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Photos: The Demolition of Old Kashgar
Gilles, of Le Monde’s Eye for China blog, has captured images of Kashgar’s Old City before and after wide-scale demolitions took place in a four-part series (1, 2, 3, 4). Below are selected photos and their accompanying excerpts, translated by CDT. Read more about the razing of Xinjiang’s cultural center on CDT.

A young Uighur girl carrying her younger brother passes before the door of a traditional house in Old Kashgar. The open door signifies that visitors are welcome, and the red curtain indicates that a pregnant woman can be found in the home.

On the wall of the mosque, an inscription: “Individual pilgrimages are strictly prohibited. Take the road of organized pilgrimages.” The practice of Islam, the Uighur religion, is strictly regulated in Xinjiang. Pilgrimages to Mecca can only be done within the framework of organized trips, officials (including teachers) do not have the right to practice … etc.

Detail of a traditional house in Old Kashgar.

The bulldozers came at night and knocked down a wall of this house, leaving the interior courtyard visible. Residents clean.

75-year-old Batur sits in front of his house marked for demolition. The neighboring homes fell 10 days earlier; his was temporarily spared. He built it 30 years ago and will not be compensated for it. He has no local hukou [residence permit] and the surface area (35 squared meters) makes him ineligible for rehousing. He waits in the fear that he will find himself on the streets.

A final turn to the pigeon loft. This tradition is at risk of disappearing as Old Kashgar’s population relocates.

Those who were displaced first were relocated to the “City of Happiness #1,” 4 kilometers from the city center. For them, everything was free. Though there is no more mosque in the neighborhood, the apartment will be heated this winter. The government will pay for the first electricity bills.

A propaganda video is shown on loop on a screen in the People’s Plaza. Here, one sees what has moved in first: blaring music, folk dances, inaugural floral bouquets. The filmed Uighurs do not hide their joy at their sudden attainment of modernity. They wave small Chinese flags. An official voice in mandarin (that 2/3 of locals do not understand) vaunts the merits of the project: “Never before has an event of such proportions occurred in Kashgar … The quality of these new buildings are without equal …”

Behind Mao’s raised arms, the old city. For how much longer?
Update: The Uyghur Human Rights Report has translated a portion of the article that originally accompanied these photos here. Thanks to Adam Cathcart for alerting us to the link.
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- December 13, 2009 3:41 PM
Slideshow: Historical Photos of Sun Yat-sen’s Burial Procession
According to Wikipedia: “Sun Yat-sen (pinyin Sūn Yì Xiān) (12 November 1866 – 12 March 1925) was a Chinese revolutionary and political leader. As the foremost pioneer of Republican China, Sun is frequently referred to as the Father of the Nation. Sun played an instrumental role in overthrowing the Qing Dynasty in October 1911, the last imperial dynasty of China. He was the first provisional president when the Republic of China (ROC) was founded in 1912 and later co-founded the Kuomintang (KMT) where he served as its first leader. Sun was a uniting figure in post-Imperial China, and remains unique among 20th-century Chinese politicians for being widely revered in both mainland China and Taiwan.”
Here are some historical photos of Sun Yat-sen’s burial procession posted on iLishi (Love History) blog.
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- September 15, 2009 9:22 AM
Slideshow: A Visit with Ai Weiwei
Colorful Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei will be traveling across Europe this autumn to participate in various contemporary art exhibitions. French journalist Jordan Pouille went to his house on the outskirts of Beijing for a visit and took the photographs below. To read more about Ai Weiwei, please see CDT’s blogger profile.
Read about the exhibit, Double Happiness, that Ai is co-organizing in Brussels in October. Watch a video of Ai inspecting the exhibition space for Double Happiness:

Ai will also be exhibiting a video installation at MOCA in Los Angeles this fall. Read more from the LA Times.
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- September 10, 2009 12:09 PM
Photos: A Look at China
CDT presents a look back at the past few weeks in China. The following photos from late August include subjects from the everyday to the extraordinary. Photos and captions (here, translated) can be found at paowang.net (1, 2).
The Guangzhou station became a “place of grief” as left-behind kids cry as they return to the countryside by train. Guangzhou is the transportation hub for millions of migrant workers in Southern China.
Changsha’s first student to enter the guzheng department at the Central Conservatory of Music in 30 years is a 9-year-old girl from Xiangxi. Her scores were the top in the nation to test into this school, and she will go straight to university!
New brides lift their veils at the Rose Wedding ceremony in August 29.
On August 29th, director of “Let the Bullets Fly” Jiang Wen (third from the left), Ge You (2nd from left), and others on the red carpet at the premiere.
A thousand people gather together for a lively blind date event during the 26th of August’s “Qixi Festival” [note: somewhat analogous to the Western Valentine's Day] in the city of Xian, located in Anhui Province. The event planners organized over 1000 singles to participate in blind dates. Within the event were introductions, a talent show, as well as other items, all of which gave these young men and women opportunities to get to know one another.
On August 23, the ladies from Miss Tourism Queen International take a group photo in front of a Shaolin Temple gate in Dengfeng, Henan. The Miss Tourism Queen contestants came from 120 countries and regions to visit Shaolin Temple.
In the afternoon in Wuhan, this reporter spotted an eye-catching small advertisement affixed to the front of a white police car. The advertisement is for making fake IDs and seals, and includes a contact number.
The province’s first women’s school in Chengdu’s Immaterial Culture and Heritage Park has begun classes. Zhou Yongchen, who is in charge of the school, [stated that] the intention in launching the school was to return classical, gentlewomanly cultivation to the modern woman and to promote Chinese traditional culture.
In the morning of the 24th of August, Anhui’s Chaohu city Party secretary, Zhou Guangquan, received his verdict in Anqing’s mid-level for accepting a bribe, and possessing large sum of money from unkown sources. The Anqing mid-level court ruled that Zhou Guangquan would receive life imprisonment, be stripped of political rights for the rest of his life, and have his property confiscated.
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- September 9, 2009 12:21 AM
Photos: China’s Creeping Sands
ChinaDialogue has posted a slideshow of stunning images documenting the desertification of China by photographer Sean Gallagher:
Desertification is the gradual transformation of arable and habitable land into desert, normally caused by climate change or the destructive use of land. Each year, desertification and drought account for US$42 billion loss in food productivity worldwide.
It is estimated that nearly 20% of China’s land area, some 1.74 million square kilometres, is now classified as desert. Affecting the lives of an estimated 400 million people, it is one of the most important environmental issues in China today.
Gallagher’s notes from the field can be read here.
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- June 27, 2009 1:13 PM
Photo: Behind the Scenes – A New Angle on Tank Man
From the New York Times blog:
Terril Jones had only shown the photograph to friends.
While working as a reporter in Beijing during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, he shot many photographs and recorded several hours of video. It wasn’t until weeks afterwards, when he had returned to Japan, that he discovered the magnitude of what he had captured — an iconic moment in history from an entirely unique angle.
His version of the tank man has never been published until now.
For 20 years the negatives rested in Mr. Jones’ belongings, following him across the world throughout his career as a journalist. He contacted The New York Times after reading the accounts of the other four photographers in Wednesday’s Lens blog.
Mr. Jones’ angle on the historic encounter is vastly different from four other versions shot that day, taken at eye level moments before the tanks stopped at the feet of the lone protester. Wildly chaotic, a man ducks in the foreground, reacting from gunfire coming from the tanks. Another flashes a near-smile. Another pedals his bike, seemingly passive as the tanks rumble towards confrontation.
The photograph encourages the viewer to reevaluate the famous encounter. Unlike the other four versions, we are given a sense of what it was like on the ground as the tanks heaved forward, the man’s act of defiance escalated by the flight of others.
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- June 4, 2009 11:14 PM
Photos: First Anniversary of the Sichuan Province Earthquake
From AP:
China marked the first anniversary of a massive earthquake on Tuesday in a somber, nationally televised ceremony filled with flowers and speeches, as the normally distant Chinese leadership provided an unusually cathartic public moment. The 30-minute memorial service in front of a destroyed school in the Sichuan province town of Yingxiu followed a minute of silence that began at 2:28 p.m. (0628 GMT), the moment the magnitude-7.9 temblor shook China — and some countries beyond — on May 12, 2008. Villages were toppled or buried and landslides raked mountains as large portions of Sichuan — where the quake was centered — and two neighboring provinces were wrecked. Nearly 90,000 people were killed or never found, and 5 million were made homeless in the deadliest earthquake to hit in decades. (Click here to see the 18 images)

