Suburban Kunming
The new government building in Kunming, which strikes a great pagoda pose from a distance and serves as a great landmark. It’s even being used in real estate ads elsewhere in the city as a marker of prestige.
Capital of southwestern China’s Yunnan Province, Kunming is a fairly unassuming, extensively modernised city. No part of it seems to be bustling or teeming with activity, yet none of it’s deserted or windswept, either. While the downtown shows the classic traces of contemporary transformation — the Carrefour, the Kentucky Fried Chicken, the brightly lit pedestrian streets lined with outlet after outlet of the same national chains — it’s in Kunming’s suburbs that these changes seem more like a work-in-progress and less of a fait accompli.
A view of southern Kunming and the Dian Chi (lake) from the Xi Shan (West Hills). The elevated highway seems to have radically changed the lakefront- riding underneath one can’t help but notice a sense of decline in the adjacent properties, which though becoming increasingly decrepit, seem to have once been fairly sought-after retreats, with large lawns, and of course that now-lost view.
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