1. Departure

May 12, 2:28 pm, almost all my Reuters Beijing colleagues saw the office TV sets shaking. Those TV sets had often shown the news but it was the first time they themselves had been the news. Within a few seconds, we realized it was an earthquake. An 8.0 magnitude earthquake had hit Sichuan province. Sichuan! My home. About ten minutes later, I was driving my car to Beijing airport. At that moment, I did not even know that there was a place on this earth called Wenchuan. Where was I going? What time could I leave? Fortunately, I was the first Reuters journalist to arrive at the airport and unfortunately I was the last to leave as I chose to fly to Chengdu and its airport was closed. I had almost no idea how serious the situation there was but wisely as it turned out took two instant DC/AC power inverters which meant I could work normally in the firs few days when the whole area was completely out of power.

2. In the field

On afternoon of May 13, after 6 hours of driving from Chongqing, the first earthquake-hit area I reached was Hanwang Town of Mianzhu. I was one of the first to arrive there. It later transpired that because the epicenter had been Wenchuan everyone assumed it would be worst hit when in fact towns in the surrounding area suffered more disastrously. It was like the end of the world with gloomy skies and soft drizzle. Terrified survivors told me Hanwang Dongqi Middle school had been horribly damaged so I headed there. It was unnaturally silent, the bodies of at least 20 students covered with plastic bags lay in a row on the ground. A mother gently removed the coverings trying to find her own child. Policemen surrounded the scene and I dared not approach but with a long lens I could see rain and tears merged on her face. Sometime later a couple found the body of their child and were just overcome with grief.  I shot a single frame and went and hugged them but then an aftershock struck which made the damaged buildings ‘peng peng’, like the King of Terrors clamouring against which humans were just so small and weak. The rain became heavier, the mourning became louder and the sky became darker. There was a choking smell of death. I could not believe that just that morning I had been in Beijing, a city with a population of 15 million.

3. Beichuan

On May 15 I set off for Beichuan, utilising all available modes of transportation - jeeps, cars and my own legs. I arrived 5 hours later as a mass military rescue team also reached the spot. It was a valley of death. A  landslide had almost buried the whole of the old district while the new part was just rubble with fires flickering here and there. Once in a while there would be a shout ”someone here” as a survivor was located beneath the debris. At one collapsed kindergarten, I saw dozens of cute little faces almost untouched except for the dried blood rimming their eyes and mouths while the rest of their bodies were stuck beneath heavy rocks and concrete. The tears in my eyes made it almost impossible to shoot pictures and I had constantly to remind myself that I needed to show this tragedy to the world in a way that was not too general but not too brutal. What a painful feeling, I saw everything I could not let my camera see as I walked and walked among the bodies of victims looking for pictures… I saw a butterfly fluttering between pretty shoes on the feet of a young girl which stuck from the rubble. As I pressed the shutter I mourned for this young soul and moved away to leave her be.  The next day, I saw a mother searching in the rubble for her daughter; she sobbed as she told me she had forced her 4-year-old daughter to go to school that day although she said she felt unwell. She kept saying, “I killed my own daugher”, and begged me not to shoot pictures of her…

4. Death is right at your back

With the death toll in Beichuan soaring, I felt obliged to continue my reporting there in case quake lakes burst or epidemics started. On May 17 for the first time in my life I felt the approach of death as I and 10,000 people ran for our lives. Around 2:55pm, a helicopter, hovering overhead reported that a nearby dam was about to burst and all military and rescue teams were ordered to retreat. All of a sudden everyone was running for their lives in complete terror - including me.

The day before I had imparted the details of my savings and investments to my editor in Beijing - just in case. In the circumstances I hadn’t wanted to worry my parents and which of us doesn’t want our parents to think we can take care of ourselves? But after hundreds of aftershocks, cracking dams, continuous landslides, with the threat of plague and a possible nuclear leak, I had felt it was maybe time to  hedge my bets a bit.

The stampede started downtown and ended on top of a nearby mountain 3 kilometers away. After running madly for 5-minutes, I realised what I was doing and turned back to record the scene with my cameras and called it in to the Reuters Beijing office. 

5. Back to Beijing

In 12 days I lost 5kg in weight and brought back sadness and nightmares to Beijing.

On May 24, as I boarded the flight back to Beijing from Chengdu, I met a senior photographer from a competiting agency, who said, “your pictures are very nice”. In Beijing we almost never talked and it was the first time that he had praised me face to face. While it is good to get compliments deep inside I still feel sad. I am Chinese born in Sichuan; after spending days in the ruins, keeping a lid on my emotions, shooting pictures, describing the scenes for my text colleagues in Beijing, helping to rescue survivors and fleeing for my own life, my sense of identity, my feelings and my reactions are complicated…

One thing I do know is that we are lucky - because we are still alive.

The first chapter coverage of this story is gone, things need to move on and I will try my best to play my part in it all.

David Gray presents an audio slideshow on China’s southwest region.

I covered the aftermath of an earthquake years ago as a new-comer to the business. I was living in Rome and we had felt the quake as it struck a moutainous region of Southern Italy just before 8 o’clock on a Sunday evening in November.

It was first light by the time we got to the village of Balvano. As, I drove down into the valley, the village was blanketed by cloud. There was no sound, there were no lights but as we passed through the cloud, we became aware of an awful noise - the terrible wailing of the survivors.

Did my pictures convey the horror of it all like the ones we are seeing from China? Did they eloquently tell the story of the men, women and children of the village crushed when the roof of the Third Century Roman church fell in on them? No, I blew it. I was so completely overwhelmed by the scale of the suffering, by the death, destruction and misery that I blew it. Never having experienced anything remotely like it, I felt a complete interloper ashamed to be pointing a camera at people who had lost everything.  

