China - a country of 1.3 billion people in the grip of an industrial revolution absorbing a large part of the world's resources - was, until relatively recently, a closed book to most in the West. With the Olympic Games in Beijing, more and more people will visit this vast country and, with that in mind, the Hong-Kong-based, internationally-celebrated photographer and writer Basil Pao determined to travel through every province of China, recording history and landscape, people and places, to give a comprehensive snapshot of China today. By turns lyrical and exquisite, stark and brutal, his informative text and powerful photographs show a country in transition. A country whose four thousand years of cultural history are being rediscovered, and where new urban wealth and rural poverty coexist uneasily as a new regime tackles a legacy of corruption, and of anarchy under Mao's cultural revolution and repression in its aftermath.
