People 人

The Phoenix city - Fenghuang Located on the western edge of Hunan Province next to Guizhou, Feng Huang Cheng's beauty lives up to this story. Claimed to be one of the two most beautiful towns in China, it sets an example of what villages were like before the start of modernisation. In the town dozens of lanes are paved with stones that run between the wooden houses built on stilts. Generations of local people have stepped on the lanes and worn them down bit by bit. Mist envelopes the town in the early morning or after a rain, creating a charming picturesque scene of Southwest China. Fenghuang's charm goes beyond the natural beauty. This ancient town has a history of 1,300 years and it has a number of old gardens as well as distinctive residential buildings, elegant bridges and mysterious towers and pagodas. Tourists here can also have a glimpse of the Great Wall. This section of the Great Wall was built in the Ming Dynasty (1573-1620) to defend against the local Miao minority ethnic group, which defied the central government at that time.

Tagong (Chinese: 塔公), also known as Lhagang (Tibetan: ལྷ་སྒང་) is a frontier town of about 8,000 people on the 2,142km-long Sichuan-Tibet Highway, about a quarter of the way to the Tibetan capital of Lhasa. Formerly known as the Kham region of eastern Tibet. The Garze Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture is roughly the size of Nepal and has a population of mainly Tibetans. The grasslands around Litang and Tagong offer a chance to see the fast-​disappearing Tibetan nomad culture. During the summer months, the Tagong Grassland (appx 3900m in elevation) will see semi-nomadic herder families travelling with their yaks across and live in tents.

These local youngsters came to the stupa for a short bike trip. They did not come to smoke or to drink. They did practice hardship, by a ritual of carrying heavy stone around this sacred place.We asked if we could join them, and they happily agreed. At last I took a photo for memory. Not much later, the guys left and we noticed a very different approach by another species. The Chinese tourists. They did not stay in this village like we did, just stopped on a bus . Took photos. Some girl asked me to pose her for a photo, which I did not appreciate. Angry refused Barbie then showed me to move away so she can take a click of the stupa. Then the Chinese bus left. The place was peaceful again.

real colour photo, only the saturated a bit to overcome the hopeless cloudy summer in Kham