China Vimeos

I've read a few different times that vimeo.com is a much more "artist-friendly" video sharing website than YouTube. I assume that has to do with revenue sharing and the legal protections the video site provides. I know that I've found Vimeo videos to be uniformly excellent.

Below are a few China Vimeo videos that friends either sent to me or I found through Bill Bishop's Sinocism newsletter. They're all worth a view.

The first is a beautiful big-city time-lapse video montage from three of the largest cities in China - Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Shanghai (h/t to my friend, Donnie):


Guangzhou'2012/CHINA from zweizwei |motion timelapse| on Vimeo.

The second is surreal skateboarding in the empty ghost town of Ordos (h/t to @niubi, aka Bill Bishop):



ORDOS from Charles Lanceplaine on Vimeo.

The third is a quick two minute clip of the making of Crocs-like shoes (h/t to my friend, Timo):



Factory Video from Native Shoes on Vimeo.

And the fourth is a video about environmental activism in Yunnan Province from Jonah Kessel (h/t to @niubi, aka Bill Bishop):



HOPEFUL from Jonah Kessel on Vimeo.

Please feel free to send me any great China short videos you find on the internet. Especially if they're hipster Vimeo videos.

1978 National Geographic - China's Incredible Find

Qian and I went to an estate sale in our neighborhood yesterday. Qian saw an old box full of National Geographic magazines on sale for $5.00 and began thumbing through them. Once she saw the third issue in the pile, she called me over.

This is what she saw:



Knowing how big of a China nerd I am, she guessed correctly that this vintage account of China's terra cotta warrior discovery is something I'd want.

The terra cotta warriors were discovered an hour east of Xi'an in 1974. This 1978 National Geographic account highlights the initial progress that the Chinese were making with the discovery and gives the basic history of the warriors. It's a very interesting read. It's definitely worth the $.50 we paid for it.

I spent a few minutes this morning scanning all twenty pages of the story. My scans aren't that great and I'm not sure the best way to display these images on the confined spaces of this blog. I put together a collage of the story below anyways. I think they're worth posting as is: