Russian college student set up website, attracting use as local guidebook

Denis Kim is a student at South-Central University for Nationalities. He is also the founder of the Russian website wuhanshi.ru.

Kim watched a series of Chinese movies when he was young, sparking a lifelong interest in China. In 2016, at the age of 38, he fulfilled his childhood dream, resigning his IT engineer job at a university in Russia and moving to Wuhan for Chinese language study.

"Before I came here, I was trying to learn about the city online, but very little information was available in Russia. So I decided that when I came to Wuhan, the second most important thing, after studying, would be to help people who speak Russian to know more about the city," said Kim, explaining his motivation for the website.

From the first day he began to explore the city, he has never stopped searching for interesting places and taking photos. And after having gathered material for six months, he launched his website.

"I can take as many as 1,000 photos over the weekend," he says. Among countless photo subjects in the city, his favorites are the bridges on the Yangtze.

"I'm addicted to the Yingwuzhou Yangtze River Bridge." The Yingwuzhou bridge, like the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, is painted red.

Known as a river city, Wuhan is located at the junction of the Yangtze River and its largest tributary, the Hanjiang River. The city was built and developed along the rivers. Bridges link the three major areas of the city: Hankou, Wuchang and Hanyang.

The Wuhan Yangtze River Bridge, regarded as the first bridge over the Yangtze River, was designed and constructed by the Wuhan-based China Railway Major Bridge Engineering Group and was officially opened on Oct 15, 1957. About six decades later, 13 bridges have been built or are under construction over the Wuhan section of the Yangtze River. Most of them were designed and built by the company.

It has participated in the construction of more than 2,000 bridges in China and abroad, including the new Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge, the world's longest bridge over the sea.

In 2017, Wuhan was designated as the "City of Design", a category within the UNESCO Creative Cities Network, for its innovative design capabilities in bridge engineering, high-speed railways and urban planning.

In Kim's photographs, bridges on the Yangtze River, along with skyscrapers, all look strikingly attractive, because they are presented from different angles.

He likes to take aerial photos without a drone. Kim usually climbs to the rooftops of buildings and sits there for a whole day, waiting for the perfect moment of light and angle.

"From the rooftops, it feels like the city is in the plum of my hand" Kim said.

Kim participated in a photo contest titled China and Russia through the Camera Lens last year. His work, Calla Flower, which shows the Institute of New Energy in the Future City, won an award.

(China Daily 12/26/2018 page6)