I know I take too many photos, and I know I should remove some for brevity. But it feels to me that each of these views is worth capturing, as if to store it in a jar for storage. When I no longer live in China, I want to look back on these trips, to cherish these visits.

We’re in Longmen today, one of the more famous old towns, and for good reason; its history traces back over a millennium, and it’s still in great shape. We walk through the alleys and along the river in the early morning, before the crowds come. It’s an uneven walk on the cobblestones, but they’re remarkable. There are patterns everywhere: guiding visitors how to walk, or dividing up a large square into pieces, or radiating out from a well. It’s not just on the ground — also all the walls are made from stones picked from the nearby nature. Some walls have stones on the surface, others have a thin layer of peeling paint. Some newly placed stones show patterns where old doors and windows used to be.

And those are just a few of the beautiful details in Longmen; painted or carved characters, decorations on roof edges, decorative windows, and traditional folk-art painting of blue Chinese guardian lions above a gate, plus the Five-Colored Flag, which was the national flag of China from 1912 to 1928. It all shows a pride lost in modern architecture.