Treasure Chicken
Aug 16, 01:25 PM
So I’m here in the internet bar in Baoji – literally “precious treasure chicken”, and I’m planning to be in town for the next couple of days. I caught the bus this morning from Tianshui (I am beginning to think that for shorter hops like this, buses are the way to go in China) and am now settled into my new hotel and have had a quick chance to explore the city, which I already quite like.
No other news yet from here. And no chickens either. But this is just a quick note to say that I’m very likely going to be out of email (and FB and twitter) contact until I get to Anyang – on the 20th of the month. I’ll still update this blog, however, if there’s anything to say of interest, either on the subject of chickens or on some other subject; and for anything urgent do contact me on my De Montfort University email (easy to find if you search!).
Curious Happenings on Daxiang Mountain
Aug 15, 04:45 PM
There’s something undeniably exhilarating about hurtling down a mountain road in a minibus driven at speed, the driver’s hand upon the horn, loud music blaring, and spectacular landscapes unfolding before you. As I headed to Gangu (甘谷) this morning, through the terraced hills and orchards of a landscape that already feels a part of the old Silk Route, I was filled with the excitement that can only come from knowing that a deadly precipice is mere feet away.
I decided this morning to head to Daxiang Shan （大象山) or Elephant Mountain, a couple of hours to the West of Tianshui, to visit the Tang dynasty rock-cut Buddha, who has blue eyebrows and moustache. It seemed worth the journey just for the moustache, I thought. I caught the bus from Qincheng mid-morning, and arrived in Gangu in time for lunch, eating in a cheap fried noodle place where I was interrogated in the usual fashion – where was I from, how long had I been in China, and so on. After lunch, I headed up to the ragged and unlovely looking mountain just out of town, a series of temples and building clinging to a curiously shabby looking cliff. It turned out, however, to be one of the more intriguing days I have spent in China, and this largely thanks to the mother and daughter – both local to the mountain – who I met just before I started to climb the steps. Here’s a photograph of my two excellent companions for the day:
We met when the daughter marched up and said, in English, “Let’s make friends.” “Good idea,” I replied, and we shook hands. Then we got into conversation in Chinese as we climbed the steps. I turned out that they lived on the mountain, and they were both immensely welcoming. Half way up, they suggested I stop off for a cup of tea and a rest, so we turned off the path into a courtyard where there was a figure of the God of Wealth, attended to by a diminutive monk, and several people were working on carpentry, renovating the courtyard. After making offerings of incense to the God of Wealth, I sat down for tea. Somebody found a lump of sugar the size of a fist, and – believing that Westerners all like their tea sweet – tried to crumble it into my glass. I managed to limit the amount that found its way into my drink, but not to entirely resist. I must have spent a good hour chatting in the courtyard. The little girl – who quickly appointed herself as my guide and general purpose mentor – demonstrated some fine dance moves for me:
Dancing is not my strong suit, but knowing that nothing breaks the ice more than looking ridiculous, I asked her to teach me. She tried her best, but this met with general bewilderment and perhaps a hint of disapproval. Was this a girl’s dance? I asked. It was, she said. OK, so could you teach me a man’s dance? She did this gladly, showing me a manly kind of riding-a-horse-across-the-grasslands dance. When I emulated this, my dancing was met with general approval, and even a small ripple of applause.
The conversation turned, as it often does in China, to money. In Britain, people will go out of their way not to ask others what they earn, and questions about personal finances are considered about as personal as it gets. Which is weird, when you think about it. And probably unhealthy, too. In China, people happily talk about money. So we had the usual conversation about exchange rates and English pounds and Renminbi. It was at this point that somebody asked if I had any English pounds with me. They were curious what they looked like. I said I didn’t, but I did have Hong Kong dollars. This seemed to be a good second-best, so I took out a few of the dollar bills I had remaining from Hong Kong and they were passed around. What is the exchange rate for these? they asked. More or less one to one, I said. OK, let’s exchange, said one woman. But you can’t use them here, I said. We know, but they are interesting. OK, well why not just take one? I can’t use them either, so I can give you one. No, we can’t take one. We will exchange for Renminbi. And suddenly, up there on that dusty hill in Gansu province, in a building site in a Buddhist temple, there was a curious rush on Hong Kong dollars, with folks wanting to clear me out in exchange for mainland currency, exchanging one-for-one. It was not a financial transaction. This was not a matter of currency; instead these were artefacts. One man wanted a 100, a 50, a 20 and a 10 dollar bill, so he had one of each. He liked the 10 (as I like the ten) because it has a see-through window, which is quite snazzy. But he wanted to recompense me. I tried to say that it really wasn’t a good deal, that I’d rather just give the things away, but my hosts were insistent. If they were worth something, they should pay what they were worth.
