Leiyang has a million people, modern hospitals, and a high-speed rail station but you've probably never heard of it. This is fifth-tier China, the place Western media rarely covers and stereotypes love to dismiss. I spent a few days there and found something more interesting than poverty or backwardness: a city that's rough around the edges but genuinely livable, where people shop at chaotic wet markets in the morning and play badminton in beautiful parks by afternoon. It's not glamorous, but it works.

Sometimes travel doesn't go as planned. Rain washed out the mountains, an injury changed our route, and gray skies killed the golden hour I'd been counting on. But South Hunan's Dongjiang Lake taught me something about photography and about China's quiet transformation.

A few times a year, a quiet Hunan village transforms. For Qingming Festival, families return from the cities to honor their ancestors and to feast. A dive into Chinese festivities, customs and people

One turn off the highway, and the gray of modern China gave way to spring green. I spent Qingming Festival in a Hunan village where ancestral halls still stand, fish ponds mirror the sky, and tradition persists in the shadow of progress.

A photographer's night wandering through a small village in Guangzhou during Chinese New Yea: fireworks, smoke-filled alleys, and a retro-futuristic atmosphere straight out of Blade Runner.