Several days of rain had dispelled the mugginess that's usually so typical of Hunan province in summer. Swallows glided swiftly across the low, leaden sky and small plots of land planted with rice nestled between the two-story tiled houses in Zhabu in Taojiang county.
Huang Jianxing, 52, has vivid memories of the day he returned to Taojiang county from Saudi Arabia, where he had taken part in one of Islam's most important sacred duties, the Hajj, or pilgrimage, to Mecca, the birthplace of the prophet Muhammad.
Even though night had already descended on Beijing, at 9 pm on a summer evening the sun was still shining over the plateau of the Tibet autonomous region. In Qamdo prefecture, the largest city in the east of the region, a huge screen in Liberation Square played traditional music to more than 1,000 people who formed a number of concentric circles and began a traditional dance.
At first glance, Zhangzhai looks like any other village in China. It seems to be a peaceful place, mainly populated by elderly people and children, but upon closer inspection, a very different picture emerges.
Quannengshen, or The Church of Almighty God, is a secretive organization, and the biggest mystery surrounds its financial operations.
"Secretive", "controlling", "money-loving" and "crazy" are the words Song Wang, a 30-year-old from Yongzhou county, Henan province, used to describe the sect.
Dressed in paint-stained coveralls, China De La Vega easily navigated the maze of alleyways running alongside a ceramics factory in Jingdezhen, Jiangxi province.
When Li Jianshen founded Sanbao Ceramic Art Institute in 1998, the building in which it is housed was just an old house Li bought from some local farmers in the suburbs of Jingdezhen.
Su Lingwen had no choice but to drop out of high school after just one year. The 17-year-old was expected to get into a key university, but he found it almost impossible to keep pace with his peers from the cities. Su was raised in Sankeshu, a poor township in Suqian city, Jiangsu province, and went to primary school and middle school there.
Wu Weiliang is the first person in his family to attend a key university. The Henan province native, who comes from a low-income family, studied day and night for three years to achieve his dream and eventually entered Chongqing University in 2011, majoring in Civil Engineering.
Unlike hundreds of thousands of Chinese students, Chen Chaoyi never worried about school entrance examinations.
Huang Jingwen lay on a hospital bed desperately clinging to life. At 108 years old, there's very little about Huang to remind people that she once fought for the freedom of her country and herself, but that's what she did for more than two decades.
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