"All I knew of the Middle Kingdom I had gleaned here and there in various history books and tourist guides. I found myself facing a country full of contrasts, heir of millennial imperial history, ready to turn the painful page of a stifling totalitarianism.

I was rapidly confused when I realised that all the prejudice which I had in mind was just cliché. Besides the Forbidden City's splendours and the misery of the working-class districts, a sprawling capital was frenetically trying to match the world economic standards, regardless of any social or environmental logics.

I was far from running out of surprises for, far from Beijing's glass tower and chaotic traffic, many provincial cities, covered by a thick layer of coal, seemed to still live in the old days of communism and planned economy, like paralysed in the ignorance of the social and economic changes taking place in the rest of the country.

There were even more surprises in the countryside, with its archaic lifestyle, in comparison with our development standards, with the villages deserted by their inhabitants, marks of a dramatic rural exodus.

Nevertheless, in each city, in every village, beyond the changes on the move - sometimes brutal and unwanted – I frequently met people who lived simply, repeating ancestral gestures, celebrating the same age-old customs."

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"Beyond the impressions collected during my previous Chinese trips, I was left hanging. How could it be else faced with this country, as big as continent, which many lives in a row would not suffice to make discover, all the more so in these times of major upheavals?

I made up my mind and went in search of the Chinese section of the Silk Road, the mythical Silk Road, fantasized millennial route of commercial and cultural exchange.

From Beijing, which I had left five years before, a prey to an anarchical metamorphosis, often to the detriment of its identity's survival, I headed to that far west, skimming the northernmost bounds of the former Tibetan kingdom, along the edge of the Gobi Desert.

Central Asian China, like so many marches of the former Middle Kingdom, is racked by a forced modernization, following a model more inflicted than chosen. When I entered it, I was enthralled by the pride of those Muslim peoples, heirs of a culture where the ancestral nomadism still prevails, hurt by the war on terrorism, which is too often a pretext for a blind 'normalisation'."

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Far from the wealthy Eastern and Southern megalopolises, practically isolated from the rest of the country by its uneven terrain, which somewhat kept it away from development, Guizhou appears like old-time China.

Relatively safe from modernity the province houses numerous ethnic minorities (Dong, Miao, Bouyei…). As custodians of ancestral customs, they still earn their living from rice-growing and farming. Sadly, their beautiful villages with small wood houses are increasingly threatened by the invasive and seldom respectful domestic tourism.

Known as the Eastern Venice, the former river port of Zhenyuan, a two thousand year history rich city, sprawls along the banks of the quiet river Wuyang.

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Close to the cold of the Himalayan peaks in the North, Yunnan shows itself completely different when going to the South. The nickname of its capital, Kunming, "the City of Eternal Spring", speaks for itself.

Away from the magnificent but overtouristed Lijiang many preserved villages show Yunnan's genuine face. Like Shaxi, a former stopover on the Ancient Tea Horse Road, as well as Xizhou and Wase, located on the lake Erhai's banks, or Azheke, at the heart of Yuanyang's terraced rice fields.

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Yuanyang area's terraced rice fields are such a bewitching, enchanting, spectacular sight! Leaning against mountains dropping down to some 2,000 meters, they were built by the Hani ethnic minority. In the course of countless generations they developed an unequalled savoir-faire in terms of land use and irrigation.

Though listed as a UNESCO Heritage Site these rice fields are unfortunately in jeopardy, due to the lack of workforce to maintain them, the younger generations longing for better life perspectives than their elders.

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A mirrored view in black and white of an outlying China, which one might think immutable, nevertheless fragile and whose days are probably numbered.

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