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- May 17, 2009 4:51 AM
Photos: Hu Jintao’s High School Years
You never know when you will be searching the “wrong words” in the Chinese blogosphere. Searching “Hu Jintao, middle school” on Google’s Chinese blog search produces the message: Your search results may be related to content which does not accord with relevant laws, regulations or policy, and therefore cannot be displayed. 搜索结果可能涉及不符合相关法律法规和政策的内容，无法显示.
But the following photos do exist in the Chinese blogosphere and BBS; they are from bbs.Chinanews, blog.sina.com and bbs.voc.com.cn.
Hu Jintao’s middle school – Taizhou Middle School, Jiangsu Province.

Hu Jintao’s seat in a classroom.

What are they looking at? Any photos?

Hu Jintao: first one on the right in the second row.
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- May 11, 2009 4:37 PM
Photos: Jiang and Hu in the Party Congress
While the Party leaders’ names are sensitive words in Chinese cyberspace, the following photos are being distributed by bloggers, with some making comments about the apparent differences between the personalities of Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao:
From Xisiwuya’s blog:

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- March 27, 2009 9:30 PM
Photos: Xinhua and Photoshop
A poster on a Sohu blog writes about Xinhua’s use of image doctoring. Below are photos with translated commentary:
Left: “Memorial tablet for soldiers who lost their lives in Papua New Guinea” (巴纽阵亡将士之灵位), from Xinhua
Right: Original tablet image, “Memorial tablet for Republic of China’s Armed Forces soldiers who lost their lives in Papua New Guinea” (中华民国国军于巴纽阵亡将士之灵位), from Taiwan Central News Agency. Other views of the tablet can be seen at BBC and Sina Taiwan.
Past Photoshop incidents have been more humorous. Captions, translated:

Twins! 双胞胎

Six legs. 六条腿
Read also: Secret Behind Chairman Mao’s Image: Every Photo Had Been Retouched on CDT.
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- March 18, 2009 5:36 AM
Photo Series: Villages Filled with E-waste
Wenxuecity.com carries some photos taken in Guiyu, Guangdong, and presents the scenes of the e-waste “recycling” processes in the villages of the trash town. Rivers run black, the air is filled with toxic fumes and dangerous smoke. Water is not drinkable of course, so locals rely on bottled water transported from out of town for drinking and other living purposes. Indeed, transporting water has become an important business in town as a result. Lead poisoning is among the highest here as heavy metals leak into the water system and the air.
Please also see a CDT highlight video post Electronic Waste Documentary Preview by Michael Zhao.
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- March 14, 2009 9:03 PM
Slideshow: A Wedding in Rural Yunnan
Photographer and blogger “Flying Bird and Fish” posted a group of photos of a wedding in rural Yunnan. He says that generally Chinese parents don’t hesitate to spend most of their savings on their children’s weddings and they try their best to make the wedding nice and festive. However, the wedding style in rural area is still very different from those in cities. From blog.sina.com.cn:
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- March 10, 2009 8:30 PM
Slideshow: Road to School
A blogger “Flying Bird and Fish” posted a series of photos he took in a mountain area showing some rural children walking to school in a dangerous cliff road. He says that he was scared to see the scene. His hands were sweating and his legs were even trembling while taking photos of the children, via blog.sina.com.cn:
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- March 1, 2009 7:26 PM
Photo Series: Memories of 2008 in Shanxi
These photos are from “Shanxi Evening,” a local newspaper in Datong, carried by News.QQ.com:
- See also Photo Series: Memories of 2008 in Hubei by CDT
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- February 26, 2009 10:30 PM
Photo Series: A Collection of Photo Stories(2)
These photos are from fengniao.com and QQ.com and they reflect the grassroots’ recent life in China.

Photo source: fengniao.com, CCN, QQ.com
- See also Photo Series: A Collection of Photo Stories(1)
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- February 23, 2009 8:04 PM