Sometimes, you have to take a break. So where do you go on holidays when your job is already called ‘Go West’? Not west of course. You go south!

The high speed train takes you with almost 250 kilometres/h in 7,5 hours from Shanghai to the nice port city of Xiamen (one of China’s Special Economic Zones). And back of course. In those hours you blast through the economically most developed zone of China – with cities like Hangzhou, Ningbo, Wenzhou and Fuzhou as the stopovers. What kind of landscape do you see during this train ride? In other words: what does China’s most developed area look like? The answer: a highly fragmented landscape, in which the urban and the rural dissolve, in which farmers build small skyscrapers and where you see a clash of top-down and bottom-up planning. A landscape in which man tries to rule over nature by cutting away mountains and where history and concrete meet.

The following  is a random selection of pictures we took every five minutes between Xiamen and Fuzhou, at a speed of 247 km/h. The Chinese landscape with an interval of 20,5 km.