linking 12 sites in total. If you go to any of these sites, you have to buy the combo ticket, but you can use it for 5 days as many times as you want. To make sure you don’t resell this to another individual during the valid period, they record your fingerprint in the card during first use, and subsequent uses must be authorized by the same fingerprint. Smart, but potentially troublesome, and I suppose this doesn’t come cheap in equipment and maintenance. I just wonder how much more money are the site owners making in using such system… or maybe the money just go to the county touristic department first and they redistributed to the site owners, in which case I doubt they would receive their full entitlement…….

Well, the first 2 days were cloudy, as typical in the Jiangxi and Anhui provinces. The 3rd day was absolutely blue sky and great weather. During this trip I did see much more of Wuyuan, so much that I felt the villages were repetitive and basically indistinguishable in photos. With the convenience of a car, we drove back and forth among the 3 observation decks of the Jiangling [江岭] scenic area 3 times during the morning. We actually stayed one night on top of the mountain, allowing us to be at the observation deck very early the next morning (7am). But then we realized that people were much more crazy then us, they were there way before we woke up! When we got there, people were already filled up the place with tripods and long lens. Once again, the cloud was thick, sky was blue, what a wonderful world I told myself! Seeing a small village on the mountain dipped in the cloud, I couldn’t stop pressing the camera shutter, on and on and on.

Trying to capture different aspect of Wuyuan this time, I was pleasantly surprised by the Yue Liang Wan [月亮湾] scenic area. We were not aware of this place when we drove cross a crowd of more than 50 amateur photographers lining up beside the river. We decided to pull off and joined the crew, spent more than an hour of truely enjoyable shooting time. It was a really nice discover for me. I feel that I did shoot many different views of Wuyuan this time compared to last year, and I felt more comfortable in shooting with the new camera now. I feel that my framing skills have improved during this year too.

Click here to see the whole album.

The road from Quzhou to the Sanqingshan scenic area isn’t far, about 100km only, but serpented around a few mountains and getting there by the rainy dark night wasn’t exactly relaxing, but we got there safely and on schedule, despite my first time driving in China! We stayed at a hotel just underneath the cable-car entrance, so we were able to get there very easily and early at the next morning.

The cable-car took us to the middle height of the mountain, it was a thick foggy day. Then we started climbing the stair, which is neatly built and maintained, making the matter much easier than I’ve expected. I brought a tripod and big lens (70-200mm F/2.8L IS) beside my regular camera 5D Mark II and the 24-70mm F/2.8L lens. I’m glad to have two healthy colleagues with me to carry the extra equipment in rotation. An hour later we were able to get to the point of pretty scenic view but the omnipresent thick fog simply hide everything of 50m away from us!

Following the excellent open walk way like a long balcony literally hung at the middle of the mountain, we walked and walked and walked, then suddenly the fog cleared away, showing the tip of a far away mountain. By the time I took the camera out of the bag and powered it on, the fog had already gotten off half of the mountain, fabulous and astounding are just too mild to describe the feeling of seeing such wonderful natural view, and such “fog play” at such amazing speed. After about 5 shots the fog started to cover up the mountain again, and before I had time to find another angle (or get away from the tourists who insisted to be shot together with the view) the fog had already covered up the mountain entirely, then we were back to the same thick white view everywhere again…

Walking another 15 minutes we got another “fog play” at another place, we learned to be very quick and decisive. No more waste of time framing and adjusting camera settings, just clack click clack and move on to another angle! We got about 2 hours of luck that day. After that it started to rain badly, and we were hungry, and tired, and legs hurt, wet, geez, it was truely painful by moments… But whenever the fog cleared out and show some mountain, we instantly forgot about the pain and immediately got into action.

In overall, it was a truely memorable day seeing such wonder of this land, it reminds us of how this world is filled with little wonders in every corner of Earth to be discovered.

Click here to see the whole album.

The few days that we were at Lijiang and surrounding, the general impression is that it’s a pretty neat town with good weather, albeit very variable from minutes to minutes, good air quality and nice view everywhere. We mostly stayed within the Lijiang Dayan old town [大研古城] and also visited Suhe old town [速河古镇]. We didn’t spend any time in the normal Lijiang city. With its strong reputation inside and outside of China, it’s no wonder that the consumption price is very high in the old towns, almost comparable to prices at Shanghai!

As part of our package, we visited the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain [玉龙雪山], watched an outdoor show there, and also went to several touristic attractions surrounding the mountain. This mountain is considered a sacred mountain by the Naxi ethnic. Geologists also praise this mountain for being this and that, but as a simple person coming from Montreal and having seen many ordinary sky snow mountains there, I didn’t get any excited when seeing it for the first time, neither for the last time… Admittedly, the surrounding of this mountain is pretty because of large open green fields, but the mountain itself is yet to impress my girlfriend and I. We thought it is a must-see due to its reputation but would not pay for seeing it another time.

Out initial plan was to visit Shangri-La during 2 days. Driving distance from Lijiang to Shangri-La is only roughly 200km, but it took us almost 5 hours to get there because we had to cross many mountains. At half heigh of the Haba snow moutain there was snow all over the place. By then we knew that the place was hit by a week-long snow storm. Poor us going all the way there to escape the coldness of Shanghai, but finally hit but the worst snow storm of 2009! We stayed the night at the hotel at Shangri-La, sufferred from high altitude reaction, lack of appropriate clothes/shoes, bored to dead in the hotel room, then early morning next day we were brought back to Lijiang because all the touristic attractions at Shangri-La were not accessible. They were worried that the road back to Lijiang might be blocked if we didn’t leave quickly enough. That was out encounter with this famous place that was once called Zongdian county [中甸县] then renamed to Shangri-La at 2002 to attract tourists from all around the world!

