Shenyang, Liaoning Province, China - 12 December 1999; no people in view; Shenyang is not the sort of place in China that tourists would knowingly want to - or get to - visit. In 1989, when I spent a year there as EU Director of a joint Europe/China environmental project in air pollution, it was a grim, industrial city. Moreover, one of its abiding delights is its extreme climate, with astonishingly cold winters, direct from Siberia. I shot this in a mid-winter walk in -20C. The weird sky owes much to the extreme cold, with the sun struggling through layers of stratospheric ice. And the cluttered skyline is down to the universal use of coal for heating throughout the fierce winter. The result of all this, strangely, is this visual beauty we see here.