China's Vanishing Worlds - 9780262019866

Just a few kilometers from the glittering skylines of Shanghai and Beijing, weencounter a vast countryside, an often forgotten and seemingly limitless landscape stretching farbeyond the outskirts of the cities. Following traces of old trade routes, once-flourishingmarketplaces, abandoned country estates, decrepit model villages, and the sites of mystic rituals,the authors of this book spent seven years exploring, photographing, and observing the vast interiorof China, where the majority of Chinese people live in ways virtually unchanged for centuries.

China's Vanishing Worlds is an impressive documentation inimages and text of modernization's effect on traditional ways of life, and a sympathetic portrait oflives burdened by hardship but blessed by simplicity and tranquility. The scars of China's recenthistory and the decay of centuries-old traditions are made visible in this volume, but so is thelure and promise of technology and another life for young people. In the next twenty years, anestimated 280 million Chinese villagers will become city dwellers, leaving their ancestral homes insearch of urban jobs and opportunities.

In striking and evocative colorphotographs, we see picturesque villages set against a background of rolling hills, plannedcenturies ago according to the principles of feng shui; a restaurant with bright pink resin chairsand a wide-screen television; traditional buildings preserved by the accident of poverty andisolation; ramshackle rooms decorated with portraits of Chairman Mao; backpack-wearing childrenwalking to school; festivals with elaborately costumed performers; old men playing cards; buyers andsellers at open-air markets.

China's Vanishing Worlds offersreaders a rare opportunity to glimpse China as it once was, and as it will soon no longer be.