Overall, we did enjoy the time at Lijiang, but everything else was not exactly exciting, considering the high price that we paid to go there even though it was considered low season. Given another chance, we would not choose to go there are that season, but rather at June as we were constantly being told by the locals. Now we know, and will remember forever, that Yunnan is far from being green at all seasons. That only happens at Kunming and part of south of Yunnan!

See the whole Lijiang album, Jade Dragon Snow Mountain album and Shangri-La albums.

We flew from Shanghai to Xiamen [厦门], spent a night at Gulangyu [鼓浪屿] which is a touristic island annexed to the south east sea of Xiamen. Although weather was excellent that day, it is still a Winter day and people were walking at the beach with Winter coat on, so there’s nothing sexy worth mentioning here. Small island with lots of tourists, sea wind, cold beach, salty smell, that’s about it!

The next day we drove west to the mountain side of Fujian where most Tulou are located. Over the next 3 days we hoped from one to another Tulou all over the places. We saw round, square, large, small, new, old, solid, collapsing, semi-finished, at any shapes of Tulou that could possibly exist. Not that we’ve gone through the 3,000+ Fujian Tulou, but we’ve been through two dozens of them, and passed through hundreds of them on the road. So much that at the end of the trip, we were no longer excited to see one, and we could judge by the outside surrounding whether it’s worth stopping down and go in visiting.

Though mentally tired we were, the large Tulou are spectacular to see, outside and inside. What’s truely amazing is that, despite so much dramatic changes occurring over the last thousand years, there are still more than 20,000 Tulou in active use today at Fujian and surrounding! Many of those were built during modern time. Although today’s Shanghai is so different than 20 years ago, the people living in tulou have barely seen any major changes in their life over the past century. There are many old people over 80 years old (mostly females) living in tulou, I wonder in their eyes what was the most dramatic change between today and 1920…

Click here to see the whole album.

During the weekend trip, I went to 3 places:

1. South Eastern Hundred Herbs Garden [中南百草园]
2. Tian Xia Yin Keng [天下银坑]
3. Hidden Dragon Waterfalls [藏龙百瀑].

The first place isn’t so interesting to visit, except maybe for corporate annual celebration or team building. The second place is actually quite small, but it hosts 4 movie shooting attractions. The one that interested me most is the movie site of The Banquet [夜宴]. I had to climb on a special spot to take an overview shot of that “house”, but it was worth the trouble, I’m quite happy about that.

The third place is actually nice, small mountain with waterfalls of various sizes and shapes at various height. But for someone who has seen many times the world’s biggest waterfalls, the Niagara Falls at Canada, I wouldn’t say that I was impressed by this one, at all. Once I arrived on the top, the view is actually quite interesting, a faraway green mountain chain with a small road between them. That road actually has a very fancy name, just like many touristic sites at China, it’s called Nine Dragons Street [大溪九龙街].

Overall, I was very impressed by the scale, density and omnipresence of bamboo everywhere in Anji. The bamboo are so large that I cannot encircle it with both palms together. Unfortunately many bamboo are engraved with tourist names on them, while others are marked in black pen with their date so that the farmers can cut them off eventually and sell off for making furniture or bamboo plywood. So it was not easy to take pretty photo of them…

Click here to see the full album.

One very memorable thing was the returning day. We were supposed to leave the island around noon, just before lunch. It turned out there was a big typhoon announced by the weather channel at early morning, we rushed for the breakfast at 7am, went to the pier at 8am under heavy rain and strong wind. It was like a scene of running for your life. Arrived at the pier, there were not only our tour group but also other villagers who want to leave the island that day in afraid that there might be only one boat available for the day. So the line up was messy, they were not allowed to embark on the boat because it was arranged specifically for our group (because we pay more in advance) but those guys insisted on embarking and deliberately blocked us. The scene was like families fighting for their lifes to leave a war torn island on the last boat………

Then after the painful embarcation, the boat was overloaded with too many stocks and people, there wasn’t enough seats for everyone, and before the boat leave the port it was already rocking because of the big wave. Fully packed, uncomfortable seats without air conditioning were all conditions to make everybody feel worse than usual. Many ladies started to take seasick pills early, but that didn’t cure them in any way. Fifteen minutes after the boat left, all those who usually had seasick have a plastic bag in hand, some already filled 1/3 of the bag… Fifteen minutes later we ran out of anything disposable that could hold liquid… Ten minutes afterward all those who usually have no seasick were feeling bad too because of the sight and the smell of all those half-filled plastic bags………

Weekend outing to Shandong Lingshan Island	Weekend outing to Shandong Lingshan Island	Weekend outing to Shandong Lingshan Island
Weekend outing to Shandong Lingshan Island	Weekend outing to Shandong Lingshan Island	Weekend outing to Shandong Lingshan Island
Weekend outing to Shandong Lingshan Island	Weekend outing to Shandong Lingshan Island	Weekend outing to Shandong Lingshan Island
Weekend outing to Shandong Lingshan Island	Harry Potter in China	World-class model shot

At the moment where I could no longer hold my breath… the boat luckily arrived to destination and stopped rocking, I arrived alive! It was a memorable trip for every single member of our group, we didn’t stop talking about those plastic bags during the lunch and returning road. Finally, I got home at 11pm, home sweet home!

