福

I took this photo while visiting China in January of 2008. My friend Kai and I just finished climbing part of the great wall located near Beijing. When we came down, we saw a tree with hundreds of these charms tied onto it. These charms have the chinese character 福 (luck) written on them.

Because most people can’t reach the top of the true, most of these charms are tied to the few bottoms branches of the tree. The crushing weight was pulling whole branches down, much like the population problem in China, a lot of good wishes, too few branches.