A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden

To the partially-trained observer, some rural Chinese communities seem to have been designed with such a conjoined and interdependent structure that the relatively recent revelation of communism might have sounded like a benignly logical extension of centuries of tradition. Nowhere is this more evident than in the earthen roundhouses of Fujian province (Administrative Region #17 - the half-way mark), from within each of which the world's enormousness feels strangely conquerable. Each of these aged buildings, which dot the landscape a few hours outside of Xiamen (formerly Amoy), has a story to be told. But like much of rural China, and the people who inhabit it, their seeming senescence overwhelms, and one is left hoping that there will always be someone to preserve them.