Across the Chinese borderlands, investments in large-scale transnational infrastructure such as roads and special economic zones have increased exponentially over the past two decades. Based on long-term ethnographic research, Borderland Infrastructures addresses a major contradiction at the heart of this fast-paced development: small-scale traders have lost their historic strategic advantages under the growth of massive Chinese state investment and are now struggling to keep their businesses afloat. Concurrently, local ethnic minorities have become the target of radical resettlement projects, securitization, and tourism initiatives, and have in many cases grown increasingly dependent on state subsidies. At the juncture of anthropological explorations of the state, border studies, and research on transnational trade and infrastructure development, Borderland Infrastructures provides new analytical tools to understand how state power is experienced, mediated, and enacted in Xinjiang and Yunnan. In the process, Rippa offers a rich and nuanced ethnography of life across China’s peripheries.

A completely revised and updated second edition of the essential field guide and reference work.

Since the publication of the first edition of Guide to the Flowers of Western China in 2011, there have been great strides in knowledge of the flora of China through international collaboration. Many plants included in the first edition have been revisited in the wild, while areas hitherto inaccessible have opened up, if sometimes only temporarily. Great advances in systematic botany have occurred since the publication of the first edition, particularly with the widespread availability of rapid DNA analysis. The result of this has been an influx of new photographs and data, and the need for a second edition of Guide to the Flowers of Western China.
 

Unrivaled in the temperate latitudes of the world, China’s rich flora comprises 30,000 species of plants, and nowhere is this floral richness more evident than in western China. With its lush forests, meandering rivers, and majestic mountains, the west of China has been a center of plant exploration for over two centuries, giving rise to many well-known species of trees, shrubs, perennials, and bulbs that populate our parks and botanical institutes, including rhododendron, orchids, peonies, and roses.

            
Guide to the Flowers of Western China describes and illustrates more than two thousand species, from the common to the endemic to the extremely rare. Plant families are arranged following the latest DNA-based classification, making this pictorial guide— the largest and most comprehensive on western China ever published—essential for gardeners and plant scientists.

Celebrating the wealth of western China’s vast flora, this magnificent volume will enable the horticulturally inclined traveler (or armchair traveler) to identify many of the plants encountered in the wild.