Beijing has undergone enormous change in the space of a few years. Although the political regime remains the same, the loosening of economic policies and regulations is the main driver of this change. As a result investment in real estate in Beijing and ...


The Three Gorges Dam project, first conceived by Mao in the 1970s and due for completion in 2006, is an extraordinary feat of engineering. The dam is 185 metres tall and 2,309 metres long. Behind its vast walls, a reservoir will stretch over 650 ...


It's almost midnight in Dalston, an up and coming area of East London, as we arrive at Die Freche Muse, a neo-burlesque club night that describes itself as 'irreverent, decadent, sexually ambivalent and dissolute'. The location had been kept secret ...


This project explores the industrial hinterlands of four remote provinces in northern China: Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, Shanxi and Shaanxi. In the past three decades the rapid process of industrialisation has transformed their formerly bucolic ...


This project is a road trip around the coastal regions of England, Wales and Scotland, which together make up an island that is the largest in Europe and the ninth largest in the world. My intention is to explore aspects of Britain's identity by ...


Every day, busloads of Russians cross into Chinese border towns like Suifenhe and Dongning to buy cheap Chinese goods. They are entrepreneurs, here for business. The items available range from textiles to timber to scrap metal. However, behind this ...


Even by the standards of hermit regimes, Burma lives in a world of its own, a shadow of the country that was once the world's largest rice producer. Rangoon, once so alive with diversity and people from across the region is today a place of ...


With golf courses, marinas, hotel complexes and amusement parks mushrooming out of the ground and the waters along the the Straits of Johor, Malaysia's watery border with Singapore, the area is being transformed into an Eldorado for the region's ...


For centuries, ships following the trade winds ventured into the Straits of Malacca, a narrow 805 km stretch of water between peninsular Malaysia and the Indonesian island of Sumatra. Today, from an economic perspective, it remains one of the most ...


The Black Sea - mysterious, menacing and mythical - is at the heart of centuries of warfare, turmoil and historical drama. A mixture of totalitarian regimes and young democracies, a melting pot of ethnic minorities, the Black Sea region is a point of...


At the end of its nearly 2,900 km course, the Danube, Europe's longest river, spreads out into countless tentacles over a huge, watery plain along the border between Romania and Ukraine. The Danube Delta, Europe's second largest after the great ...


Known to its multi-ethnic populations by different names, Transylvania, now a part of modern Romania, has long enchanted and enthralled foreign visitors and writers including Bram Stoker who captured the imagination of his Western audiences with his ...


During Soviet Times, the small Caucasian Soviet Republic of Abkhazia was part of Soviet Georgia and Joseph Stalin's favourite holiday destination where he would hold court at one of his numerous dachas in the mountains overlooking the Black Sea. As ...


'Janjaweed' is said to translate as 'devils on horseback'. Since 2003, the people of Darfur have faced a reign of terror waged by the Arab militia group, which is backed by the Sudanese government. At least 200,000 people have been killed, and over two ...


On a hilltop near the small Latvian town of Piltinkalns, around a hundred people gather each Midsummer's Eve. The women carry herbs collected from the forest, most prized of which is the mythical blooming fern, said to only flower on this day and to ...


The earthquake in Kashmir on October 8th 2005 killed more than 73,000 people, and up to five million lost their homes. Three months after the massive quake, the survivors were struggling to stay alive in the cold weather. Millions were living in tents ...