By this time all of my very few remaining Hong Kong dollars were doing the rounds of the whole group, and folks were digging into their pockets to give me Chinese currency in return, despite my protests. At the end of the ten minutes or so, I was very slightly poorer in Hong Kong bills and very slightly richer in mainland Chinese bills.
Such financial speculation over with, we sat down to drink more tea and eat large quantities of melon; and after another blessing from the monk, we continued on our way up the hill. Next we visited the temple higher up, where my two new friends, mother and daughter, took me to see the resident monks. They needed poking as they were asleep, but bore this with remarkable good nature. Once I was sat down and provided with more tea, we launched into a long discussion about Buddhism. Or, better put, a lecture. The most voluble of the monks insisted that Buddhist was the finest religion there was. Everything else, he confided, was next to useless. And when he got me to make offerings of incense to the small Buddha figure, he thought that there was something decidedly Christian about the way I did so – which was probably right, given that Anglicanism is virtually in my DNA, being the first non-believer to follow from a long line of Anglican priests – so I was instructed in how to bow to images so that I looked like a Buddhist and not a Christian. Finally, after about another hour of discussion, they gave me a small pile of books in Chinese about Buddhism, exhorted me to study them well, and to tell people in the West that Buddhism was the thing to practice. I said I’d do my best.
By now, I was keen to climb the hill and see the large blue-moustached fellow at the top. My young self-appointed guide, however, was quite taken by the sight of me bowing before Buddha images, so at every stopping-point, she got me to repeat the movement. It would happen like this. We’d go into a shrine. She’d say, “Let’s worship!” and grin. Then we’d stand side by side and bow three times, our heads touching the cushions, then bow three times from standing. Then she’d grin at me again. “OK, let’s go,” she’d say.
Eventually we reached the top of the hill, and the rock-cut Buddha was really rather astonishing. Here’s a picture:
Here’s the close-up of the moustache – the paint, incredibly, is said to be original Tang Dynasty paintwork:
Here’s the magnificent foot:
And here’s the view from the base of the Buddha statue.
The top of the hill is filled with caves, tunnels and niches, many of them that look decidedly closed off to visiting tourists. But my guide, with the fearlessness of a seven-year-old, and with her knowledge of the place that came from it being more or less her own back yard, took me on a tour of various tunnels that led up to rock-cut shrines, and other nooks and crevices whilst her mother sat outside in the shade, fanning herself and chatting. We emerged into one dark shrine where there was an elderly keeper who seemed astonished to see me there. “Are you Chinese?” he kept asking. No, I said, I am English. “Are you Chinese?” he would say again. At the back of this shrine there was a curtain, and my guide pulled open the curtains and then pushed open the large doors to yet another shrine inside. There in the gloom were several figures holding books, and we went round translating the characters as best we could, although being traditional rather than simplified, here at least we were both struggling.
Eventually the three of us we made our way down, but not before stopping off in the temple half way. Here we visited a cave shrine, containing a number of Buddha figures, and within the cave another friendly local led us to another cave with statues depicting Buddhist visions of hell. Gruesome stuff (I’ve written about Buddhist visions of hell, and my unease with them, over on thinkBuddha some time back). There was another cave, right at the back, but this was locked, so we came back into the sunshine, where the abbot had come to see what all the fuss was about, and to check out this foreigner who more or less (more today than yesterday, to be sure; less than would be ideal) could speak a bit of Chinese. The man who had shown us the caves started describing how I had been bowing before the Buddha images, and the abbot decided that if this was the case, I should certainly be permitted into the innermost cave. Somebody was sent to fetch the key.
The innermost cave – a cave within a cave within a cave – was extraordinary. I was asked not to photograph it, so I didn’t; but it was a cave shaped roughly like a doughnut, with the walls entirely encrusted from floor to painted ceiling with brightly painted sculptures of the eight hundred luohan (八百罗汉) or arhats – enlightened Buddhist disciples. The sculptures were modern, and each was different from all the others. It was an extraordinary piece of work. A monk showed us to the far side of the cave, and there was a gloriously garish neon shrine to the Bodhisattva Guanyin (观音菩萨/觀音菩薩). My small guide and I then did our double-act of worshipping at the shrine, at which point the monk then declared that, once again, I was not doing it right. There followed another twenty minute lesson in proper bowing – different from the previous lesson, in fact – and if I have retained anything it is that one’s feet must be aligned like the lines in the number 8 (八) – an auspicious number in China. When he was satisfied, he let us leave, and as we left the door was locked firmly behind after us.
By now it was getting late, and so with some reluctance, I said that I needed to head to catch the bus back to Tianshui. We walked down the hill and hopped into a waiting motor-tricycle into town, where I said goodbye to these wonderfully hospitable and generous people and boarded the raucous and crowded minibus back to Tianshui.
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Skincare, Maiji Shan - and a few snapshots.
Aug 14, 02:22 PM
OK, so I promised some images of the Fu Xi temple, so here they are. Firstly, a couple of pictures of Fu Xi himself, one from the murals in the temple, and one of the main image:
The Dragon Horse is also impressive, so I can’t leave him out:
On to today. I woke up this morning in my somewhat grim hotel in Qinzhou (or Qincheng, my taxi driver said that both names will suffice, which is confusing – here is a town split into two parts, each ten miles from the other, and one part has two equally good names…) to the sound of speakers being tested and the sight of banners fluttering past my window. Aha, I thought. They are setting up for a local music festival. And I thought perhaps I should stay around in that part of town if there was a bit of culture to be had. But when I put my glasses on, I realised that it was not a music festival. It was a washing machine festival. Folks were unloading gleaming washing machines into little tents marked with the names of famous manufacturers. This decided it for me: I did not want to be kept awake the coming night by a washing machine festival. So I hopped into a taxi and headed down to the more down-at-heel Beidao, where I’m staying in the very reasonable Dong An hotel, and have the luxury of an internet broadband connection, which is allowing me to catch up on phone calls and so on.
Having checked in here and bought some good fresh bread from the market for breakfast, I headed up to Maiji Shan mountain, some twenty miles or so out of town. Maiji Shan has some of the finest rock-cut Buddhas in China; unfortunately, it was also closed, as the recent rains have raised safety concerns. But the large, rambling botanical gardens were lovely, with lots of paths through the forest:
For the rest of the day, I’ve been exploring Beidao, which I quite like. This evening I was apprehended in the street by some sellers of skincare produces for the lady in my life, as these people always put it when they do the same thing back home. The resulting conversation gathered quite a crowd of curious onlookers. Shortly after, I took refuge in a local restaurant, ordered some mixed vegetables that came with a generous but unwelcome sprinkling of strips of liver, and returned to the hotel to do a bit more writing. Tomorrow I’m still not sure what to do – whether to go to Water Curtain Cave – a somewhat long trip – or whether to stay closer to home and explore a few more places are Tianshui, including the nearby Guatai Shan – a mountain that is associated with the wearer of leaves himself. I’ll see how I feel, and when I manage to wake up, tomorrow morning.
Fu Xi, inventor of the i-Pad?
Aug 13, 10:12 AM
Right, folks. Let’s get one thing straight. Fu Xi (伏羲) – the leaf-clad inventor of fishing nets, writing, sericulture and the eight trigrams (that when doubled up become the 64 hexagrams of the Yi Jing) is not a historical figure. He is a story. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It never did Anna Karenina any harm. Take him as a story, and he just about hangs together. Take him as historical fact, and none of it makes much sense.