Click here to see the full album.

China is in the midst of the same evolution as Japanese in their late 70s. The image of “Made in China” still haunt Chinese brands, especially the rare high-end brands such as fashion and cars. Nationalist feeling has never been so high as it is today, some brave designers and photographers are exploiting this trend to promote their creations in the local maket, using local models with 100% local taste, while adopting a western looks.

I’m hoping that no too far in the future, maybe the next generation kids would be surprise and ask their parents why did people laughed at “Made in China” before?

As a once glorious capital of China during the beginning of Ming Dynasty [明朝], and then capital of Republic of China during the Japanese puppet Kuomintang [国明党] government, I was a bit disappointed by how this city is now under developed and kinda dirty. In terms of popularity it is certainly as well known as Hangzhou, but clearly it doesn’t attract as much tourists as Hangzhou, so the touristic spots are relatively quiet, which is actually good for visitors…

Mausoleum of Dr. Sun Yat-sen	Mausoleum of Dr. Sun Yat-sen	Mausoleum of Dr. Sun Yat-sen
Mausoleum of Dr. Sun Yat-sen	Mausoleum of Dr. Sun Yat-sen	Mausoleum of Dr. Sun Yat-sen

So, we went to visit the most popular touristic spots of Nanjing: the mausoleum of Dr. Sun Yat-sen [中山陵], the Confucious temple [夫子庙] snack street and the Yu Hua Tai [雨花台] martyrs meseum. It just happened that we stayed at the hotel next to the train station, which has a window view of the Xuan Wu lake [玄武湖], so I can say that I’ve visited that too…

Confucious Temple	Confucious Temple	Confucious Temple
Yu Hua Tai Martyrs Museum	Yu Hua Tai Martyrs Museum	Yu Hua Tai Martyrs Museum
Yu Hua Tai Martyrs Museum	Yu Hua Tai Martyrs Museum	Yu Hua Tai Martyrs Museum

To be honest, there’s nothing really that I can say “whoa….” at Nanjing. Been there done that, back home next day. I don’t think I’ll return there for another decade, unless for work or something really special.

See the whole album here.

Xi’an has been capital of China for about 2000 years, from 1100 B.C. to 900 A.D., thirteen dynasties, hundreds of emperors have chosen that region as their base. Visiting Xi’an is like reading a history book of ancien China, but it’s only amazing if you have some prior knowledge of Chinese history. If you have no idea of the chronology of Chinese history or no idea of the famous emperors, then you might not feel a “connection” with what you’re seeing, and you might not appreciate that much for seeing some broken bones and jars and terra-cotta soldiers. I think it’s very similar to visiting Greece without knowing antiquity history, you see some fallen rocks and walls, but there’s nothing fancy about that… As the tour guide put it, visiting Xi’an is 70% about listening and 30% about seeing, so next time you go there, make sure you book a tour that you can understand the language well. I see a lot of western tours where the guide barely speak English or French or German, very superficial, so they miss a lot of details.

Emperor Qin Shi Huang	Terra-Cotta army	Terra-Cotta army
Terra-Cotta army	Terra-Cotta army	Terra-Cotta army
Terra-Cotta army	Terra-Cotta army	Terra-Cotta army
Underground tomb of Emperor Qin in reduced scale	Reproduction of Emperor Qin's tomb based on ancien text	Reproduction of Emperor Qin's tomb based on ancien text

Four important dynasties have established at Xi’an and neighbor: Zhou [周], Qin [秦], Han [汉] and Tang [唐]. The Zhou Dynasty has been there for longest time, but there is no visible physical trace remaining. What it has left to Chinese was all the philosophers and their teachings, collectively called the Hundred Schools of Thoughts [诸子百家] which still remain firmly established in Chinese society today.

Underground tomb of Emperor Han Jing Di	Underground tomb of Emperor Han Jing Di	Underground tomb of Emperor Han Jing Di
Underground tomb of Emperor Han Jing Di	Underground tomb of Emperor Han Jing Di	Underground tomb of Emperor Han Jing Di
Underground tomb of Emperor Han Jing Di	Underground tomb of Emperor Han Jing Di	Underground tomb of Emperor Han Jing Di

Qin, Han and Tang have left very large physical footprint in the region, but they were all destroyed by their following dynasties, some rare religious establishments collapsed and were rebuilt during later time. Bottom line is, the best preserved physical traces of those eras the emperors’ tombs. Many of them have been rioted or robed, but even that, many were still secretedly preserved because they were well built hidden, so geniusly constructed that even with today’s modern ultra-sound and super-laser technologies we’re still not able to find the tomb’s entrance, nor do we feel confidently capable of preserving the shapes and colors of objects inside the tombs if we ever uncover them.

Big Wild Goose Pagoda	Fa Men Pagoda	Fa Men Pagoda
	Concubine Yang Gui Fei	The famous hot spring bath used by Yang Gui Fei

Regarding the modern city of Xi’an, some noticeable things are the well preserved city wall that wraps around the central part of the city, the Bell Tower and Drum Tower at the middle of the city, and a lively street full of Hui ethnic restaurants and snacks. The rest is like any other cities of China, a few pagodas here and there, a museum, a shopping street, and so on. We didn’t go to the nearby Huashan [华山] because of the tight schedule.

