#John Stanmeyer

[pplndplcs]

A Hasidic Jewish man in Ukraine immerses himself before Rosh Hashanah in a quarry pool that serves as a mikvah, a body of water used for spiritual cleansing.

John Stanmeyer

[rjzimmerman]

A National Geographic 2024 Picture of the Year:

A CENTURIES-OLD LOVE SONG. Springfield, Illinois. Periodical cicadas spend 13 or 17 years in the ground, emerging only to reproduce. Last May and June, for the first time in 221 years, brood XIII, with a 17-year cycle, and brood XIX, with a 13-year cycle, emerged simultaneously in the Midwest and southeastern United States, respectively, filling the air with vibrations as they called out to mate. Photograph by JOHN STANMEYER

[xtruss]

Centuries-old cypresses, planted by royal decree, still line miles of the Shu Roads in the lush hills of northern Sichuan. The roads were built about the same time as the Romans built the Appian Way. Photograph By Paul Salopek

​This Ancient Marvel Rivaled Rome’s Intricate Network of Roads

​Remnant slabs of stone laid more than 2,000 years ago pave forgotten trade and military byways across the mountains that divide northern and southern China.

— By Paul Salopek | Aril 21, 2023

Sword Gate Pass, Sichuan Provence, China“Over there!”

Discovery: For a decade, National Geographic Explorer Paul Salopek (Pictured above) has been walking the routes of human civilization worldwide. Now in China, he has stumbled upon remnants of an ancient network of roads. “They unspool like gigantic question marks over miles of jagged landscape,” he writes. Photograph By John Stanmeyer, National Geographic Image Collection

It is my walking partner Li Huipu. Li points to a line of cypresses near a highway that booms with the inescapable red cargo trucks of China. (All of modern China is a construction site.) A few miles farther on, she peers down from a concrete bridge into a steep, rainy mountain gorge. “It’s down there!” she calls out again. “See it?” She is a resourceful hunter. She a woman of Shu.

We are stalking the old Shu Roads.

What are Shu Roads—the Shǔdào?

They are squared slabs of stone—of slate? of granite?—about the size of small tabletops. Placed by hand in times long past, and numbering perhaps in the millions, they pave forgotten byways that cross the mountains dividing northern from southern China. Antique but sturdy paths. They unspool like gigantic question marks over miles of jagged landscape. They start and stop and fade into shadowed forests. Time machines. Broken mazes plied by phantoms. Sparse and solitary and moving. We try to walk them, Li and I, through the uplands of Sichuan Province.

In this way, we hopscotch through centuries. We skip between the chaos of the Warring States Period in Chinese history, circa the fourth-century B.C., and the distractions of the dynasty of TikTok.

Builders of the Shu Roads in Shaanxi Province confronted jagged obstacles such as Mount Hua Shan. Photograph By Tao Ming, Xinhua/Getty Images

The laying of the Shu Roads began when the Romans built the Appian Way—some 2,300 years ago—and for the same purposes: military control and trade. The vast Eastern Zhou empire was cracking apart. A subject kingdom called Qin, occupying much of modern-day Shaanxi Province, rose to power. It pushed new roads across the 12,000-foot Qin Mountains to attack a wealthy southern rival—the kingdom of Shu—centered in today’s Sichuan. Rich in salt, silk and iron, Shu expanded its own roads to better defend its mountain frontiers. But Shu lost in 316 B.C. And all these stone-paved roads, improved with post offices and caravan stops, became arteries of imperial integration. This was when China’s center of gravity lay in the highlands of the west, and not (as today) in the hot, low plains and cities of the east.

A hundred generations of traders commuted along the Shu Roads. They pushed “wooden oxen”—wheelbarrows. Armies fitted in leather armor marched atop the branching network of flagstones. Sometimes, they torched wooden sections of the road—miles of extraordinary plank walkways suspended from canyon walls—as they retreated. Farmers hustled their goods along the roads. (One segment was called the Lychee Road, dedicated to a royal concubine’s fondness of the fruit.) Poets and sages walked the roads. So did deposed kings, refugees, addled foreigners, and elderly farm women tacking against gravity under bundles of firewood. (A few last of these still walk the trails today.) In China’s relict wild mountains, giant pandas, red pandas, gnu-like takin, and six-foot salamanders also prowl the Shu Roads. Today these weedy paths go mostly nowhere.

