Tuesday, February 01, 2005

Colour photo of Jizushan (Mt Tali) in 1944


Jizushan (Mt Tali), originally uploaded by mutikonka.

A bit off-topic this.

This beautiful view of Jizushan (Chicken Foot Mountain) near Dali was taken in 1944 by an American transport pilot called Don Downie.

He has written a wonderful book about the pilots who flew the Hump route from Assam and Yunnan during the war "Flying the Hump". It is crammed with fantastic colour pictures of planes flying between Yunnan and India in the last two years of the war.

And while most of the pictures are of aircraft, there are also some interesting scenes of everyday life in Yunnan as Joseph Rock would have encountered it. Coolies, soldiers, mud huts, poverty and squalor. It's easy to forget that Rock lived in pre-revolutionary China when things were very different from today.

These colour pictures bring us a little closer to that now far-off world.


Here's a picture of the same mountain taken more recently:

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