Chinese Bike Resources

So, hopefully I have a few new readers from the Chinese bike talk. Welcome!


Here are a few things I talked about that you might want to check out.

First, please see my original Chinese bike of the day posts I posted in March 06 and February 06.

Also see the tag chinese bikes, unfortunately that only shows the last 20 or so things I tagged with that title.


If you want to see how they make giant bamboo baskets like these:

surf on over here for in process pics from giant basket making in Vietnam.

Here are some photos of a Flying Pigeon bikes i borrowed for in 2006. Very nice example of the mighty chinese bicycle:

Click for source post

If you want to know more about the giant budda (dafo) in leshan pictured here:

Well it is 73m high and it was started in 714AD and it was meant to ensure safe passage for ships at the confluence of rivers. wikipedia has more. Sorry I completely forgot all the numbers during the talk.

If you are looking for more information on the Yangtze River, three rivers gorge or tiger leaping gorge. I sort of recommend the River at the Center of the World by Simon Winchester.


The book has a very interesting history of the river and follows the author Simon Winchester and his stalwart translator as they traverse the river end to end. While large swaths of the book are very interesting, I think the whole book is marred by Winchesters colonialism nostalgia and underlying condescension toward the Chinese. He seems overwhelmingly interested in the history of british in china and not quite as interested in anything else. It left a really poor taste in my mouth that sort of wrecked the rest of the book for me. Others I have talked to did not notice it or were not bothered by it, but it was kind of easy to impress an image of a pith helmeted Winchester being borne on the back by coolies over the otherwise interesting journey. I did enjoy most of Simon Winchesters other books that I have read. All said though, this was the book that inspired me to visit Tiger Leaping gorge and hike it. It is absolutely useless as a guide book as it was written over 10 years ago and things are changing so fast that that a 1 month old Lonely Planet guide to china was woefully out of date, and horrendously inaccurate as far as Tiger Leaping Gorge was concerned. Best advice I can give is get your butt to Lijang and hit the hostels and coffee houses for the up to date dirt.
me at tiger leaping gorge:


Finally there are tons of people who, like me, visit places and take tons of photos of bikes. Rhinos and Lilos has some nice asian bike photos up right now, like thisun from india:

click for source.

I also recommend checking out Finland Laurita and the clever cycles blog for bikes in other parts of the world, among others...