Postcards from China: Dog Edition

It started somewhere around the second or third one. We took a break in late May and traveled out to the mountains of southwest China, and there was a dog at almost every place we stopped — outside markets, asleep at monastery gates, trotting down mountain trails, stationed in hotel lobbies like they were on payroll. By the end of the trip my camera roll was less landscape, more livestock.

What kept catching me wasn't how many there were, but who they belonged to. Back home a dog usually comes with one owner, one leash, a fenced yard — a tidy line between the animal and everyone else. Here that line was blurry. Some dogs belonged to someone. Some belonged to a street, a village, a temple. A lot seemed to belong to a place more than a person, and I was the only one who found it worth noting.

So, consider these a few postcards from the trip. Here are the dogs of Yunnan, roughly in the order we met them — and the small, loose ways each one was claimed.