Pixiq

To tie in with the Chinese New Year, which begins on 3 February 2011, the online version of the  Environment section of the Guardian Newspaper, have put up an audio slideshow of images from my latest book Exploring Natural China  with me talking about the stories behind the images.

The topics highlighted are pandas, the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, Sichuan high altitude flowers and the plant hunter E H Wilson, who was no mean photographer. When a landslide fell onto the path on which he was being carried in a sedan chair, it broke one his legs, but his tripod came in handy as a makeshift splint!

The French missionary Père David was a very enthusiastic naturalist who collected lots of plants and described many new species – including the giant panda,  which he described from a skin in a hunter's hut. He was the first Westerner to spot what later became known as Père David's deer, in the Emperor's Royal Hunting Park outside Beijing. A few deer sent to Europe thrived on the Duke of Bedford's estate at Woburn Abbey. Long after the deer became extinct in the wild in China, deer bred in Europe were reintroduced to China to several locations in the 1980's, where they are doing very well.

The book is a natural history travelogue, which looks at 13 specific locations and some of the key species to be found there relaying the inevitable ups and downs of travelling in offbeat China.