Xi'an city - Bell Tower	Xi'an city - Drum Tower	Xi'an city - Shaanxi Museum
Snack street of Hui ethnic	Snack street of Hui ethnic	Snack street of Hui ethnic
Snack street of Hui ethnic	Snack street of Hui ethnic	Snack street of Hui ethnic

Overall, I’m very happy to have been to Xi’an finally, and having seen the Qin terra-cotta army is a long time dream of mine. There are many must-see sites in China, the Great Wall and this one are two of them.

Click here to see the whole album.

But anyhow, here are two sets of photos of Chinese professional photographer Li Wei Guang [李伟光], from Shanxi [山西]. I really enjoy his works showing a traditional Chinese woman in traditional Chinese costume in a very traditional Chinese house, but yet strangely, it looks totally modern to me! Maybe because of the clean and sharp makeup, or maybe because of the pose, but I just love it! I truely hope that very soon Chinese traditional costume can be revived again in modern lifestyle, just like Japanese and Korean men and women still use it in some significant ceremonies.

Disclaimer: these photos were produced by Li Wei Guang!

Here is a set of photos that Li made as an exercise of his own, and for offering to the Beijing olympic game as well as to his fans. This set has been shown at the front page of a local photograpy magazine [摄影之友]. Heck, I hope one day I could do exercise such spectacularly, for myself and friends.

Disclaimer: these photos were produced by Li Wei Guang!

Read the author’s blog and his photo studio’s home page.

Among the tour members there are campers and amateur photographers. The campers are supposed to walk all day long across mountains to admire more raw landscape, while the photographers, including myself and two colleagues, would take small bus to cross the mountains, thus leaving more time and energy to take photos. At night, the campers would — naturally — camp somewhere in the village while we’ll sleep in some farmers’ houses. We had breakfast and diner at the farmers’ houses as well. Wuyuan is usually very humid, especially during this period of the year. I rarely see a photo rapeseed flowers in sunny day here. Everybody literary brings umbrella or rain suit.

Ancien villages

Wuyuan is not only a unique place with huge rapeseed flowers landscape, but its beauty is greatly enhanced by the presence of many small villages embedded inside the rapeseed fields. This adds a great deal of punch when viewed from far away or from a high vantage. Most of those ancien villages were built amost a thousand years ago, based on the Hui architecture [徽派建筑]. While the bigger houses are now built on modern architecture (or the lack of one), they still maintain the grayish wall and black tiles, so viewed from far, they blended in quite nicely.

Life in those villages is generally very backward, no air conditioning, no hot water, no flushable toilet. If the electricity lines and TV antennas are taken away, those villages would look like how they were 500 hundreds years ago! Many villagers still wash their clothes at the small river, and wash their foods at the same river. I have no doubt that drinking water also comes from there directly. Some farmers still keep the toilet remains for using as fertilizer……. This is not my first time travelling to rural and poorer regions, but seeing it still make me feel uncomfortable, or maybe I don’t see it often enough.

Chinese tourists

The tourism industry in China is in booming period these days. Most of the white colar workers can now afford bus, train and flight tickets to the remotest region of China. Since those remote and backward regions are still very poor, the cost of staying there is very low and therefore making them very affordable at the same time very refreshing to citizen (people living in big cities). On one hand this is good for the poor regions, to have tourist business and bring new construction into the area. On the other hand, as soon as these places become popular, rapid development quickly destroys the authentic rural atmosphere while villagers also adopt modern lifestyle comfort and fashion. Suddenly you see electricity poles and lines everywhere, TV dishes and sun panel heater on roofs, snack garbages everywhere, and worst of all, a flood of Chinese tourists that destroy everything on their way, for their love of taking photos of themselves on or in the main attractions. Many of them won’t think for a second when stepping in the flower field or standing on the stone, if that’s the main attraction that they’re coming for.

For example, the village of Xiaoqi [晓起] has convenient highway and bus station, so now it’s packed with farmer-style restaurants as well as big commercial restaurants and hotels. The old village is so packed of tourists that you wouldn’t believe you’re in a remote village, you can’t see anything but heads when visiting the ancien houses (kinda like in Zhou Zhuang). 30km away, a small village called Qingyuan [庆源] still has no convenient road to reach it, so it still maintains part of its calm atmosphere and charm, but that’s about to end next year when they’ll complete the road that allow tour buses to flood it with thousands of tourists everyday! By that time, farmers will give away farming and get on the tourist business and this place’s fame will be over forever!

Sometime I wonder if we shouldn’t make a beautiful place popular as that certainly will destroy it…

Click here to see the whole album.

Another important tradition is the crackers and fireworks. During the night of new year eve, from 8PM to 1AM, I can hear crackers at every minute, and fireworks can be seen in every corner of the view from my 20th floor apartment’s windows. Some of the fireworks can be very expensive, up to 10,000 RMB a box. To fire continously during several hours, they must have burned more than a hundred boxes of fireworks for each individual, that’s incredible amount of money gone in the air! But that’s the tradition!

