#头条创作游园会##秋日生活打卡季##寻找热爱表达的你#
On the first day of the National Day holiday,
Compared with the long queue at the popular attractions where people follow the crowd,
More and more people want to open up unpopular routes to avoid the flow of people,
Or develop a more humane in-depth tour.
A photographer who has visited several photographers who traveled to China to take pictures,
Here is the story of their exploration of the "gods" in the county, the wilderness grottoes, and the endangered species in Tibetan areas.
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, 10,000 likes
In 2019, photographer Cai Shanhai began
Walk around 2,800 counties one by one and travel around China to shoot.
At present, he has driven more than 40,000 kilometers,
Walked more than 300 villages,
Photograph the man who built a 9-story castle on a wasteland,
The cellar keeper in the cave, the mural restorer, the village keeper who is not seen......
They are like "walking fairies" who are leisurely and free,
Comfortable creating your own world.
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Yuan Rongsun, the "ascetic" of Chinese photography,
is a grotto photographer.
For 18 years, he has been alone, at his own expense of hundreds of thousands,
Traveled all over China's rivers,
Visit the cultural relics conservators who have been guarding the cultural relics for decades,
Looking for the statues of Buddhist caves left in the fields, barren mountains and mountains,
Tens of thousands of photos were taken, exquisite, rustic, and moving.
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Post-60s photographer Luo Hao,
In the past 14 years, at his own expense of 2 million,
Founded the Tibet Biodiversity Image Conservation Agency,
Walking the northern slopes of the Himalayas,
Led the team to take hundreds of thousands of photos of rare creatures,
Snap up more than 3,000 species that are about to go extinct,
Many plants and animals have been recorded in China for the first time.
Self-report: Cai Shanhai, Yuan Rongsun, Luo Hao
Editors: Jin Lu, Chen Qin
Editors: Ni Chujiao, Chen Ziwen
▲Cai Shanhai walked on the village road in Shanxi
Cai Shanhai is a county photographer
In 2019, I did a really long-term photography project, I wanted to go through all the counties in China, and use the method of "flat pushing", county by county, walking around and shooting, but it was not until this year that this project officially started.
From January 7 when I officially went out, until now, I have driven more than 40,000 kilometers and almost walked more than 300 villages.
On March 31 this year, I met the old man Fuqing on the way from Fanzhi County to Yanmen Pass in Dai County, and I didn't expect such a big attention at that time.
When I passed by his door, there was a loud sound of musical instruments inside, and I wanted to go in and have a look. A white event was being held in the courtyard, and when I was about to leave, I looked up and found a sentence written on the red beam: "Kashgar, Xinjiang will become a container transportation center on three continents in 2026, can I, Zhang Fuqing, have a chance to go and see it again?" Written in June 2023. ”
▲ The words written by the old man Fuqing on the wall of the courtyard: "How big is the universe? The surface temperature of the sun is 6000 degrees, and the center is 15 million degrees......"
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Left: "Planting time in the spring of 2024,...... Asking the two sons to go to Kashgar City, Xinjiang to find a way out after looking for themselves. ”
Right: The old man Fuqing left a note for his son to explain the future before his death
As soon as I turned around, there was an obvious sentence written on a brick: "How big is the universe?" "I was amazed at the time, but later I learned from the family of the deceased old man that the old man loved to write and wrote all over the yard.
I marveled at the vastness of his spiritual world. "How big is the universe" is also a question that I often think about. I was born in a county town in Zhenjiang, Jiangsu Province, and I have almost no friends except for taking pictures, and the only thing they talk about with me is what kind of business I can do this year, and I am thinking about having a second child next year. I want to go to the park, talk about plants, talk about the universe, but I can't find friends.
When I read the words written by the old man Fuqing, I can feel the resonance. I can imagine him bending over or climbing a ladder to write. At one point, we are all alone.