A reconstruction of plank roads—an engineering feat more than two millennia old—hangs above Mingyue Gorge, in Sichuan Province.​ Photograph By Paul Salopek

We Start Our Trek in Li’s hometown, Chengdu, the ancient capital of Shu and the southern pole of the Shu Roads. Today it is a megalopolis of 16 million set in the lush Sichuan Basin. (This agricultural zone is exalted in classical Chinese literature as Tiānfǔ zhi Guó—the "Country of Heaven.") Li walks me by her childhood apartment. By her primary school. (“It’s much smaller than I remember.”) By the first McDonald’s in her neighborhood. She points out newer layers of Chinese franchises including Mixue Bincheng, a low-market bubble tea outlet launched with a $438 loan from the founder’s grandmother and now a billion-dollar company whose mascot, a rotund snowman, sings “I love you, you love me, Mixue Bincheng sweety!” to the public domain melody of “Oh! Susannah,” the minstrel song composed by Pennsylvanian Stephen Collins Foster in 1848.

Left: Eighth-century poet Du Fu spent years wandering the Shu Roads. Illustration Via Pictures From History, Bridgeman Images Right: Map

The Shu Roads welded north to south China. They also became tangents of longing. They delivered art. In the eighth century, Du Fu, a titan of the gilded age of Chinese classical poetry, survived on boiled tree leaves in a hut in Chengdu. Exhausted from escaping rebellions, constant joblessness, and years of itinerant wanderings along pitiless Shu Roads, Du Fu mocked his so-called-poet’s life:

Far from the market, my food has little taste,

My poor home can offer only stale and cloudy wine.

Consent to have a drink with my elderly neighbour,

At the fence I'll call him, then we'll finish it off.

His contemporary, the traveling bard Li Bai, lamented his journey into exile along the slippery roads up the Qinglin Mountains:

The Shu Road is as perilous and difficult as the way to the Green Heavens.

The ruddy faces of those who hear the story of it turn pale.

There is not a cubit's space between the mountain tops and the sky.

In Chengdu, the Shu Roads dream mutely under asphalt. Li and I hike toward their northern terminus some 400 miles away, to Xi’an, the capital of Shaanxi Province.

— Tracing 2,000-year-old byways through rugged terrain in western China.

Near Minyang we cross the ghostly path of a British traveler in a long Manchurian dress.

Sometimes Isabella Bird walked. Sometimes Bird rode a chair hauled by laborers who cushioned their aches with opium.

“A thousand years ago it must have been a noble work,” the British traveler wrote of a still-bustling Shu Road in The Yangtze Valley and Beyond, a record of her travels in western China in 1897. “It is nominally sixteen feet wide, the actual flagged roadway measuring eight feet. The bridges are built solidly of stone. The ascents and descents are made by stone stairs. More than a millennium ago an emperor planted cedars at measured distances on both sides, the beautiful red-stemmed, weeping cedar of the province . . . Each tree bears the imperial seal and the district magistrates count them annually.”

They still do.

To locate old Shu Roads, Li and I seek out colonnades of big trees linking village guesthouses and gritty truck stops. They aren’t cedars. They are cypresses (Cupressus). A few are 800 or more years old, and each one is tagged by the Sichuan reforestation bureau. In the wet mists of Sichuan their massive black boughs drip their own rain.

Isabella Bird wrote sympathetically of rural Chinese. She did complain about the 19th-century bureaucracy. Qing Dynasty officials demanded her passport every few miles, she grumbled, copying her particulars on clipboards of slate. This also still happens. At Wulian, an empty inn cannot host us. They aren’t registered to receive foreigners. Two police drive us to their station. They help us fill out the necessary paperwork.

“Why are you walking?” the older cop asks, skeptically.

“It's a walking project,” the younger cop reminds him. He rolls his eyes at his square partner. “It’s about walking.”