At the 4th January night, there’s another tradition to welcome the God of Fortune [迎财神]. Based on the amount of crackers and fireworks, I can tell that this is as important as the new year itself, if not more. Again, I heard crackers continuously from everywhere, and fireworks were all over the place from my window.

Unfortunately for me, I was sick before and during the Spring Festival breaks, so I pretty much spent that whole week resting at home. But then I was thinking to myself, luckly that was a holiday week, otherwise I would have asked for a week of sick leave… So, bottom line for me is a full week of crackers and fireworks and sickness. I hope this rat year brings health and peace to my whole family and all my friends.

Every year, more than 100 millions Chineses who worked abroad (in another city) return to their hometown to spend the Spring festival (Chinese New Year) with family. For some migrant workers, that might be the only holidays in the year. So within 2 weeks before and after the Spring festival, the chinese public transport system is working at their pick to bring these people back and forth, train, bus and airplane.

However for this year, the snow storm just happen during the week of people returning home, trains, buses and flights were cancelled. Millions people were trapped on their way home, some were stuck at the train stations or airports. With many cities now at orange or red alert level, nothing will move and many of them will be forced to spend Spring festival abroad.

800,000 people were stuck at the Guangzhou train station while trains were cancelled. Many of them persist in staying their, hoping to be lucky enough to board on a train when traffic resumes.

Shanghai’s Hongqiao airport was also crowed by people returning home, flights were cancelled because the middle of China is in such bad condition.

People lining up to buy ticket to return home. Many had to wait overnight under the snow and cold. Even though it’s barely -2 °C people here are not used to the prolonged cold of northern countries.

At least 300,000 soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army are deployed to help cleaning the mess on highways and railroads. More than 1.5 million soldiers are on standby.

Heavy military equipment was deployed to de-ice the link between Beijing and Guangzhou.

Unfortunately for their effort, appropriate tools were lacking, shoveling a runway by hands isn’t the most productive way…

Some of the most seriously affected rural regions are deprived of water and electricity, some for over a month already. In the larger cities like Shanghai, energy reserves are at their lowest, alarming level because of supply interruption.

A city in Anhui province curiously resembles to a city in Canada…

This one is a city in Jiangxi province.

This couple was supposed to return home for their mariage, but now it looks like they’ll celebrate that in a train station, along with a million other people!

When we got out of the Hangzhou train station, we met two local women so sympathetic to us (new tourists) that they almost forced us to get on the bus instead of taking taxi to the lake. I tried but it was hard not to take their suggestion, so we obeid. Bottom line, we arrived at our intended destination an hour later than expected, as result of the missed train and taking bus.

It was a good day for sight-seeing but bad day for photo. The sky is all gray, a bit windy, all the lotus were long dead, some trees are yellow, or bald. I managed to snap around 50 shots, not much for a whole day trip at such a famed tourist attraction.

When I finally get to process those photos, it wasn’t as good as my previous trip to Hangzhou during Summer 2004. So I decided to convert some of the boring landscapes into B&W painting, I’m personally quite happy with the results.

Hangzhou - West Lake	Hangzhou - West Lake
Hangzhou - West Lake	Hangzhou - West Lake
Hangzhou - West Lake	Hangzhou - West Lake
Hangzhou - West Lake

You can see the whole album here.

I usually consider myself part of the generation that embraces technology and Internet, I do everything with a computer whenever it is appropriate and provides higher productivity. I no longer listen to CD, only MP3. I have no audio tape or video tape player at home, only DVD player. But laptop and IM are things that make me feel different from the 80′s generation, or I would call them the WiFi generation.

Everytime I attend a meeting at work, at least 1/3 of the people carry their laptops with them, and for the whole duration of the meeting they seem to stare only at the laptop screen, rarely looking at the speaker or the projection screen. It really irritates me when I am the presenter, sometime I tell people not to bring their laptop or don’t bother coming. When I’m not presenting, I observe their behavior, and it’s quite funny, I might have to interview them one day…

So here goes my observation. Many of them don’t seem to be involved at all in the subject that people are discussing in the meeting room, they simply read their news on the web, read their emails, half of them IM with friends intensively, some continue to do their normal work. I feel like their thought is “I’m joining this meeting because you invited me, not because I’m interested in the discussion”, or “your subject is so un-relevant to me that I’d rather continue my work or chat with friends or read gossip on the web”. Many time I wonder if they ever understand and appreciate the concept of face-to-face meeting, or they’d rather avoid it.

I also observe that those who don’t carry a laptop to meetings are either a) the contractors that were not assigned a laptop at work, and b) the older employees who have started working before laptop and WiFi were ubiquitous. I have no doubt that the first group would do the same if they were assigned a laptop with WiFi connectivity.

Not so long ago, most employees use a desktop computer at work, only sales people and senior managers use laptop. In conference room there is only a network line connection for the presenter, some rooms have none, and projector was very rare. Every attendant would go there with a pen and notepad, and the presenter usually handed out prints of the content. I think during that time people pay more attention to the discussion than today, everyone participated or listened. Now it’s hard to get everyone to listen at the presenter, let alone looking at him or her.

The decision makers of baby-boomer generation would flight for hours to meet their business partners at the other side of the world, just to have a handshake and to see them in person. The X generation people would write emails and make phone calls to their customers, and video-conference with colleagues, now the WiFi generation won’t even listen or look at their colleagues! I wonder if these youngsters will grow up appreciating direct human contact, or if the world will evolve into a more virtual contact model. Maybe our next office building won’t have meeting room at all. Hell, I must rush to buy some virtual land in Second Life, and some Linden Lab stocks too!

