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This week in PostMag: China’s salt capital and a cruise on the mighty Mekong River

Christopher St. Cavish talks China’s ‘salt capital’, David Swanson leads us down a river cruise and Bibek Bhandari remembers 2000s-era Beijing

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The Shenhai Salt Well, in Zigong, Sichuan province, on this week’s PostMag print cover. Photo: Graeme Kennedy
Cat Nelson

I was scrolling through Instagram, as one does, when a particularly arresting image stopped me. Roughly hewn wooden beams and rafters holding up a high ceiling. Puffs of steam caught in the light. A floor blanketed in white snow-like powder. “I really thought this was AI or game art” read one comment.

In fact, it was a photograph of a salt well in Sichuan province posted by Shanghai-based writer Christopher St. Cavish – the first in a carousel of photos from a week-long research trip to Zigong, once known as China’s “salt capital”, for an episode to air on his newly launched YouTube channel with photographer Graeme Kennedy. I messaged him immediately. It sounded like a story too good to miss, an expertly woven tale of how centuries of history can shape the way we eat today. The piece that came from it – this issue’s cover feature – is accompanied by a striking image of Sichuan’s salt drilling fields, taken by Swiss geologist Arnold Heim in 1929, along with photos of contemporary Zigong that Kennedy shot earlier this year.

Bibek Bhandari transports us to the Chinese capital (and back to the mid-noughties) as he chats with Glen Loveland, the American author of the recently published Beijing Bound. In 2007, Loveland moved to Beijing, which he describes as unexpectedly open. My first visit there was three years later and it was exactly that feeling that convinced me to make the move from New York. For Loveland, this openness led to a self-described gay awakening, and while I didn’t have the same story, reading his made me recall my own early years in the city and the particular energy of mainland China at that moment.

The rest of the issue takes us on a tour around Asia. Traversing Cambodia and Vietnam, David Swanson takes a cruise down the Mekong on the AmaDara where he reckons the region’s violent past with its present. It’s a beautiful and powerful journey that juxtaposes megacities against bucolic rural scenes.

In Osaka, Julian Ryall gets a sneak peek of the Expo 2025. He previews its many pavilions – I’m particularly intrigued by the Saudi Arabian one, which Ryall describes as “a tangle of alleyways, sheltered courtyards and water features like oases”. I’ve never been to a World Expo, but it turns out this is my year. I’ll be in Osaka in May. And you?

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