Voices from the ground

His journey lasted 41 days from late May through early July, when he walked or hitchhiked more than 10,000km to meet nearly 1,000 villagers in close to a hundred townships and villages.

Retiree Yan Dong, 45, was virtually penniless when he started out on his trip. He slept on his raincoat by the road. He wore a short-sleeved shirt, a thin pair of pants and slippers to ease the pain from walking long distances. He carried two worn-out cameras bought in the mid-1980s and filled his ragged backpack with 80 buns, a bag of pickles, antibiotic tablets, a cup, journals, pens, films, flashlight and a will, where he outlined the password to his savings account and noted "two deposit receipts under my bedplate; the money is from my father for his grandson's education".

But Yan never wavered from his mission - to tell the story of how Sichuan residents coped with the devastation of the quake that hit the province on May 12.