At a time it was difficult to explain guanxi to westerns, with all the social implications that it encompasses. But no longer now, a simple Google search of guanxi returns 667,000 hits! There are countless of websites and books and PR companies who make very exhaustive explanation of this critical concept. From their view, if you’re starting a business in China and you have to decide whether you’re going to take a MBA course or a course on establishing guanxi, the later option will certainly yield much higher return on your investment, as simple as that!

Wikipedia explains guanxi as “describes a personal connection between two people in which one is able to prevail upon another to perform a favor or service, or be prevailed upon. The two people need not be of equal social status. Guanxi can also be used to describe be a network of contacts, which an individual can call upon when something needs to be done, and through which he or she can exert influence on behalf of another [...]“.

A well known Chinese sociologist put this as “关系，在社会学意义上，是中国社会中特有的一种人际互动形式，是费孝通差序格局理论中的重要概念。按照费的解释，在传统中国社会中，“社会关系是逐渐从一个一个人推出去的，是私人联系的增加，社会范围是一根根私人联系所构成的网络”.

Those are accurate but boring definitions. I prefer this one from Catherine Jiang of Asia Times: “Guanxi is a term for mutual back-scratching or reciprocal personal or business connections”. The expression mutual back-scratching [互相擦背 = 擦鞋 = 擦屁股 = 拍马屁] might be very cantonese, but I think it truely reflects my feeling about this concept. It also reminds me of monkeys in the zoos, they do mutual back-scratching all the time, or sometime they help each others seeking for louse. Maybe we’ve inherit that from them…

Here again, a photo is worth thousand words!

Obviously all these mega-projects, as well as the tiniest projects, require capital backing, political guidance and approval, but more importantly require the man power to execute them. But most of the time, the people who gave up so much for so little are barely noticed by the society and history. For instance among the millions people who participated in, and died at, the construction of the Great Wall of China, how many famous names remain in popular culture today? I can’t think of one. We only know which emperors ordered the building or rebuilding of it, and which generals were major contributor to the project, but none of the workers actually made it into history, unfortunately.

Shanghai's old train station

Ticket office

If you look carefully, there is no lining up, everyone just sneak around the counters...

Ironically, as invisible as they are in history, in real life they’re everywhere in the country, in every corner of every city, on every street, you can easily spot them, but mostly people just ignore them. In China, they are called migrant workers [民工]. They’re like a special segment of population in the society. They’re treated differently by the local government and the police, coz they don’t have an official status at the places where they work (and live temporary), but they also lost their status at their home town for being absent for so long time. They have next to nothing in terms of life conform and social protection, but yet they work really hard, 7 days per week, hot or cold, dry or rain, day and night, in order to raise their family at home.

They hop from city to city depending on the projects, most of the time they literally live in shelters within the construction project they’re working on. They only go home once or twice a year to visit their family, by train. Trains in China have 4 classes of ticket: hard seat, soft seat, hard sleep and soft sleep. I don’t need to explain each class, but most of them consider hard seat quite expensive already, let alone soft seat or soft sleep. Sometime there are stand-up ticket as well, for short distance itineray such as between Shanghai and Suzhou (30 min).

The other day I took the train to Hangzhou, at the train station, I saw many of them running to catch their train while others sitting and sleeping at the station waiting for their train. Sometime I took the metro line 1 and see many of them too, because line 1 connects the two train stations of Shanghai, the old and the new station. To be honest, it’s quite unconfortable standing close to them, they stink, they’re unpolite, they talk loud and they’re always with big bags around them (luggage is a luxury).

But at second thought, these people contribute their life for our comfort: they build our roads, our apartments, our subways, our highways, our bridges, our tunnels, our dams, etc. They dig mines, cut forests, run cables, in order for us to have electricity and the materials for the manufacturing industries. Without them, any of these would not be possible. Without their hands, China would have to import huge amount of industrial equipments from western countries or Japan, and thus forever falling under their control for modernization.

So, I think these migrant workers deserve to be honored as the hero of China’s modernization. They should be honored the same way as their parent’s generation who defended western and Japanese occupancies, or the same way as their grand parent’s generation who fought for bringing down imperial rules and corruption. I think we should build a monument or statute to the unknown migrant workers who have given up blood and life for bringing China yet to a higher level of prosperity and peace, and to some extend, for making comfortable life much more affordable at every corner of the world!

But the moment I stepped out of the station, I didn’t regret about my misfortune. The city was so polluted that the smock was terrible, worse than at Shanghai! Visibility was extremely low, I’ve never seen such thick smock before. My plan was to visit the Liu He Tower [六和塔], which has a pretty view of the Qian Tang river [钱塘江] as well as the famous bridge of Qian Tang [钱塘江大桥]. Actually the name of the Zhejiang province [浙江省] was derived from the name of this river.

However, as soon as I got off the taxi and try to take a picture of the tower from across the street, I already had the impression that it’ll be a bad photo day… Nevertheless, I still try to shoot the tower as much as I could. I also climb on the 13-stories tower to take a view of the river, since I was already there.

