Why were we denied the opportunity to right our stricken three-wheeler countless times?

JUNE 3, 2007: The bulldozers have no mercy for several old-style Chinese villages that Songyuan City is swallowing whole. The combination of muddy, rutted streets and three-wheeled 'agriculture trucks' might be the only reason they were still there by the time i got around to taking some photos, as you'll see at the end of this post. The first village photos are here.

Chinese people can't seem to understand why anyone would want to take pictures of something ugly or run-down. Even if it's disappearing forever.

A few days ago i had to give personal English lessons to this unmotivated rich kid who's going to Canada soon. It was hot and he can't concentrate at the best of times so we just went for a walk.

By and by we came upon this very modern-looking, relatively solid and very abandoned building. In a country where most of the buildings show less architectural finesse than a 4-year-old's lego house and can be observed decaying in front of your eyes, modern, solid and abandoned is an odd combination. So i whipped out the camera.

Immediately the student asked me, "Why do you take pictures of this? This is not beautiful." (That's still the most advanced English sentence i've heard him utter.) If, like i did, you want to see more, click here.


So, knowing my Mandarin was still not good enough to explain my motivations for even being there, let alone taking photos, i headed into the village. And learned quickly why it is that so many people are happy to abandon their family home to the 'developers' in favour of a drawer in an archetypal crumbling grey filing cabinet.




Razor-thin alleyways, windowless steel doors and bones lying in the mud make for a foreboding first impression.




Aside from the rubbish everywhere - especially food scraps - the sky's reflection in the perpetual puddles is about the village's only colour outside a narrow band of browns and greys.

In contrast, the long rows of crumbling new towers (new, that's right, most of them are less than 15 years old, many less than 5) in the rest of the city mean piped water and electricity, flushable toilets, central heating and no mud.

Of course it's good riddance to the village.

The brightly-dressed kids were the only people i saw until a dude came out from behind his door to ask me the inevitable: "What (the fuck?) are you doing here?"

In our short, awkward conversation i think i managed to ascertain that the 'historic' village i thought i was recording was actually about 50 years old.

I left soon after, but on my way out, the village hit back at the demolition team by overturning one of the three-wheelers as it tried to carry away a load of bricks from a recently-demolished section: