This is a really interesting photo essay:
"Little boxes on the hillside... home to 40,000 Buddhist monks: The stunning makeshift town that has sprung up around a Tibetan monastery..."
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2349761/Little-boxes-hillside--home-40-000-Buddhist-monks-The-stunning-makeshift-town-sprung-Tibetan-monastery.html
Thanks beautiful photos! I have never been to that part of China. I really hope to return and visit that area some day. Maybe after we sell the ranch / homestead and try and spend the kids inheritance. ;)
A quaint little village such as that would certainly keep our local planing and zoning guy and building inspector busy. n* And some of our locals busy turning in code violations. [waiting]
If you look closely, a lot of the houses seem very uniform. Concrete foundation, a one-story log structure, capped with a shed roof and metal roof panels. I guess that maybe shows something about a culture where conformity is emphasized? If you look close many of the structures actually look quite substantial. It says the structures do not have toilet plumbing and that is shared. No visible power or phone lines -- cell phones? Are the structures powered?
The first pictures is striking in that the white field of Buddhist prayer flags is 1/4 as big as the town.
Farm villages we have visited there was a lot of communal kitchens, communal toilets and absolutely unheated homes or dwellings and no electrical in the homes. They are constructed much as seen in the photos. They might gather in a communal kitchen for warmth and electric lighting to read but mostly not..... I stress this was at farming villages. No wonder the farmers from the north flooded down to the south and the industries around the more temperate Shenzhen - Guangzhou areas. However we did visit the Village on Mount Tai http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Tai Not near the size of the of buildings is in the photos. We took the tram not the 7,200 stair steps. It was about then it dawned on me Rick you are not in Idaho no more.......... We traveled that trip with a group of ten westerners and for about ten days in that part of China. We were the only westerners we saw till we got back to Hong Kong. (Except for a very rude to the Chinese - White lady with a loud Texas accent in a hotel in Jinan who insisted in calling them the little yellow peoples who tried to hook up with our group.) I think her group gave her the slip........ ;)