In a white-walled village where the sun made me squint, I went to see a doctor.

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About 220 kilometers south of Kunming, Tuanshan is the country's only intact traditional walled Qing village where the Yi people still live.

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Around 1286, this village of thick-walled farmhouses was founded by settlers from the west.

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Here in Qobtan Jebel, a pinprick village of century-old stone walled homes in the hills west of Aleppo, Mr. Shehab Eddin's word is law, at least for now.

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Throughout the afternoon, news stations showed live footage punctuated by gunfire and small explosions at the small, walled residential compound set amid rice fields in a village.

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Political discourse is harder, as is any consensus action, because the collaborative promise of an online global village has morphed into an endless number of walled and locked enclaves of exclusionary ideologies.

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Sipping lemon-ginger tea on the cushions of our house's rooftop pavilion, I watch the first light spangle the leaves of the poplars along the village's irrigation stream, see lambs herded into a small willow-walled corral, a woman in a black robe and orange head scarf testing her lower back after filling her buckets.

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