▲ Cai Shanhai's "Three Chapters of Leisure" series Hejin, Shanxi, a person swinging
▲ Cai Shanhai's "Walking Immortals" series left: the hermit who practiced under the Taihang Mountain right: the cellar keeper in the cave in Guangxi
Before Fuqing's post exploded, in fact, I had filmed a lot of such characters, and they all lived comfortably in the world they insisted on, adhered to their own rules of survival, and were not coerced by mainstream society.
I call them "Walking Immortals". Calling people who live in their own world "great immortals" is also a kind of self-deprecation, and because the process of finding these people requires a lot of walking, an average of 20,000 steps a day, which is a very laborious process.
Most of them I met by chance on the road. On the edge of a national highway in Baise, Guangxi, I met a cellar keeper guarding the cellar alone, and in the depths of the Taihang Mountain, I met a master in his 70s who could still practice martial arts, and a muralist who repaired the temple......
▲A group photo of Chen Tianming and the castle
Among the people I have photographed, perhaps the one I want to talk about the most is Chen Tianming. Since 2018, he has spent almost 6 years building a magical high-rise building on a wasteland like this beneath our feet.
I think he lives like a fairy, the second and third floors of this "castle" are used to raise pigeons, the fourth and fifth floors are his study and painting studio, the sixth floor is a bedroom, the eighth floor is placed with green plants, and the ninth floor is even more magical, with a big stereo, this is his own world.
▲The exterior and interior of the castle built by Chen Tianming
Standing at the location of the castle, the airport runway is 800 meters away. At that time, he said to me very casually: "I watch the planes rise and fall here every day." "I think it's a very romantic thing.
I took a lot of pictures of him with the castle, and the one I was most pleased with was the one with his head up, because it had the feeling of asking questions.
▲Cai Shanhai talked with local villagers and asked for directions
I first got into photography in 2014, when I was still working as a clerk in a factory. Across from my workstation is an uncle who is about 60 years old, and looking at him, it seems that I can see myself 30 years later.
I was only 23 years old at the time, and I was terrified of it. At the end of that year, I quit my job and took half a year's salary from the factory, 18,000 yuan, and a camera, and went on the first long-distance trip in my life.
In fact, if you open the map and zoom it out, you will find that the real urban area is so small on the map, maybe only about 1/10 of the place, the palm of the hand, and the rest of the places are all villages and towns, and the county seat is the most common place in China.
▲Cai Shanhai strolls in the village of Shanxi
Making money is a mountain, photography is a mountain, life is a mountain, and marriage is also a mountain.
I am free to choose which peaks to challenge, and maybe one day I will stop taking pictures and carry a bag to challenge the snow-capped mountains and the pristine rainforest. Going around China and taking pictures is the mountain I imagined in 2019 and I'm completing it now.
Yuan Rongsun is a grotto photographer
In 2006, I began to pay attention to Chinese grottoes and have been photographing them for 18 years.
I often drive alone, I have to go out once or twice a month, and my backpack weighs more than 50 pounds. There are places where there are grotto statues in China, and they are all visited, and there are more than 20 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions.
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Sichuan Anyue Lingyou Courtyard five generations of Thousand Buddha Rock
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Granny Wang, a clerk in Gouwang Village, Hongya County, Sichuan, and her sheep
Different from the tall and mighty northern grottoes, the Bashu grottoes are hidden deep in the mountains. If you step on the fallen leaves and walk in slowly, you are a Buddha; If you push the grass away, you can see a Bodhisattva. In the fields, barren mountains and mountains, sometimes the smallest Buddha shrine is the size of a palm.
The most charming place of the Bashu Grottoes is the fireworks in the world.
In the precipitous Hongyagou King Village, in addition to the statues of Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism, I have also seen the chicken god, the sheep god, the cow king, the horse king and other livestock and poultry gods. Another cliff statue is even more unique, even plasterers, pig killers, and bricklayers are among them.