Marco Polo may have paced off Shu Roads in the 13th century. He supposedly journeyed from Beijing to Chengdu: “Having traveled those twenty stages through a mountainous country, you reach a plain on the borders of Manzi . . . where you see many fine mansions, castles, and small towns. The inhabitants live by agriculture. In the city there are factories, particularly of very fine cloths and crapes or gauzes.”

The first and only empress of China, the supremely brilliant and capably ruthless Wu Zetian, may or may not have been born on a Shu Road five centuries earlier. The northern Sichuanese city of Guangyuan claims her in any case. Its museum of mannequins celebrates the world’s “top 10 queens.”

We trudge on, Li Huipu and I. Stone paths scalloped by the hooves of long-dead pack horses point us north through dozy river towns and hamlets of geriatric farmers. Local place names contain characters for the words yi (post station) and pu (market station), suggesting waypoints along a great, dissolving road system of antiquity.

At Sword Gate Pass, we climb a Shu kingdom fortress so famed it has spawned its own Chinese proverb: “One man at the pass keeps 10,000 at bay.” Standing at the summit, I scan the green hills once again for telltale lines of cypresses, knowing that the world they once shaded came undone a century or more ago because no fierce battlements could keep out the whine of a car, or the thin wire of the telegraph.

[rjhamster]

Will we ever find Noah’s Ark? Plus, fungi in your belly

PICTURES OF THE YEAR VIEW ONLINE THE OTHER LOST ARK Monday, December 4, 2023 In today’s newsletter, we examine the chances of recovering Noah’s Ark, discover the importance of fungi in your belly, learn the evolutionary advantage of curly hair … and delve into the origins of Advent. PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN STANMEYER, NAT GEO IMAGE COLLLECTION In the Biblical story of the Flood, Noah’s Ark…

[hzaidan]

How can it be represented Christ today? How can his life, his actions and his teachings to be communicated through modern means, words we know and that can instill a sense of immediacy? In other words, how can you convey that sense of eternity as it is contained in the words of the Gospel: "I am always with you, until the end of the world"…

Please follow link for full post

Bettina Rheims,Miles Aldridge,Ricardo Oyarzun,John Stanmeyer,Greg Gex,Marco D’Amico,Giampaolo Sgura,JOEL B. POLLAK,Ethan Knight,Bronwyn Lundberg,RELIGIOUSART, Zaidan, Mythology, Religion, biography, Paintings, Art, History, Ancient, footnotes, fine art,

29 Photographs, CONTEMPORARY RELIGIOUS ART - Photography from the Bible, with footnotes #3

[spiritsprinkles]

[paranoiasnfm]

Foto(s) do dia / Photo of the day Charcos cheios de vida Como é característico em praticamente todo o continente africano, onde há água, há camelos e tratadores.

[theadventurehandbook-blog]

Photo by John Stanmeyer

[loquaciousquark]

Ukrainian pianist Alex (IG @alexpian_official) plays the Hans Zimmer composition “Time,” from the Inception soundtrack, during air raid sirens in Lviv. Filmed in March 2022 by National Geographic photographer John Stanmeyer (IG @johnstanmeyer).

The video was truncated due to the air raid app automatically ending the recording. Hans Zimmer’s response is here.

Links for how to help Ukraine here.

[urtopia]

John Stanmeyer

[koenvlecken]

African migrants on the shore of Djibouti City at night raise their phones in an attempt to catch an inexpensive signal from neighboring Somalia—a tenuous link to relatives abroad. John Stanmeyer “Signal” (2013)

[sheltiechicago]

Laid to rest: The family of Ramesh Pandey agreed to be photographed as they prepared to cremate him in Prayagraj on the bank of the Yamuna. His ashes will flow into the Ganges. Hindus believe that cremation at a holy site frees the soul from the cycle of life and death.

India and pollution

Photographer: John Stanmeyer

The cost of pollution: The hands of Resham Singh, a 59-year-old carpenter in Punjab, are gnarled from arthritis. Doctors say it may have been caused by exposure to water tainted by fertilizers and pesticides. Heavy use of chemicals in the 1960s to late 1970s brought India out of famine and into its green revolution, but Singh’s village, Mari Mustafa, has high cancer rates.

