2012 versus 2018

September 12, 2018

Having missed out on going to see the pagoda, most of the 'same thing six years apart' items which I photographed today were not things I was specifically looking for.

However, as with everywhere I'm going that I've been before, it's fun to see what has changed either for the better or for the worse.

Almost all of the little roads and paths between the dozen plus folk shrines in this cluster have been paved. Most of the shrines that didn't have gates have acquired them. Those gates have then started to rust and rot.

Everything that was made of mud plaster and straw has since been remade with concrete. The area around the shrines has also been cleaned up.

I had a lot of fun creating this composite. At first glance, it seems that nothing has changed other than the season.

Look closer, however, and the original hand painted "local art" has been replaced with something from a print shop.

Even the somewhat more artistic hangings have been replaced with these polyvinyl photoshop jobs

Other things are basically unchanged. Cleaned up a little perhaps. Freshened paint jobs. But otherwise, if you didn't have pictures of previous years to compare, you wouldn't know that any changes have happened.

I refer to this trio as The Barbarian, The Venerable Old Dude, and The Scholar. Like many of the local gods in this part of Hebei, they were practically everywhere, until suddenly they were nowhere.

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