Mortal beings, enshrined together with immortals, saints, Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, blend more secular images and themes, unlike the cultural relics in the wall, which are very rare. In the past, this aspect was largely ignored in the study of cave statues in China.
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Sichuan Zizhong Qinjiayan Southern Song Dynasty Buddha
But unfortunately, after more than 10 years of searching for the grottoes, very few can be completely preserved. There are both natural and man-made disasters, natural erosion caused by long-term wind and rain, as well as man-made destruction and rampant theft.
Fortunately, there is a group of unknown guardians around the grotto statue. Gradually, I was looking for not only the ancient grottoes, but also these venerable cave keepers, and my friendship with the clerks grew deeper and deeper.
In 2019, I did a topic selection of Bashu cave keepers in China National Geographic magazine, and introduced the stories of several cave keepers, which received a great response.
The people who guard the grotto are basically local villagers.
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Clerk Zeng Xiangyu has to lead the wolf dog every night to check the statue of the Northern Song Dynasty in Anyue Mingshan Temple
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Huang Tianjian, the guardian of the Taoist grottoes in the Tang Dynasty in Renshoutan, Sichuan
Like a national treasure-level cultural relics unit, it must not leave people 24 hours a day, and the clerk has to bring daily necessities, move to live next to the grotto, grow some vegetables in the field, guard the Buddha statue all day long, and live there.
Their salaries are actually quite small. In the early days, it was only 5 yuan a month, and it would take a few months or half a year to take a car to the county's administrative office to get it, and then slowly dozens or hundreds of yuan. In recent years, the state has paid more attention to the grotto cultural relics, and the wages have been greatly increased, and there are 1,200 cultural relics at the national treasure level, and sometimes 600 or 800 at the provincial level.
But with such a meager salary, how can young people be retained? So most of them are elderly cave guards. Many are husbands and wives, brothers, and fathers and sons, such as the father who kept it for decades, and after the father died, the son came to keep it again.
Over the years of photographing the grottoes, it was often painstaking to find them. Sometimes I finally find it, and I feel like I have to walk over quietly and quietly, slowly set up the tripod, shoot slowly, for fear of disturbing it.
I felt as if they were alive, as if they had been waiting for me for thousands of years.
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Destroyed the remnants of the transparent rock Tang Dynasty cliff statue in Yingshan County
There are also dangerous things, such as in 2012, in Transparent Rock, Yingshan County, Sichuan, there was an adventure blind shooting on the abyss.
On the stone wall of transparent rock, there were 104 niches and more than 1,600 statues in the grottoes of the middle and late Tang Dynasty, which were excavated in the canyon cliffs of the halfway up the mountainside, I went in a foggy morning, the dense grottoes were full of devastation, and many statues were almost bulldozed.
From the body of the Bodhisattva on the individual stone wall, the cloud shoulders and Yingluo on the body, as well as the Buddha tent pattern and honeysuckle pattern on the frieze of the shrine, it can still be seen how wonderful these Tang Dynasty statues were back then.
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Yuan Rongsun ventured to stand on the stone railing on the edge of the cliff to photograph the Buddha cave
But during the Cultural Revolution, more than 1,600 exquisite Tang Dynasty statues were destroyed, and the only one niche left was still relatively intact, with jewels, streamers, beads, and even colors still there, in fact, the reason why it is so well preserved is because it is too dangerous, at the highest point of the cliff.
I didn't think about anything, I felt that I had to take a picture, and the director of the county clerk's office, who was traveling with me, was worried about my safety and resolutely disagreed, I said, "This responsibility is not borne by you, I can live and die." ”
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The most complete Tang Dynasty statue niche in the transparent rock of the adventure blind photograph
I trembled and climbed the slippery guardrail, and I had to hold on to the cliff with both hands before I dared to look up, and I was in the mist and cold wind on the cliff, as if I was about to fall off the cliff at any time, and I am still afraid when I think about it.
