Five-year-old Wu Lianlian visits her family's hillside rice field with her hair ablaze in store-bought frills—a sign that the outside world has reached the once isolated farming community of Dimen.
Stark against late winter snow, ramparts of brick and stone twist through mountains north of Beijing. Ancient emblem of the Middle Kingdom's determination to protect itself from outsiders, the Great Wall now stands among China's greatest global tourist attractions.
Dressed in a hybrid Tibetan-Han costume for her photo at China's Qinghai Lake, weekend tourist Sha Mengxiang covers her face in giggles, terrified of the "white dragon" (the yak) she is sitting on.
China's new face beams along Changan Avenue at the heart of Beijing's central business district, where high-rise apartment, business, and retail complexes are shooting up at warp speed. By some estimates, 10,000 new structures are sprouting in Beijing alone as it transforms itself into the financial and cultural hub of the world's most populous nation.
Blooming fields of rapeseed plants weave around hills near Luoping in Yunnan Province.
Patio chairs and a satellite dish (lower left) mark one home as claimed in a new suburban development in Shenyang. The Chinese government estimates that the country is adding five to six billion square feet of floor space to its residential and commercial building stock every year.
Dr. Zhibao Dong, research scientist of the Chinese Academy of Science, drives with other researchers past sand dunes in the Kumtag Desert located in the Xinjiang region.
Fragile nature meets technological ambition in the labor—roughened hands of a track worker. Li Yingde captured this snow finch while working on a new high-altitude section of China's 2,525-mile Beijing-to-Lhasa railway.
From a construction crane 94 stories up, Shanghai's streets and skyscrapers seem incandescent with capitalism. One of every 20 dollars of China's GDP is generated in this city, and a fifth of the nation's exports—up 500 percent in real value since 1992—pass through its portals.
In Guangxi, limestone pinnacles line the Li River.
Cultivating rice in flooded fields has sustained the Dong for a thousand years. What will become of their culture now that this generation is leaving village farms to work in urban factories?
As a token of appreciation for the role he played in a divining ritual, an exhausted "rider" receives a memento in the shape of a horseman cut from traditional handmade paper.
Architect: Herzog & de Meuron, Switzerland Completed: 2008 A lacy tangle of steel twigs cradles Beijing's 91,000-seat Olympic stadium, nicknamed the bird's nest by locals. "We didn't design it to be Chinese," says noted Beijing artist Ai Weiwei, a consultant on the project. "It's an object for the world."
The terraced farms of the Lisu people, one one of China's minority groups, create a patchwork on mountains near Weixi in Yunnan Province.
An all-female crew carries logs to the village, where the men are beginning to frame new buildings that will replace those lost in a devastating fire. In a typical day the women make several round-trips, climbing rough paths to reach a hillside forest about three miles from Dimen. There they work together to cut down sturdy trees and strip the trunks bare.
A truck travels along the highway leading to the Taklimakan oil field in the Xinjiang region. The rows of vegetation on either side keep sand off the road. The buildings that appear every few miles house workers who maintain the greenbelt.