Travel to China: Guilin

A famous part of China, figuring largely in Chinese landscape painting and, from that, in the modern tourist industry. The desk clerk is too polite to disagree when told that the countryside is beautiful, but she knows that you can't eat beauty.

Make default image size larger

Tourist boats cruise downstream through karst towers.  A thick layer of calcium carbonate has dissolved along joints and fissures and left them behind.

Not so many years ago, but certainly before the trouble in Tiananmen, Bloomingdale's ran an advertising campaign in which models posed before towers like these.  Sweating peasants were cropped or air-brushed.

Rustic imagery sells airline tickets and women's clothing, but the people of Guilin are pushing for change. Are those power lines? Is that asphalt paving? Are those bicyles? Well, the place has actually been changing for a long time: look at that un-Chinese crop in the background, good old American corn. It's just that things are changing faster now, fast enough to be perceptible.

There are plenty of people busy with ancient tasks, such as distributing buckets of human waste caught in latrines and carried out to the fields.

A tripod and scoop, swung back and forth to raise water or so, a gallon at a time.

Down the road: a concrete-lined canal, from which water is raised into a canal not by muscle power but by simple mechanical ingenuity.