In fact, all the statues in the shrine also have no heads, but the body is basically still there, but despite this, the stone blue, stone green, cinnabar and other mineral pigments on the statue exude a soft and beautiful luster, looking at it is still very excited, so I have to ignore the danger, let go of my hand from the cliff, take the camera handed over, and hold my breath can only take a few blind shots.
It was one of the most dangerous shoots I've ever experienced. Actually, it's okay, a fall, a car breaks down, a little skin is broken, that's all. I thought, maybe the Buddha is blessing me.
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Yuan Rongsun's hand-painted schematic diagram of the spread of Buddhist grottoes to China
I'm a native of Chengdu and I got my first camera in the early 80s. In the past, I worked as a propaganda designer in the army, and photography was just a hobby.
Before photographing the grottoes, I photographed a lot of Bashu Ancient Town. In the process of running to the countryside, I saw the grottoes scattered in the countryside of Bashu, and I thought it was very interesting, so I started shooting.
Last year's book, "Bashu Grottoes: Chinese Civilization Hidden in the Countryside" includes more than 600 photos, 37 grotto statues, and tells the stories of 50 cave keepers.
My search process is a bit like fieldwork, hoping to tell the story of ancient statues in the countryside in a more plain and understandable way. I believe that the grotto relics hidden deep in the countryside are also part of Chinese civilization.
Some people say that I have been walking all over the country alone for more than ten years, I am a contemporary Xuanzang, an ascetic (laughs), I don't dare to be, I just luckily did what I liked.
Luo Hao is a photographer and founder of the Tibet Biodiversity Image Conservation Organization (TBIC).
There is about one species of life in the world that goes extinct every 15 minutes, especially in Tibet, where the climate problem, altitude problem, and wind and sand problem make its ecology even more fragile.
In many people's minds, Tibet is blue sky, white clouds, temples, snow-capped mountains, and yaks. But in addition to these, there are actually a lot of "elves", and I hope that this microscopic biological world will be seen by more people.
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Lulang alpine meadow pasture
In 2010, I established the Tibet Biodiversity Image Conservation Organization (TBIC), which is purely non-governmental and has been doing this for 12 years. By pulling sponsorship, I also put money into it, and if I count it as one or two million, it is also a drop in the bucket.
I invited professional scholars, recruited ecological photographers and volunteers, and led the team, basically traveled to the entire northern slope of the Himalayas over the years, took more than 300,000 photos, and published 11 popular science books.
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lynx
Why do biodiversity image conservation in Tibet? It's a bit of chicken soup to say "love", but this kind of love is rooted in my heart, because I grew up in this land, it's like helping my family to touch the bottom of my family, what is there in my family?
Southeast Tibet, western Yunnan, and western Sichuan are the most biodiverse regions in the world, not one of them. Nanga Bhava Peak is 7,782 meters, from the summit to the water level, there is a drop of 5,700 meters, in between, there are primeval forests, secondary forests, alpine meadows, flowstone beaches, snow lines, and the biodiversity of the entire Himalayas is very rich.
The rare species here is a rare "rare".
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Tower Yellow
My goal is the "Circum-Himalayan Biodiversity" survey, which I haven't done to date, it's actually been 14 years.
The entire Tibetan biodiversity survey began in the winter of 2010.
We followed the northern slope of the Himalayas, starting from the Grand Canyon of the Brahmaputra River, from east to west, in fact, the original plan was to do it twice a year, such as plants, insects, birds, in the summer. Beasts and birds, do it in winter. But because of the high altitude, funding and other problems, by 2018, we had done a total of 8 surveys.
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The head flower is a solitary dish
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Artemisia sylvestris
The northern slope of the Himalayas in our country, we have done 90%, involving the southern slope of the Himalayas, Nepal, Bhutan, India, Pakistan have to be counted, it is a huge project.
