• One Billion Journeys (English Edition): 40 Years of Life on China’s Trains, in Black & White
  • One Billion Journeys (English Edition): 40 Years of Life on China’s Trains, in Black & White
  • One Billion Journeys (English Edition): 40 Years of Life on China’s Trains, in Black & White
  • One Billion Journeys (English Edition): 40 Years of Life on China’s Trains, in Black & White
  • One Billion Journeys (English Edition): 40 Years of Life on China’s Trains, in Black & White
  • One Billion Journeys (English Edition): 40 Years of Life on China’s Trains, in Black & White
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One Billion Journeys (English Edition): 40 Years of Life on China’s Trains, in Black & White

One Billion Journeys (English Edition): 40 Years of Life on China’s Trains, in Black & White

Lovers, Children, Sleeping Travelers, Salesmen and Newlyweds — A Railway Worker‘s Black-and-White Portraits of Ordinary People Sharing the Same Narrow Carriage Over Four Decade
This is not a travel guide to China’s railways, and it is not a book about trains themselves. It is a collection of black-and-white photographs taken by Wang Fuchun, a railway worker who spent decades riding China‘s trains with a camera. He photographed the people around him—lovers sharing a berth, children playing in the aisle, passengers asleep under seats, salesmen showing off their first mobile phones, newlyweds listening to a shared cassette player. The English edition is organized differently from the Chinese version, grouping the images into seven themes: love, childhood, dreams, food and drink, entertainment and communication, special passengers, and the stage itself. Together they show what forty years of rapid change looked like from inside a moving carriage—not in statistics, but on people’s faces. If you want to understand modern China through intimate, human-scale photography—rather than read a policy paper or flip through a glossy travel album—this is it.
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Detail

More than a photography book — it is a visual time capsule of a changing China, seen through the windows of its trains.

Over four decades, photographer Wang Fuchun boarded trains across almost every railway route in China, camera in hand. One Billion Journeys brings together his most compelling black-and-white images, freezing fleeting moments of tenderness, humor, exhaustion, and connection inside the narrow space of a moving carriage-1-2.

As a former railway worker, Wang had an insider’s eye for the human drama unfolding on each journey. He expanded the train carriage into a stage of life, a platform for social encounter, and a mirror of a nation in rapid transformation-1-4. His photographs document the era of slow, crowded “green trains” — a world far removed from today‘s high-speed rail — and the people who traveled through it with hope and resilience-2.

Wang Fuchun (1943–2021) was one of China’s most distinguished documentary photographers. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the National Railway Museum in York, UK

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