Sichuan Province

"China's Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province," which premieres on HBO tonight, is a heartbreaking example of what can only be called "Testimonial Television." Almost a year after an earthquake in central China killed an estimated 70,000 people -- 10,000 of them children -- there is nothing to find among the rubble except sorrow and rage.

If pandas weren't so darn cute, we wouldn't be up in the clouds at the edge of a mountain ravine slick with moss and mud, clinging for life to shoots of bamboo. And get this: There is almost zero chance that we'll actually see a panda. We keep our eyes on the ground, not just to keep from falling, but because the best we can hope for is to discover panda droppings (and even the chances of that aren't so hot). "To be honest, I've been working in these mountains for 20 years and I've never seen a panda in the wild," says Dai Bo, 43, a wildlife biologist with China's Forestry Ministry who's wearing a camouflage jacket and hiking boots and has a zoom-lens Canon around his neck, just in case.

Take-out Chinese food is common around the world. But only in China's Sichuan Province do you find take-out Chinese chefs. The export trade in chefs is the responsibility of Chen Kehao, 42, a well-fed official who specializes in sending Sichuan chefs to restaurants around the globe, wherever there is a demand for the 20-centuries-old peppery fare from southwestern China.

Shopkeepers peer out from storefronts festooned with traditional Tibetan prayer flags at platoons of armed police, some carrying an unusual addition to their riot regalia: fire extinguishers. A string of self-immolations by young Buddhist monks in Sichuan province is unnerving the Chinese government and giving a new, more radical momentum to the Tibetan protest movement. On Monday, the ninth young Tibetan — and the first woman — killed herself in the small town of Aba by self-immolation in a protest against Chinese rule.

I knelt down beside fried dough twists, jasmine tea and a bowl of candies. The Tibetans watched me closely. As instructed, I used my thumbnail to scoop yak butter from the oiled wood tub and drop the yellow, waxy gobs into my tea. Yak butter tea is a staple for Tibetan nomads and an honor for distinguished guests. I did not consider myself distinguished, just one of the first foreigners to visit the Tibetan Highlands area of China in almost 25 years. Boojum Expeditions of San Diego had negotiated for two years to get permission from the People's Republic of China to explore northwestern Sichuan Province on horseback.

Like many mothers, Li Shubing despaired over her inability to control her teenage son. The 14-year-old often stayed out all night playing games in an Internet cafe. He neglected his studies. So when she learned of summer camp in rural Sichuan province that was promising to cure Internet addiction, she enrolled her son for a one-month course at $715. No matter that the camp boasted extreme methods -- "suffering can help a person improve," read one of the advertisements -- Li thought a little discipline would be just the ticket to whip her son into shape.

A 30-minute hailstorm killed at least 45 people and injured about 120 in a southwestern China city Thursday, New China News Agency reported. The storm in Luzhou, Sichuan province, damaged houses, cut water and power supplies and telephone lines. It also uprooted trees.

Hailstorms that battered wide areas of southwest Sichuan province over a 10-day period killed 157 people and injured 6,000, the newspaper China Daily said Wednesday. The storms, which hit 105 of the province's 175 counties from April 20 through last week, also destroyed 170,000 houses, the English-language newspaper said. Earlier reports had put the death toll from the storms at 87.

If pandas weren't so darn cute, we wouldn't be up in the clouds at the edge of a mountain ravine slick with moss and mud, clinging for life to shoots of bamboo. And get this: There is almost zero chance that we'll actually see a panda. We keep our eyes on the ground, not just to keep from falling, but because the best we can hope for is to discover panda droppings (and even the chances of that aren't so hot). "To be honest, I've been working in these mountains for 20 years and I've never seen a panda in the wild," says Dai Bo, 43, a wildlife biologist with China's Forestry Ministry who's wearing a camouflage jacket and hiking boots and has a zoom-lens Canon around his neck, just in case.

WHY look for a company when you can assemble your own tour group? That's what Albert Huen and about 20 friends did for a trip last month to China. The two-week journey took them through regions that Western tourists don't visit frequently, including the Jiuzhaigou and Huanglong valleys in Sichuan province. It was when traveling between these two scenic spots that Huen, a retired physicist from Camarillo, took this picture with his Canon EOS 10D. It was about 6:30 a.m.

