We spent nearly three weeks in China in the autumn of 2008, exploring places such as Beijing, Hong Kong, Lijiang, the Three Gorges Dam, and many remote and unfamiliar places in between. I have a full album with my favourite Chinese images, but I was drawn to create a parallel album full of black and white shots. Many of the sights and sounds were evocative of the China that we all may have in our mind from decades gone by, and I felt that the black and white conversion would help to convey that feeling. I think it worked for many of them, particularly those images in rural China that were (relatively speaking) untouched by the advance of western culture.