Welcome to the most polluted city in the world.  As can be seen here, Lanzhou - the capital of Gansu Province - has well earned its dubious distinction.

Stretched out along the Yellow River (which, like the air here, is heavily polluted), Lanzhou was once an important stop along the Silk Road.  The region has thousands of years of history behind it, and parts of the Great Wall lie about 150 miles north of the city.  However, much of that history is now gone; the city underwent massive expansion and industrialization over the past half-century, and the population exploded to nearly three million people.  This structure, not a temple despite its appearance, sits on a hill north of the river in the western part of the city.

The city does have a few historic sites - the White Pagoda Temple, the displays at the Gansu Provincial Museum - but with Lanzhou little more than an overnight stop for our westward-traveling crew, I did not get to see them.  What I did see was this guy at Xihu Park, on the south bank of the muddy Yellow River.

He happened to be offering a very unusual service.  For a nominal price, he and his colleagues would float passengers a short distance down the Yellow River - on a raft made of inflated sheep skins.  Apparently this form of transportation goes back two thousand years.  It was an intriguing enough prospect for these folks to try it out.  They made it back safely moments later, brought upriver by a speedboat.

The Statue of Mother Yellow River, a modern sculpture in Xihu Park.  In China, the Yellow River is also called the Mother River, because so much of Chinese civilization was born alongside it.  On the far left in the distance is a mosque, one of over two dozen in the city of Lanzhou.  A hundred thousand Muslims live here, a reminder that this city was along the Silk Road and remains a major transportation hub for the western reaches of China and beyond.

Chinese opera singing and playing in Xihu Park, an activity that takes place every day in parks throughout China.

This day’s drive, from Lanzhou to Xining, in Qinghai Province, was the shortest in our long journey from Beijing to Lhasa - just two hours.  Still, it had some of the best roadside scenery of the trip so far.

One of the prettier agricultural fields along the trip to Xining.  On the lower left, a farmer; on the lower right, haystacks.

This page starts, and ends, with pollution.  Having spent a lot of time in China, I knew that pollution was a serious problem in its cities - a vast majority of the world’s most polluted cities are in China.  What I did not realize until this trip was the severity of air pollution in China’s countryside.  Factories in the middle of nowhere, like this one, seemed to dot every valley we traversed to this point.  Our group had driven halfway across China, and not a day had passed where the sky was not filled with smog at some point - leading me to think that perhaps the reason the Chinese flag has five stars on it is because in the China night sky, that’s the most that can be seen.