Boating across a sea of clouds on Qing Cheng Shan.

The people in Sichuan are poorer than those in Shanghai, though they are also nationally envied because the employment rate in Sichuan is very high and also because Sichuanese are famous for having a great deal of leisure time. Provincial laws ensure that businesses make plenty of jobs available even if the people are not working full days. At restaurants we seemed outnumbered by the army of wait staff delivering our dishes and standing around whose only task, as far as I could tell, was to either greet us with a “ni hao” or point the way to the bathroom. Even in the countryside we saw factories spilling smoke on an early Sunday morning, peasants busy farming terraced fields, roads being painstakingly repaired from mudslides by hammer and chisel and erosion preventing concrete webs being laid in nearly vertical hillsides. The Sichuanese keep busy.

Some of the places we visited in Sichuan were much older than those in Shanghai — a Taoist mountain, Quing Cheng Shan, set amongst a sea of clouds and the mysterious Wulong Nature Reserve, set on the road to Tibet, home to fuzzy cuddly Panda bears (though rumor has it they will tear your freak’n throat out if you mess with their kids). Unlike the cities, which felt thoroughly contemporary, these places felt balanced and peaceful. People have journeyed for hundreds of years to these mountainsides in order to experience harmony with nature and meditate. Though the ride from Quing Cheng Shan to Wulong was a bouncy, kidney killing half-day trip over fragmented, switch-backing roads, the vista was that of an ancient painting come to life, and I felt calm and still.

But even out in this rural area China was a world of juxtapositions. On the peaks of the Taoist mountain, women out on dates walked up ancient slate steps in high heels and short skirts, while teenagers chatted on cell phones. The Tibetan minority who lived in the small town around our hotel built a bonfire over which they roasted goat and chicken carcasses. We danced traditional Tibetan line dances, not unlike Greek or Jewish wedding dances, but after the traditional music stopped Euro-trash techno music started and a mini-rave began. Down a dirty back road, past a man skinning an animal, was a grimy shack filled with cigarette smoke and eight small computers on which teenagers instant messaged and played video games. We were not out of place with our digital cameras and ipods.

Though everywhere I went in China I saw growth and development, it was out in Sichuan that I first experienced the deep respect Chinese people have for their culture and history. Due to the richness and length of China's history and the emphasis on civic and history education in primary and high schools, it is not surprising that these feelings run much deeper than those in the US. Still, as an outsider to China it was striking that young people know the basic tenets of ancient philosophies, made pilgrimages to historic natural sites and maintained traditional dress and dance while also adopting much of Western culture.

What will happen as Western capitalism continues its infiltration into China? Will the next generation hold the same respect for tradition? Will cell phones, shopping malls and pop music just become one facet of the culture, with philosophy and history standing as others? Or will these places simply be stops on the tourist map of Chinese looking to reconnect with their country’s past, similar to the few Americans who trek through Civil War battlegrounds and Revolutionary War sites? This new face of China is one of contradictions — forward looking, global, digital and westernized while respectful of the traditions of the past.

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