The contents of the survey include mammals, plants, insects, reptiles, birds, birds and underwater life.
In the early stage, it must be a lot of reading materials to make a plan and do enough desk work. To plan the route, how to be more economical and time-saving. Once the budget is done, it's mostly my business: finding money.
The time of each survey is a month at most, and the prices in Tibet are also quite high now, dozens of people eat, drink, and live in Lasa, and the cost is not a lot, so we try to be as precise as possible, for example, in one place, how many days to shoot, and which important creatures to photograph, we have to plan in advance.
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Black-necked crane
Some cute animals, such as wild asses, white-lipped deer, Tibetan antelope, Tibetan antelope, and black-necked cranes, are actually more abundant in our eyes, and we pay more attention to more rare and more extinct creatures.
Like the black-necked crane, we can see almost every time we go to investigate, it has a nature: monogamy, and it is lifelong. In the summer, you can also meet its hatched cubs, and the couple takes the cubs to the wetland to forage for food. When they are older, they will fly and exercise in the sky with their little black-necked cranes. In winter, they will be on their migrate.
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Prickly green velvet
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Artemisia velvet is a new record of Chinese images
I would like to introduce it again, at the beginning of the last century, botanists in United Kingdom discovered it, and it became a star species at that time, because it is of the poppy family, it grows particularly brightly and beautifully, and survives at an altitude of about 3000-4500 meters.
In the early years, the common people would go to pick green velvet artemisia, dry it, and sell it to the Tibetan medicine factory, only 7 or 8 yuan a catty, I felt that it was a pity, you might be extinct if you picked it like this, so I tried to find a way to print the green velvet artemisia photographed into a poster and give it to the people.
In 2018, we did our last survey before the pandemic, the "Top of the World" Everest Survey.
It was originally planned to be done in 2015, and two or three months before the survey was prepared, an 8.1 magnitude earthquake occurred in Nepal, and Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, was very close to the Tibetan border, so we were going to Jilonggou, Yadonggou, Zhangmugou, and Chentanggou, which were very affected, and we had to cancel the trip, and this postponement was 3 years.
During the time when we were doing the survey, it happened to be the rainy season of Mount Everest, and there was no sunny day for three consecutive days, and on the morning of the fourth day, we pulled out the camp and prepared to leave, I remembered that there was a big bend in the Rongbu Temple, and when I turned out, I basically couldn't see Mount Everest, and I felt very sorry in my heart.
I also habitually looked at the rearview mirror, "Eh, why did that cloud in the sky of Mount Everest open a skylight?" ”
As soon as the brakes stopped, I shouted over the walkie-talkie, "Turn around, maybe there's a show today." ”
In less than an hour, the tip of Mount Everest was revealed, and we were so excited that we took turns shooting, the camera took it, the mobile phone took it, and after the shooting, we had to make sure that the camera and the mobile phone were fine.
Suddenly, I felt very uncomfortable in my heart, so I ran down the hill, and as soon as I opened the car door, my tears were already pouring down my face, and with a bang, the person collapsed. Maybe it's the favor of God, and we basically shoot everything we want to photograph.
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Bear monkey Tibetan subspecies
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Brown-tailed red pheasant
I'm not afraid of aging, I think the human body is just a skin. The reason why I'm not afraid of being old is that I toss a lot of things, you see I'm almost 60 years old, and I still toss a motorcycle to ride around, not losing to young people.
Speaking of which, in the past 14 years, there have been no less than 5 times when I wanted to give up. But when you shoot what you want to shoot, when the results come out, you walk on the podium and share the results with young people, that moment makes you grit your teeth and persevere.
Will there be 10 people who want to study this major when they grow up? Will there be five people who will become experts or heads of environmental protection agencies in the future, and take action to protect these rare creatures?
I think this is something that can definitely be passed on and sustained, and it is the meaning. I think it's worth it to have such a good thing to pass on.
(Excerpted from a WeChat public account)