A heavily processed photo of the Liu He Tower shot across the street, at a bad day...	Liu He Tower at close distance
Qian Tang river and its famous bridge built at 1959 as the longest and unique 2-floors bridge of that time.	Qian Tang river and its famous bridge built at 1959 as the longest and unique 2-floors bridge of that time.

Beside the barely visible view of the river, there isn’t anything interesting in the tower, so I got off there after only 15 minutes. But while walking around the tower, I found something quite interesting. There is a park underneath the tower which has a collection of miniature towers from all around China, the famous ones of course. I spend the rest of my short time hunting those towers. They were not built like a garden with clear sidewalk and clear view, they were built in the jungle, among the trees and at different spots on the hill, very interested I felt! The high density trees hide my view from the thick gray smock, giving me a confortable walk in the forest, and quiet.

Miniature tower	Miniature tower
Miniature tower	Miniature tower
Miniature tower	Miniature tower
Miniature tower	Miniature tower

Although touristic material still employs the ancien famous slogan that sings Hangzhou as the Heaven on Earth [上有天堂，下有苏杭] , I can’t help but thinking that, not only it no longer is the heaven, but I can’t even see the sky in Hangzhou now! Sadly indeed! But I think I’ll return there once again during Winter, hopefully the sky will be clearer next time.

Yesterday I went the the bookstore in my neighborhood, it’s name is Shanghai’s city of books [上海书城]. It’s a chain of very large bookstores found in every corner of the city. This one is a four stories and is considered small by their standard. I went to buy some books for my nepheus, and ended up staying 3 hours in there.

Shanghai's City of Books at Zhong Shan park	There are many history books in the bestseller section, as well as psychology for daily life, finance, western literature translated, a bit of fiction and personal health.
Tourism books are also very popular at the main entrance of many bookstores.	There is no comfortable sofa or chair in this bookstore, but that doesn't seem to bother many people.

From a bookstore, you can see from the bestsellers section what are the favorite subjects of the locals, which books the store is promoting; who are the popular authors, are they an autority figure of their respective domain or are they just anybody writing to everybody? The price of the book tells how much knowledge is accessible to the lower class of the society. The quality of the print and cover tells if people appreciate books. The variety of subjects tell if the people are open-minded. The customer base tells if each generation is eager to acquire new knowledge or prefer to just sit back and relax. For instance in North America older people love to read books, while youngsters prefer to read magazine, watch TV, watch movies, play game or hang out. In China, old people prefer to stay home watching TV and watching after their grand children, hanging out at the parks with neighbors, cook for their family, but few of them actually go to bookstore to buy books. Beside, many of them have bad vision, and some of them were not properly educated because of the long period of war during a good part of the past century.

Ancien Chinese literature

To boost national pride and bring prestige to Chineses’ cultural heritage, the central government is currently promoting ancien Chinese writings, such as ancien philosophies, literature, thinkers, heros, etc. In North America I don’t see a lot of books in the bestseller section trying to translate Aristotle or Socrates or Descartes’ writings to modern language for the ordinary you and me, but in any bookstore in Shanghai, there’s a pile of books, very accessible in term of price and display, that focus on explaining ancien writings to modern people. Actually ancien Chinese text written 2500 years ago, where Chinese philosophies and thinkings reached its highest climax, are very condense and difficult to understand. You can easily take 2 lines of text and write a full page about it.

This is a series of affordable books of many popular ancien Chinese literature.

Chineses probably have the largest set of idioms among all the languages of the world. Half of these Chinese dictionaries are devoted to explain each of those idioms and their sources. We have 3 words, 4 words (most common), 5 words and 7 words.

The set of books at left side are specially made for those who will go to a job interview at any government agency, they must pass the exam of various subjects, such as communication, information management, finance, law, governance, etc. It's like passing a driving test, but 10 times more difficult, although I wonder how did all of them become so dumb once they were accepted... There must be some shortcut I assume.

To my surprise, there were many teens in that section as well.

English learning

In every bookstore, there’s invariably a large section devoted to English learning. Actually I must say it is language study. However, when looking closer, I realize that in that section, 70% are for English language studying, 20% are for Japanese, and 10% for all the other languages combined. It’s amazing the variety of material for English learning available here. The English language book publishers must have made a fortune in China! There are all kind of books for all kinds of students, and tape, video, interactive DVD, anything you could or could not imagine, for teaching English. I was looking for a Chinese-French dictionary for my sister, and there was like, one selection (I wouldn’t call it a choice). For Chinese-English, there were more than 20 choices!

The language study section is a big section in most bookstore.	The whole rack in front of me and the one after it are for English language study.
This is another rack, the left side is for business English, the right side is for master level English.	Anoter rack, the 3 columns at right are English-related dictionary (and a bit of Janapese), the left column is for all other languages combined.
These are audio tapes for English listening lessons.	This is for high school English learning material.

I’ve bought a small booklet that has the most commonly used English sentenses for different daily situations, with pronounciation using mandarin words. It really is very very funny to read out loud, my girlfriend could hardly understand what I’m reading until I show her the actual English sentense… For example:

“Our – beef – steak – is – very – good.”
[ao wo - bi fu - si dai ke - yi si - wei rui - gu de]
[傲我 逼夫 斯呆可 衣斯 微瑞 顾德]

“Is – this – table – occupied?”
[yi si - re si - tui bo - ao ke you pai de]
[衣斯 热斯 推博 傲可油排德]

I also bougth one for French, for Japanese and for the Shanghai dialect.

