Songyang’s Once Young: Portraits From a Forgotten Countryside

It is well known at this point that many of China’s best kept secrets lie in the countryside. Beyond the skyscrapers and metro systems of the country’s bustling urban centers exists a parallel world of farm and furrow where the tempo of life is dictated by the metronome of the seasons rather than the corporate schedule of industry.

For visitors, domestic and foreign alike, escaping China’s cities to access the rural experience has increasingly become the objective of traveling in the country, akin to journeying back in time to a version of the Middle Kingdom unchanged for millennia, whose agricultural rhythms form the primordial bedrock on which Chinese culture and society today is built.