A different view of China.

The crater fell in, filled with water, and the surface now sits at two thousand metres inside sixteen stone peaks.

The glacier on the east face of Gongga comes down to 2,800 metres and ends inside the fir forest.

Granite cut by water into columns, and pines growing in the cracks.

The ice tongue comes down from the snow line and stops inside the forest, above a lake of grey water.

A 1,500-metre mass of stone at the edge of the North China Plain, with more than six thousand steps from the foot to the top.

Two metres of snow in a winter, roofs pressed into rounded edges, chimneys showing nothing but a hole.

Three snow peaks of about six thousand metres stand in a triangle, with meadow and moraine lakes below.

Stone columns stand one after another along the valley floor, and trees still grow on top of them.

Tufa has stepped this stream into a hundred ledges, and the water on each one reads deeper in colour than the one above.

The lake is too wide to see across, the water is salt, and the one fish in it has to swim up a river once a year.

The tide goes out twice a day and leaves kilometres of seabed, with bamboo poles standing in the mud.

Dunes stand four and five hundred metres high, and more than a hundred lakes sit between them, reeds at the edge.

The Kaidu moves sideways across the basin, bend after bend, and the grass at its edge stays wet.

The Greater Khingan takes the last of the moisture, the grass grows to the knee, and the river doubles back across it.

Sand hills close around a pool of water, and the wind carries sand up the slope instead of into it.

Red conglomerate lifted up, then cut apart along its joints by water, leaving flat-topped walls and pillars.

This cliff is what a cave roof left behind. The fissure at the bottom is the same cave, still falling in.

The river drops sixty-eight steps in a kilometre and a half, and the trees stand on stone in the water.

The Jinsha squeezes between two five-thousand-metre mountains, and at its narrowest the river is thirty metres across.

Lava dammed a river into five lengths. The stone is black and the lakes come in a chain.

The red is iron in the rock. The beds were lifted, then planed off, and the tilted stripes now show on the slope.

Snowmelt enters the town, splits into three, then into more, and passes every door.

Water comes off the summit and steps down, one level at a time, across the whole face of the mountain.

Caves cut into the cliff of a seasonal river: painted inside, and kept by darkness and drought.

Six kilometres of wall around a county town where, in the Qing, silver was counted and never carried.

More than three thousand flooded terraces on one slope, from below the ridge to the valley floor.

Forty-five caves cut into a kilometre of sandstone, and the Buddha's face changed from an imported one to a local one.