Kid’s section

I was also pleased to see the variety of learning materias for kids of all ages, and the kids actually adore them. I saw a mom asking his kid to go home several times, but the kid replied to his mom to walk around and come back later! It certainly is good to see kids reading books rather than having their finger stucks to the game controller or TV remove control, I know because my nepheus are like that… Some kids seem to sit there all day long, one book after another, while the adults are becoming impatient.

The kid's section is always busy.

Don't disturb me!

Price, variety and quality

The average price of a book is lower or equal to the price of a MacDonal combo meal, or a Moccachino at Starbucks here, rarely does a book cost more than that, unless it’s a special edition or like a dictionary. In terms of variety, any book that directly criticizes the current ruling party isn’t welcomed, anyone trying to assemble a large group of people that could potentially cause harm to the ruling party is quickly turned down, but beside those, everything else is alright. So I’ve seen The World is Flat of Tom Friedman (in Chinese of course), The Tao of Warren Buffett, Jack Welch’s Winning and Leadership, can you get more capitalism than that? How about the American revolution and the French revolution? No problem! Harry Potter? Lord of The Ring? Star War? No problem! Well, you get the picture. In terms of quality, it’s not as good as books from Taiwan or Hong Kong yet, but it’s definitely acceptable.

So, to wrap up, here’s my selections: one book for me (about an old Chinese philosopher, Zhuang Zi [庄子], translated to modern Chinese), 8 books and 25 CD/DVD for my nepheus (cartoon, vocabulary, stories, basic language, etc)! All in simplified Chinese and mandarin of course. Someone asked me to bring some cantonese books for her baby, it’s impossible to find one here, too bad. Mandarin is the way to go, believe me!

My shopping basket.

So there I was, getting off the taxi, at the side door of the exhibition center. A man approached me and asked if I was going to the show. He has cheap ticket to sell. The regular price at the counter is 30RMB (~4$ CA), he’s selling for 20! I walked away telling him I’m not interested and that I’ve been fooled many times before, but he really insisted, and looking at his not-too-bad-guy-face, I thought losing 20 bucks is not a big deal, or I could save 10 bucks… It turned out he sold me the entry pass of a guy who must have attended the day before and don’t need it anymore. He probably bought the pass for 5 bucks from that guy… Another example that recycle is good for making money!

Fourth China Adult-Care Expo 2007	The most fancy booth on the show floor - Shaki Sex
Shaki Sex	Condom shop
A busy booth	Product show - even the guardians are interested in these products!
A big health care product company...

So I went in the show, every booth looked respectable, they toys are similar to what I see in Montreal (I live on St-Catherine!), despite a bit softer… After all the majority of the sex accessories sold on world market are manufactured at China, just like everything else. There are many westerners in the show who seem to shop for suppliers.

Toys	Sexy lingerie
Sexy lingerie	Sexy lingerie
A busy lingerie shop	Sexy lingerie
Who's using these?	Oh come on babe!
How about a multifunction massage chair?	Upgraded massage chair
Oriental viagra	What the hell are these?

They don’t sell the jumbo crazy stuff here, but more remarkably, all the posters and packaging are only topless, they don’t show the bottom naked. The wording on the packaging is a bit more polite than what is sold in North America. The sellers and consumers discuss about the products in a totally normal manner, which surprise me a bit because even myself was shy to ask questions about utilization… They either act very hard or are truely open-minded looking at these products in a totally healing perspective, more than I can do. But I’m still not able to consider the SM accessories and obscene lingerie as healing products!

At some point there was a sexy lingerie catwalk, the crowd was so packed that I can barely see the faces of the models. Unfortunately missing out the most exciting moment of the exhibition.

Sexy lingerie catwalk	Even if Bill Clinton passes by, no one would notice or care...
Sexy lingerie catwalk	Sexy lingerie catwalk
This is the best models that I could capture	We were all watching the show, but maybe not the same one...

The good thing with China today is that, it has a very rich and various history. No matter what become fashionable, China has something to show about that, philosophy, war strategy, exploration, health product, and of course sex!

Ancian jade sculpture	18th century porcelaine
Customized furniture and decoration	Paints and scrolls

Click here to see the whole album.

There are other water towns around Shanghai, but none of them are as close to Zhou Zhuang in terms of popularity and quality of the site, earning it the title of The Best Water Town of China or 中国第一水乡 —- 周庄. Every morning there’re at least 50 tourist buses pouring people in this village, all of them got stuck in the tiny allies and attractions of this tiny village not bigger than half a square kilometer.

The ticket for going into the “attraction section” of the town is quite expensive by China tourism standard, 120RMB, which was included in my tour ticket of ~200RMB, they came to pick me up at home and drove me back at the end. Needless to say, tour companies are not making much money in China, the level of competition is incredible and they’re eating each other’s profit.

The famous Twin Bridge of Zhou Zhuang	A quiet area of Zhou Zhuang
A popular attraction at Zhou Zhuang
This is your very truly... me!	These birds are not there for a rest, they're there for a fishing show at customer's request.
Every shop claims to be the oldest and authentic brand of porc's hand, but nobody knows for sure until they've tried them all...
Quan Fu Temple - A very big temple for a very small town	At one time the town of Zhou Zhuang belongs to Quan Fu Temple, now it's the opposite.

Click here to see the whole album.