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Much has been written about China's booming coastal areas. But who has heard of Anhui Province, close to Shanghai, one of China's poorest provinces?

Anhui Province is located in eastern China across the basins of the Yangtze River and the Huaihe River. The north of the province is part of the North China Plain while the north-central areas are part of the Huai He River watershed. Both of these regions are very flat and densely populated. The land becomes more uneven further south, with the Dabie Mountains occupying much of southwestern Anhui and a series of hills and ranges cutting through southeastern Anhui.

Some might be familiar with Anhui because it was here that Nobel prize winning author Pearl Buck set her most famous work, "The Good Earth" - the story of a poverty-stricken Chinese family.

Anhui is one of China's poorest provinces. Indeed, for many years after most of other parts of China were opened to Western travelers, foreigners were banned from Anhui because the Communist government did not want them to see the widespread misery there.

Compared with its more succesful neighbours to the east, Zhejiang and Jiangsu, Anhui Province has markedly lagged behind in economic development, with a GDP per capita around one third the level of those two provinces.

In the 2007 book "China Road", author Rob Gifford stated that the Chinese refer to Anhui as a "big agricultural province". According to Gifford this is a euphemism for a "very poor" area and that people have referred to Anhui as the "Appalachia of China."

A photographic journey that starts in Shanghai, a great 21st century city and leads on to Anhui and Jiangxi Provinces.