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PHOTOGRAPHY: China's Growing Sands

A man pushes his bicycle through a sandstorm in Ningxia Province.
   
Traditional nomadic life has long since dissapeared in Inner Mongolia. Paintings in the living rooms of farmer's homes reflect on a previous way of life.
  
Traditional nomadic life has long since dissapeared in Inner Mongolia.
     
  
Reforestation projects aim to bring stability back to dry and desectaed land.
   
Dry and cracked earth at the Minqin Oasis in central Gansu Province.
   
A dry river bed in western Xinjiang Province. The area is populated by the Uyghurs, an ethnic minority of Turkic origin.
     
  
A young boy in the town of Hongsibao, in central Ningxia. The town was built 10 years ago to rehouse some 200,000 people relocated from rural areas ravaged by desertification.
   
A farmer herds his cattle at sunrise on the Inner Mongolian grasslands. The grasslands are suffering because of overgrazing.
   
A long factory in the deserts of western Inner Mongolia.
     
  
Dead poplar trees on the edges of the Taklamakan desert in western Xinjiang Province. As desertification increases, the sand moves and swallows whole forests.
   
Human remains lie exposed in the ancient city of Yingpan, in eastern Xinjiang. The city was abandoned over 1500 years agao when the residents ran out of water.
   
A farmer drives through dry and degraded land in Gansu Province.
     
  
Tourists at the Shapotou desert resort, a spectacular convergence of the Tenngger desert, the Yellow River and Frangrant Mountain Range.
   
A worker takes a rest in a small forest at the Shapotou desert resort. The huge dunes are slowly taking over the remaining vegetation.
   
A sandsorm envelops farmland in central Ningxia province. When the spring winds blow, dry and degraded topsoil is thrown into the air to create huge clouds of orange/yellow dust.
     
  
The might Tenngger desert as seen from the shores of the Yellow River in Ningxia Province.
   
A farmer and a lone tree are dwarfed by the mighy dunes of the Tenngger desert in Ningxia Province.
   
Pylons in the middle of the Taklamakan desert. The Taklamakan desert is China's largest and proved impenetrable to travellers for many hundreds of years.
     
  
A Uyghur woman protects herself from a sandstorm which has descended on her town in Xinjiang province.
   
A tourists walks along ointo the Tenngger desert in Ningxia Province.