When I finally got to sleep my nightmares were full of people but my pictures were not. They showed wreckage and desolation but failed to give it a face. In the misguided belief that I needed somehow protect what shreds of dignity the victims had left by not exposing them to wider scrutiny, I not only completely missed the point of my being there but also let them down.

Luckily, for me I was disabused, while there was still time to redeem myself, by veteran UPI (ultimately Reuters) photographer Luciano Mellace who, in the middle of all the chaos, took me under his wing and set me straight. He is still doing it. 

In such circumstances if you are not doing your job you are just in the way.

There is no way reporting the deaths of thousands of people can be made palatable and without a human dimension there can be no concept of scale. Pictures like these are ‘upsetting’ for everyone who sees them because the circumstances in which they were taken are ‘upsetting’.

The subject matter is awful but these pictures from China brilliantly convey something  of that awfulness. They are not snap shots or random images plucked from the ether by picture editors, but the considered product of consumate professional photojournalists working in appalling circumstances to the very best of their abilities in order to communicate to all of us, the plight of the the victims of this terrible disaster, whether it is what we want to see or not.  

 Picture captions:

1) A father waits for his child, who has been buried for 33 hours in the rubble of a collapsed school, in the earthquake-hit Hanwang town of Mianzhu, Sichuan province, May 14, 2008. His son was found dead in the end. Picture taken May 14, 2008. REUTERS/Stringer (CHINA). 

2) A butterfly flies around the feet of dead students buried in the ruins of destroyed classrooms at a school in earthquake-hit Beichuan county, Sichuan province, May 15, 2008. The death toll from China’s massive earthquake could reach more than 50,000, the official Xinhua news agency reported on Thursday, quoting rescue headquarters. REUTERS/Jason Lee (CHINA)

Thanks Paul.

The images of the earthquake relief effort in China have been horrifying and deeply moving and remind me what has always been so compelling about my job - the ease and speed with which still pictures can impart so much readily understood information to so many people.   

And what brilliant pictures they are.

If someone had asked me just a few days ago what the worst road I could imagine in the world would be like, I would have told them probably a mountain road with lots and lots of rocks and pot-holes. Well, little did I imagine that these elements would combine with two mountain passes of around 4000 metres, vertical drops off the sides of around 500 metres, snow, ice and to top it all off, local police telling you that you cannot get to where you want to go.
The area is Sichuan Province in south-western China. The town is Kangding, located around 400 kilometres west of the capital Chengdu. The road leads west, towards Tibet. I am trying to cover the story about the violence that has spread into the province following the rioting in the Tibetan capital Lhasa on March 14. In order to find out what is going on, myself and text journalist John Ruwitch needed to get to another town called Litang, some 400 kilometres west of Kangding, where there were reports of trouble last week.

John Ruwitch and I in front of the local bus we got taken off by police.

So we got on a local bus at 6.30am, ready for an 8 hour trip. Well, before we even leave the terminal, we were asked to get off by two local policemen. ‘Where are you going?’. Well, since the bus had the name of the town written on the windscreen directly behind where John and I were standing, we pointed to it. ‘Why are you going?’. John explained very simply in his excellent Chinese ‘Because we hear it is very beautiful’. That seemed to be a good answer, and we were allowed to get back on.
The bus started off some three minutes after the scheduled departure time of 7a.m. due to our little chat with the local constabulary, and no more than one kilometre down the road, the bus was stopped again. Another two policeman got on the bus, and again we were asked to get off. ‘Where are u going?’ was the question once more. Same answer. ‘Why are you going?’ Same answer again. And to our surprise after a 20 minute delay this time, which the locals on the bus were not at all pleased about, we got back on the bus and once more started our journey.
The road started off just fine. Winding up the first mountain pass (this one was only 3800 metres-high) the snow from the previous night gave everything the look of being wrapped in a beautiful white blanket. And when the sun rose, the gorgeous morning light added a warm glow to an already pristine scene.
We got 100 kilometres from Kangding. All good.
150 kilometres, all good.
At 200 kilometres, a local official was at a toilet stop. He looked at the bus, but did not get onboard. On we went.
250 kilometres, we continued west.

The water closet along the road, and trust me, you don’t want to go inside…

Then, at 300 kilometres, we got unstuck. A police roadblock. Two police get on the bus. Two foreigners get off the bus. Two foreigners stay permanently off the bus. ‘Litang is forbidden for foreigners’ the abrupt, yet nice young female policewoman tells us. We come to the conclusion that there is no chance we will get any further west.
We are put into a small, and I do mean small, mini-van and driven back to Kangding. And how bad I thought the road was on the way in was multiplied by 20 times going back. How this van managed to stay together is a miracle. I must have hit my head on the roof at least a dozen times. And this was going at an average speed of just 20 kilometres per hour. Never again I said, never again.
Three days later, I am in a taxi travelling along the same road, at the same speed, at the same time, but now with the added obstacle of ice covering the entire road. How this taxi managed to stay on the road, going up and down the mountain passes, with no chains on the wheels, is yet another miracle. I didn’t realise just how slippery the road was until I had to get out and push the cab, when we lost momentum and stopped after getting stuck behind a large truck up a hill, and then run and jump back into it.

A yak sits in the middle of the icy road after a heavy snowfall the night before.

This time, we did at least make it to our destination - a monastery in a small village some 200 kilometres away - but due to the large increase in the number of official vehicles along the road, I also now had to duck every time one of these cars approached. Try doing that over 50 times.
Anyway, now that I am back in Kangding, trying to cover this story, which is getting more and more difficult everyday, I try to sleep at night not dreaming about those bumps on the ‘world’s worst road’.

You’ve heard of the two-horse-town, well…

A local Tibetan walks towards his home situated at the base of a beautiful snow-covered mountain near Kangding.