"We think many black and smelly rivers have yet to be discovered," the activist says during a 6km trek along the River of Happiness or Xing Fu river.
Decades of unbridled industrialisation and urbanisation mean China has no shortage of black and smelly rivers.
And, of course, there was the bumper-to-bumper traffic, smelly rivers and turnstiles on buses, which even now still baffle me".
Shi is one of hundreds of Chinese citizens fanning out across the country in search of what the government has labelled "black and smelly rivers".
The tablets were found under a 1950s office block in the still smelly, wet mud of the lost river Walbrook, as the site was being cleared for a huge new European headquarters for Bloomberg.
It's so smelly!" laughs the bald farmer, who says the river's downhill slide began after China's economic opening started in the late 1970s.
It's dank, smelly, and kind of gross — there is a river of untreated waste water flowing through the room, and they recommend washing your hands thoroughly afterwards — but I found it fascinating.
Among the minor characters is Hannah, a gluttonous, hairy-handed and smelly East European au pair, "from a town called Bronchitis, with a winding river called Influenza running through it"; she is the butt of countless jokes.
TIDES and time have been the only constants on the Raritan Estuary, which for decades was a smelly stretch of parkway to be endured by travelers racing over the river on the way to the Shore.
The dump will likely bring back smelly memories for longtime Montrealers, who remember the city regularly pouring sewage into the river until 1980.
