Winding between Zhangjiajie's peaks, crystal clear mountain streams are home to what is perhaps China's strangest creature. This bizarre animal is a type of newt, the Chinese giant salamander. In China, it is known as the baby fish because when distr...
Geng's net is a strange tubular contraption with a closed-off end. More than a hundred fishermen make their living from the lake. Its mineral-rich waters are highly productive and there are nets everywhere. The next morning, Geng returns with his son...
If catching fish in the dark is impressive, imagine eating a slippery minnow with no hands while hanging upside down. Dawn, over the karst hills of Guilin. These remarkable hills owe their peculiar shapes to the mildly acid waters of the Li River, wh...
As well as the school, the cave houses eighteen families, together with their livestock. These could be the only cave-dwelling cows on earth. With schoolwork over, its playtime at last. In Southern China, caves arent just used for shelter; they can b...
Young infants have a vicelike grip, used to cling on to mom for dear life. As they get older, they get bolder and take more risks. Those that survive spend a lot of time traveling, yet experienced adults know exactly where to find seasonal foods in d...
The cave rivers course is channeled by the beds of limestone. A weakness in the rock can allow the river to increase its gradient to flow in, providing a real challenge for the cave explorers. The downward rushes halted when the water table is reache...
But their attitude changed when the head of the village fell ill. They blamed the birds and were all set to destroy their nests, but the local government stepped in to protect them. Bendy bamboo may not be the safest nesting place, but at least this...
The ideal date depends on what the weather will do this year, never easy to predict. But there is some surprising help at hand. On the ceiling of the Songs' living room, a pair of red-rumped swallows newly arrived from their winter migration is busy...
It has transformed the landscape. Late winter in southern Yunnan is a busy time for local farmers as they prepare the age-old paddy fields ready for the coming spring. These hill slopes of Yunyang county plunge nearly 2,000 meters to the floor of the...
The last hidden world---China. For centuries, travelers to China have told tales of magical landscapes and surprising creatures. Chinese civilization is the worlds oldest. And today, its largest, with well over a billion people. Its home to more than...
Such mysterious cargos, such magic marbles from across the empire, now sailed the seas and came to the holy city of Byzantium to be gathered up upon the site of the imperial communion. This is the finished dream, the tense climax of all of ancient en...
Squares become circles, circles octagons, and all around a single central point. Space spins into ever smaller spaces. It's as perfectly mysterious as the finest natural crystal. The walls, the columns, seem to be nothing more than an illusion, and s...
Each man stands inside his own mysterious inner space, for each one of them was occupied. And from that space they look outwards, from the soul towards the heavens. As you might expect, if you should move around them, solid bulk of marble in the huma...
The man there is Justinian, the emperor who 200 years after Constantine completely remade the Roman Empire, the man who made Byzantium. He was a man, they said, who was gentle and approachable, a man who never showed his anger, a man who in the quiet...
But Simon was a nutter. Simon had tremendous presence like an emperor. He sat still and silent, and in his contest between flesh and the devil, it seemed to most people, that he was beyond touch. And there he was, on his pillar, half way between heav...
