The Urban Edit
‘Laowai Hip-Hop’ (lao-wop?) is a music genre born outta the mean streets of Beijing, Shanghai, and Xian. Dealing with gritty issues like using chopsticks, struggling with the language and getting called a laowai (foreigner), it’s given a voice to the non-Chinese out there on the comfortable margins of society. Believe!
Getting stuck in Beijing traffic has its plus sides. (Stay with us.) Nowhere is China’s emphatic march from third world to world power more explicit than on the capital’s highways and hutongs. The roads here are a theatre of the wonderful, the weird and the precariously absurd. So if you find yourself idling in the back of a Beijing taxi, just gaze out the window and see how many of these you can spot.
We asked you to send us your best (and silliest) photos of the Beijing Time Chase for a little post-race contest, and you obliged, you competitive lot! Thanks very much, and can we say, what a special day it was. We can’t wait to do it all again.
First and foremost, here is our choice for BEST PHOTO OF THE DAY:
Fed up of seeing the same smoggy, hazy images every time Beijing gets a mention in the press? Wish you could see a side of our city that’s a little more sexy, a little more PHWOAR!? Yeah, us too. So we pulled together a few of the many pics we’ve taken in the last year or so that show Beijing’s at it’s blue and buxom best. Warning: some of the vistas in this vid are so clean, they’re filthy.
Special credit to photography stud Ben Macmillan (some of these stunners are his), and our shutter-happy former intern, the lovely Aurore.
At Bespoke we pride ourselves in treating all our customers like A-listers (because you’re worth it, darlings), which turns out to be good practice because from time to time we get to host real life mega A-listers like… The Killers!
After her much-photographed wallow in Hong Kong Harbour, Beijing welcomes ‘Rubber Duck’, the globetrotting floating sculpture by Dutch artist Florentjin Hofman. The world’s largest waterfowl began her Beijing holiday in Garden Expo Park, and between September 26 and October 26 it’ll be floating peacefully in Kunming Lake at the Summer Palace. At least that’s what the Beijing authorities hope will happen… WE FORSEE A QUITE DIFFERENT SCENARIO, HOWEVER…
Transmutated and made sentient by Beijing’s rumoured air pollution, the duck will double in size overnight! And it won’t stop there. Oh boy, no. Before long, the oversized fowl will take to the wing, before settling in Beijing’s Bird’s Nest … to spawn.
