While the dragon has historically served as China’s national emblem, in recent decades the panda has also come to serve as a symbol for the country; seemingly docile yet vicious if irritated. Due to farming, deforestation and other developments, the Giant Pandas natural habitat has significantly diminished and there are less than ~2000 pandas in the wild and ~200 in captivity.
A few weeks ago my younger brother visited me in Hong Kong and given it was his first time to China I decided to take him into the mainland and visit somewhere a little off the usual tourist trail. Our destination was Chengdu (成都), the capital of Sichuan province in Southwest China, for no other reason than it was somewhere I hadn’t been before!
According to a local legend in Hong Kong, in 1880 the small fishing village of Tai Hang (大坑) was devastated by a powerful typhoon. Around the same time, a large serpent entered the village and was killed by some of the residents. Shortly afterwards, plague and cholera broke out, leading to the deaths of many villagers.
Wrapping up my recent visit to Shanghai below is a collection of random photos I took while out and about. Despite having visited the city many times of the past few years I still don’t feel I have a good grasp of its geography. Perhaps this has something to do with the rate everything is changing or the hurriedness of each trip…
Living in Hong Kong you quickly discover there’s a large divide, both physical and social, between Hong Kong island and the Kowloon peninsula. While the island has all the trappings and excesses of absolute wealth (largely generated by the financial sector) the story is often very different in much of Kowloon.
While Beijing may be famous for its traditional Hutong (胡同) courtyard residences, Shanghai has its own distinct architectural style of residential homes called Shikumen (石库门). During a recent trip to 1933 Shanghai I spied from its roof one of the few remaining Shikumen tenements and decided to take a look around…
The words ‘art deco’, ‘abattoir’, and ‘Shanghai’ are not ones you usually find in the same sentence but on a hot summers morning in China’s second most populous city I found myself in one of the most curious architectural relics you could imagine; a 1930′s former slaughterhouse beautifully crafted from concrete in a style most unbecoming of China’s usual mausoleums to the uncouth.
When film director Mamoru Oshii was looking for a model of the city of the future for his seminal 1995 animated film adaptation of Ghost in the Shell (based on the manga by Masamune Shirow), he turned to the cityscape of Hong Kong for his inspiration.
Around the time of the Shanghai World Expo last year the Rhône-Alpes region of France produced a wonderful series of short films about their twin city. I can’t find much background about them but for anyone with an interest in Shanghai they provide a wonderful glimpse into this burgeoning metropolis at the turn of the last decade.
Ankle deep in stagnant water the rancid air magnified the sense of claustrophobia I felt as me and 5 other Indian-Jones wannabes trudged through the 70-year-old tunnels the Japanese Imperial Navy forced locals to dig during WWII (1941-45) on Lamma Island (南丫島) in Hong Kong.