Chinese authorities struggled to restore order Monday after migrant workers, angry over the manhandling of a pregnant vendor, overturned police cars, smashed windows and set fires near the southern manufacturing hub of Guangzhou. It began as a run-of-the mill altercation Friday night when city authorities tried to clear the migrants, who are from Sichuan province, as they hawked produce in front of a supermarket in Zengcheng, on the outskirts of Guangzhou. But the ferocity of the rioting over the weekend exposed the fragility of social order in the nation.

Protests by Tibetan students over plans to elevate Chinese to the main language of instruction in western China schools spread Friday to Beijing, where students at a minority university staged a rare public demonstration. Earlier in the week, as many as 9,000 people protested in Tibetan communities in Qinghai and Sichuan provinces with banners reading "Equality for minorities; equality for languages. " The protests were set off by plans of education officials in Qinghai to use only Chinese-language teaching materials except for language lessons in Tibetan and English.

Like many mothers, Li Shubing despaired over her inability to control her teenage son. The 14-year-old often stayed out all night playing games in an Internet cafe. He neglected his studies. So when she learned of summer camp in rural Sichuan province that was promising to cure Internet addiction, she enrolled her son for a one-month course at $715. No matter that the camp boasted extreme methods -- "suffering can help a person improve," read one of the advertisements -- Li thought a little discipline would be just the ticket to whip her son into shape.

"China's Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province," which premieres on HBO tonight, is a heartbreaking example of what can only be called "Testimonial Television." Almost a year after an earthquake in central China killed an estimated 70,000 people -- 10,000 of them children -- there is nothing to find among the rubble except sorrow and rage.

In the 11 months since China's devastating earthquake, Wang Tingzhang and his wife have been transformed from docile, law-abiding citizens into defiant troublemakers, at least in the eyes of authorities. Along the way, they've been pushed, punched, wiretapped, tailed and detained. Their offense? Asking too many questions about what happened to their only child, an 18-year-old girl who was buried under the rubble of her high school in the May 12 earthquake here in Sichuan province.

The most famous refugees from last month's earthquake in Sichuan province lounge on their backs chewing long stalks of bamboo. Like bored celebrities, they shrug off the camera flashes on the other side of glass and the endless repetition of "Na'me ke'ai!" -- so cute! The eight young pandas at the Beijing Zoo were evacuated from the Wolong Nature Reserve, the world's largest panda breeding center, after the May 12 earthquake that killed 70,000 people and left about 5 million homeless.

About 100 giant pandas threatened with starvation in China's largest nature reserve will be taken 450 miles to a new mountain home where there is plenty of bamboo to eat, the official People's Daily newspaper said Tuesday. The People's Daily said the pandas will be taken from the Wolong Nature Reserve in Sichuan province to Shennongjia in Hubei province, about 450 miles to the east, where the climate is similar.

China announced Saturday that a Chinese-American resident of Los Angeles has been convicted of spying for Taiwan's Nationalist government in an operation it said was directed by a University of California professor. According to the New China News Agency, Roland Shensu Loo, 67, an American citizen, was sentenced to 12 years in prison for collecting "a large amount of intelligence" while he was in China in 1984 and 1985.

On Nov. 9, this message was inscribed in the visitors book of a restaurant in the remote southern Chinese village of Litang: "Great food and people.... The mountains around Yading are awesome. Countryside reminds us of home. We'll be back. -- Chris Boskoff and Charlie Fowler, Norwood, Colorado, US." Those are the last words that two of America's most prominent mountain climbers are known to have written. Since Dec. 18, search teams have been hunting for Boskoff and Fowler.

WHY look for a company when you can assemble your own tour group? That's what Albert Huen and about 20 friends did for a trip last month to China. The two-week journey took them through regions that Western tourists don't visit frequently, including the Jiuzhaigou and Huanglong valleys in Sichuan province. It was when traveling between these two scenic spots that Huen, a retired physicist from Camarillo, took this picture with his Canon EOS 10D. It was about 6:30 a.m.