China Portraits Revisited

A Naxi man in the village of Wenhai. He was attending a wake at the house adjacent to the guesthouse where we sometimes spent weekends after walking up into the mountains from Lijiang. 

(Click images to view larger--best viewed on something larger than a phone!)

I bought my first digital camera in 2005, a six-megapixel Nikon D70, just before Ellen, Bei, and I moved to China for a year to teach English. I also took my last film camera to China, but once I started shooting with the D70, I never used it again. With digital, I could shoot as much as I wanted without worrying about the cost or hassle of processing, and there was a lot to photograph.  

We lived in Lijiang, a UNESCO World Heritage site in the Yunnan Province, near the Tibetan border on the edge of the Himalaya. On weekends, we hiked to villages in the mountains or traveled to towns near Lijiang, and on longer holidays, we wandered farther, mostly to frontier areas where various Chinese ethnic groups lived. In the summer of 2006, after we finished teaching, we traveled more widely, making our way across Western China and eventually to Kashgar, where Uyghur culture was still relatively unscathed by the Chinese government’s campaign to squash it. 

 

At that time, I wished that I’d visited China earlier. The country seemed to be booming. Highrise apartment buildings and highways were under construction everywhere, gnawing away at what remained of the old China, but now, twenty years later, I realize how lucky we were to visit villages in the mountains where the traditional way of life was still largely intact and to see firsthand the mixture of untouched old towns and Chinese-style modernization.

 

The Chinese people wherever we went were universally friendly to us, especially when they learned that we were teachers and when they met Bei, our adopted daughter, who was four the year we moved. I’m usually shy about taking close-up photographs of people, but their openness emboldened me enough to ask permission to photograph, and people were usually welcoming—sometimes even hamming it up a little for the camera. 

 

I’ve recently been revisiting my China photographs, reprocessing the old digital files to remove color-casts and improve contrast before archiving them in a self-published Blurb Book, though the files from that now twenty-year-old camera are surprisingly good. While doing this, I’ve realized that I have a lot of portraits, so I’m publishing a collection of them here. I kept a blog when we lived in China (Ken, Ellen, and Bei in China), and I’ve published a few of these portraits in this blog (link, link, link), but I’ve never put them all in one place. 

 

I wish I could visit some of these people again and give them prints—especially the children who now must now be in their 20s or 30s. It would be fun to know what their lives have been like since we so briefly twenty years ago.

We met this woman on market day in a town called Liming. She was puffing away on her pipe, smoking cannabis that grows wild in that part of China and enjoying the festivities. Liming has since become a destination for rock climbers thanks to the impressive cliffs above town. 

A young girl I met in the vast Sangke grassland near the Labrang Buddhist monastery at Xiahe in the Gansu Province. I was out by myself for a walk along a two-track road in the grassland, and she came out of a small house and walked down to greet me over the fence that surrounded her yard. 

During one vacation, we hiked for several days in the mountains, ending up at a lake called Lugu Hu (Hu means Lake). We met these two along the trail on the first day of our hike.

A woman from the Bai ethnic group at market in Xizhou near the town of Dali in the Yunnan Province. Bai people settled here about 3000 years ago and number about 1.5 million according to the Lonely Planet guide that we had at that time.

A Naxi boy at Wenhai Lake. The head scarf is called a Datou.

A Uyghur man in Kashgar in far western China. At this time (2006), Uighur culture was much more intact than it is today.

A woman at the market in Wupaer, outside of Kashgar. I have another photo of her with her daughter and grandchild.

Kids horsing around in the old town of Kashgar which has since been destroyed by the Chinese. These were happier times for the Uyghurs. 

A Naxi woman at Wenhai Lake near Lijiang.

A young woman at Turfan, a desert town on the edge of the vast Taklamakan Desert in Western China south of Urumqui. 

The temple-keeper at Shibaoshan, a complex of temples in the Yunnan Province. Shibaoshan means "Stone Treasure Mountain."

A young woman in Kashgar. She and a large group of kids were running running around in the narrow alleys of Old Kashgar when I met them. 

Another young woman in Kashgar.

Two friends in Kashgar.

A child from the Yi ethnic group in the mountains above Lijiang. There are about 9 million Yi people in China living mostly in rural areas in the southwestern part of the country. 

While not exactly a portrait, this captures a moment of connection in Kunming early one morning when I was walking in town. The salespeople in their red jackets were lined up to receive what I presume was a pep talk at a phone store when this woman turned to look at me.

Three kids at Dabao Si, a Tibetan temple area north of Lijiang on the road to Zhongdian. 

Naxi musicians in Baisha near Lijiang.

I'll finish with this--one of my favorites. Our daughter Bei is with two Naxi men in Yulong, near Lijiang. Their warmth and kindness is typical of people we met that year.