Our project is simple: We intend to hitchhike the 4,000 kilometers of the Silk Road in China, from Xian to Kashgar, stopping at each of the National Parks along the route to backpack across them, filming the entire thing. As we travel, we will explore how China’s break-neck growth is affecting the country’s natural spaces and the way the Chinese think of those spaces. We want to understand what th
e outdoors means to the Chinese. Our route will take us through the Taklamakan Desert and the Tian Shan Mountains, where the Han Chinese live with a mélange of ethnic minority like the Uighurs, Kazaks, and Mongolians. We chose hitchhiking as our method of travel because it will put us into contact with large numbers of everyday Chinese people, giving us the opportunity to interview them about what they think of their outdoors. The two of us make the ideal team to complete this project. Lee Moore has lived and worked in China for more than two years, doing graduate work entirely in Mandarin at Nanjing University, while Galen Burke is a professional photographer and videographer who has been concentrating on outdoor and sports photography.
