Ningyi Xi

“To study Central Asia, you need to know something about Rome, about China, about Persia, about India,” He tells TWOC. “It gave me a more holistic understanding of history.” His creative approach has led him to make unexpected comparisons across time and cultures, including between the ancient world and today’s K-pop industry. He examines allusions to classical texts in K-pop songs and draws parallels between K-pop and pantomime, a popular form of theater in the Roman Empire.

Walking around in the lush courtyard of the temple dotted with banyans and plumerias, and grand halls decorated with orange tiles, I thought about how students here spent years mastering an ancient form of Chinese and perfecting their calligraphy, yet the languages they spoke daily left few traces in history.

In 2013, a TWOC investigation in Pu’er and Xishuangbanna in southwestern Yunnan found that in the last two decades, extensive cultivation of rubber, a resource-intensive but lucrative cash crop, has caused droughts and replaced swaths of rainforests in the region. This has led elephant herds to come down from the mountains to drink from rivers in the dry season, and seek nourishment in farmers’ sugarcane, banana, and corn crops.