There are a whole pageload of new blogs over at sinosplice china blog list, but only in only one is there insanity and genius in such monstrous proportions. In the footsteps of joseph rock is the journey of Sydney blogger Michael, following the footsteps of ‘bad-tempered and imperious’ Joseph Rock, who travelled through western Sichuan and the Tibet borderlands in the 1920s to reach Minya Konka, once thought to be the world’s highest mountain.

The writing is superb but the genius is in the photography, placing side-by-side Rock’s photos with Michael’s own equivalents taken 70 years later. It’s especially poignant for me as one of the (still unfulfilled) reasons I went to China was to travel to Minya Konka and climb the peaks of west Sichuan.