The young Chinese woman taking a picture by the water, otherwise know as ‘the customer’, most probably has a picture almost identical to this one. On the far side of the water is the mainland where the city continues unabated. As far as the eye can see huge tower blocks rise from the ground, thousands of lives contained in each one. The scale and number of people is sometimes hard to fully hold onto, particularly when you try to imagine the country as a whole since Xiamen is a relatively small city by Chinese standards with a mere 2.5 million inhabitants.