China's modernization confronts travellers at every turn

Coming face-to-face with China - the world's most populous country, fastest growing economy and most ancient civilization - is, for most of us, a culture shock that's as alluring as it is perplexing.

As different as it is vast, the country can thank its geography for its introverted development. Cut off from outside world by the Himalayas and the Siberian Steppe, much of its culture developed thousands of years ago and has changed little since; even Chinese script was perfected two millennia ago.

Yet over the last century and with increasing speed China has bounded onto the world stage and modernized at a dazzling pace - often at the cost of long-standing ways of life and much of its historical architecture.

This modernization confronts the traveller at every turn. The huge commercial upheaval with its mushrooming skyscrapers, mind-boggling dam projects, runaway pollution and emerging urban elite - with a spending power their parents couldn't have dreamt of - is often much more apparent than the censorship, human rights abuses, suppression of dissidents or imperialism in Tibet that are the familiar topics in the Western media.

You might also arrive with ideas about Chinese culture and people, though nothing can prepare you for the country's extraordinary population density nor the philosophical, orderly and pragmatic way in which the Chinese cope.

And while it's tempting to imagine the world of the Han Chinese - chopsticks, bicycles, fried tofu, kites, fireworks and dragons - they only make up 90% of the population. The rest - around a hundred million people - is made up of more than 200 distinct ethnic populations with their own languages, culture and ways often intrinsically bound to the land that surrounds them. Those peopling the green paddy fields and misty hills of southwest are very different from those living on the parched plains along the northwest's old Silk Road or those inhabiting Tibet's mountains.