[xtruss]

GET HIKING 🥾 🥾 🥾: Slow Down, Find Humanity!

He’s walked 11,000 miles … and Nat Geo Explorer Paul Salopek has life and travel tips for less strenuous adventurers. Among them: Walk toward rain. Share what little you have. Never trust a wall. And most of all, he writes in the November issue of National Geographic, remember your journeys. The image of him (above) in rugged Jordanian terrain is certainly one memory. With him is Selwa, a cargo mule, near the ancient ruins of Petra. Tomorrow, our Photography newsletter will have more on Salopek’s journey, from photographer and frequent hiking partner John Stanmeyer. Paul Salopek’s Out of Eden Walk, approaching its ninth year, is an attempt to retrace how civilization spread across the Earth. It is supported by the National Geographic Society. You can read more here.

Paul Salopek’s 24,000-mile odyssey is a decade-long experiment in slow journalism. Moving at the beat of his footsteps, Paul is walking the pathways of the first humans who migrated out of Africa in the Stone Age and made the Earth ours. Along the way he is covering the major stories of our time—from climate change to technological innovation, from mass migration to cultural survival—by giving voice to the people who inhabit them every day. His words, as well as his photographs, video, and audio, create a global record of human life at the start of a new millennium as told by villagers, nomads, traders, farmers, soldiers, and artists who rarely make the news. In this way, if we choose to slow down and observe carefully, we also can rediscover our world.

The journey begins in Ethiopia at one of the world’s oldest human fossil sites, Herto Bouri, and unspools across the scalding Afar Triangle, in the Rift Valley. Along this pathway our restless forebears ventured forth toward the Gulf of Aden, where they first stepped out of the mother continent to explore the wider world. As Salopek bears witness, this ancient pathway remains a conduit of opportunity—and sometimes fatal tragedy—for migrants seeking a better life today.

The trek through the Middle East begins in the fabled deserts that guard the cradle of Islam—the Hejaz of Saudi Arabia, long forbidden to outsiders. Meetings with Bedouin nomads and echoes of the ghost of Lawrence of Arabia give way to encounters in the contested borderlands between Israelis and Palestinians. Crossing the West Bank, Salopek gets caught in a skirmish between these two peoples. Then, to circumvent the bloody civil war in Syria, he is forced to take cargo ships from Israel to Turkey.

In southern Turkey, one of the oldest farmed landscapes, Salopek meanders through pistachio orchards, Bronze Age ruins, and walled medieval cities. And he walks into one of the greatest humanitarian catastrophes of our time: tides of refugees from Syria’s civil war. Turning northeast, he passes through tense Kurdish villages en route to the Caucasus Mountains and a frigid crossing into Georgia—an oasis of stability in a turbulent region. From the capital, Tbilisi, Salopek sprints through Azerbaijan to the shore of the Caspian Sea. Central Asia and the ancient Silk Roads beckon.

Horses were domesticated in Kazakhstan, but finding a cargo animal today to span this country’s vast steppes proves no easy task. Salopek and his local guides make the first foot traverse in almost a century of the wild Ustyurt Plateau straddling Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan—a barren upland crisscrossed in earlier times by Neolithic hunters, Silk Road camel drivers, and armies of Scythians, Mongols, and Russians. The furnace of the Kyzyl Kum, or Red Desert, sears the route to the legendary oasis cities of Bukhara and Samarkand.

After scaling the snow-draped ramparts of Central Asia—the Pamirs, the Hindu Kush, the Karakoram—the Out of Eden Walk's global trail meanders down onto the immense, river-fed plains of South Asia. From the green Punjab plateau in Pakistan, Paul and his local walking partners ramble eastward across ancient pilgrim roads in India, through a busy, booming world of villages and megacities toward the monsoon-drenched Bay of Bengal. Then the green pathways of Bangladesh and Myanmar lead onward to the edge of China.

[learn-to-see]

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBj8cnDaBe4)

[sunkentreasurecove]

[webception]

John Stanmeyer - World Press Photo 2013 African migrants on the shore of Djibouti city at night, raising their phones in an attempt to capture an inexpensive signal from neighboring Somalia tenuous link to relatives abroad.