~ These images were taken in order to convey the nature of the hills around Xishuangbanna…the luxuriant native vegetation was largely cut down and replaced with South American rubber trees as part of a political scheme to increase China's resource self-sufficiency…as the non-native rubber trees are ill-suited for Xishuangbanna's climate, they're sickly, yet they dominate the landscape for kilometers in all directions…an environmental blunder of the largest scale