Welcome to the August 18, 2009 edition of china carnival. We have 6 articles this time. That’s a record high, yeah!
Katie Sorene presents Travel China Like a Pro: 7 Tips from Expert Travelers posted at Travel Blog – Tripbase, saying, “China holds a fascinating allure for adventurers all over the world. But exploring China can be daunting. Get the inside track with these top tips from expert travelers.”

Flickr has a huge stock of “China” photos. Flickr has provided a very smart rating system for image quality and popularity; and its huge community also help “favor” and “group” out the best images.

There are probably thousands of “China” related Flickr groups. Here, I selected 10 of them as my favorite “China” groups. With the help of diligent members of these groups, we will see the “stunning” side of China.

Tibetan Plateau, “Roof of the World” “the Third Pole”, is one of the most remote regions in the world. Given its extreme altitude (4,000-5000 meters or above), not every tourist is physically suitable to go traveling in Tibet. For the same reason, not many good photographers have fully presented its beauty to the world. An enthusiastic traveler from the Netherlands, also a great photographer on Flickr, Jan Reurink, has traveled in Tibet extensively (for at least three times, I guess) and brought us a great collection of eye-catching images of the Mysterious Tibet:

This music is my favorite piece among the “Top 10 Chinese Classic Music” (the 6th one). In 2008, this music was used in the Opening Ceremony of Beijing 2008 Olympic games.
since 1925, this music is renamed as “A Moonlit Night on the Spring River”, which is the name of a poem from Tang Dynasty by Zhang Ruoxu. Unlike infamous poets such as Li Bai, who had written thousands of good poems, Zhang Ruoxu has only two poems documented. However, one is enough, he does not need many.

Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in northwestern China is a vast territory inhiabitated by several ethnic groups. Xinjiang has a continental climate, “the farthest region to the ocean”, the temperature changes dramaticaly between day and night, known as “fur coat in the morning, yarn at noon; have watermelon close to the stove at night.” In addition, 7 of 13 resident ethnic groups in Xinjiang are Muslims. So the architecture here is deeply influenced by Islamic culture and has its unique regional and ethnic characteristics.