OK? Happy with that. Now we can move on. I’m writing this from Tianshui in an internet cafe filled with game-playing chain-smoking teenagers. I’m here mainly to visit the Fu Xi temple, which is just on the edge of town. Tianshui is a small and relatively relaxed place, made up of two towns about ten miles apart; and I’m staying in the somewhat faded and shabby hotel in the centre of Qinzhuo, the Western part of town. It’s comfortable enough, although decidedly down-at-heel. Once, perhaps twenty years ago, it may have aspired to a degree of elegance; but somewhere on the way, it got distracted, and so it remains an echoing and cavernous shell of a place. It is cheap, if not exactly cheerful; if I want to get access to my room, I need to track down the woman with a key and get her to let me in; and it lacks a functioning wireless connection, hence the internet cafe. But it’s fine for a couple of nights, and yesterday I had a good evening hanging out eating some of the very good local food with some interesting and chatty French travellers. Because I’m in town for a few more days, and because of the limited charms of the Qinzhou place, I’m planning to move down the road to Beidao to see if I can find anywhere slightly more congenial to stay there.
But on to Fu Xi. The mythical figure is said to have lived in 2800 BCE or thereabouts, and to have lived for a goodly one hundred and sixty years or so. He is treated, in several places, as the originator of all human culture, and his temple here in Tianshui has been worth the trip. Outside were rows of small kids practising martial arts, and inside it was relativly peaceful, a courtyard filled with ancient trees and the smell of burning incense. The main hall, as well as having an imposing staring figure of Fu Xi himself, complete with leaf-clading, contained a slightly demented looking life-size sculpture of the dragon horse that was said to have risen from the river with the “river diagram” (hetu) on its back – a symbol that is repeated on the painted temple ceiling, and that is related to the Yijing in ways too complicated to go into here. I’d love to give you a picture of the horse, as it was fabulous; but as I’m not on my laptop but on an internet bar machine, I’ll have to give it a miss. The paintings on the walls were interesting too – contemporary or near contemporary images of a rugged looking Fu Xi going about his business of inventing everything there was to be invented, short of the i-Pad – and on the ceiling were the original paintings of the sixty four hexagrams.
I’m interested by the way in which Fu Xi is talked about here in China, and indeed by the whole mystique around the Yijing. So in the wildly popular “Mystery of the Yijing” (易经的奥秘) broadcast on China’s TV channel CCTV10, the presenter repeats the stories of Fu Xi as if they are historical fact, without any consideration of the implications of this claim. There are, and never were, dragon horses. Fishing, writing and so on were simply not invented by a single person. People don’t live to one hundred and sixty something years old. But when I’ve tried to point all this out to people here, my objections have often been dismissed or brushed aside. (The presenter of “Mystery”, incidentally, makes the claim that Westerners cannot understand these particular mysteries – note the “cannot” rather than “do not”, as if there is something constitutionally different about Western folk that forever bars the possibility of understanding these things; and were I to meet with him, I suspect he too would respond with similar impatience to my petty-minded questions such as that of historical evidence and the like.)
After wrestling with questions of historical accuracy and admiring dragon horses in the Fu Xi temple, I headed up to the out of town Jade Spring taoist temple for a brisk stroll around. It was quiet and rather beautiful in a run-down kind of way, and a place of active Daoist practice. Heading back into town, I paid a visit to the Xinhua bookstore, and then installed myself here in the internet cafe. For the rest of the evening, I’m planning to do a bit more writing, and to sample more of the local food. I also want to make plans for the next few days. It’s hard to find out exactly what is happening in terms of the weather – I am not far from Zhouqu which had the terrible mudslide a few days back, and some other routes are washed away or not traversable – so I’m going to ask around to see what I can find out. Tomorrow I’m going to the Buddhist caves at Maiji Shan, and if it is both possible and safe to do so with the rains and everything, I’d like to get down to Moon Canyon, which is apparently beautiful.
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At the Shaanxi First Demonstration Model in Adolescent Moral Education
Aug 11, 12:31 PM
Otherwise known as the Shaanxi History Museum. I’m writing this at breakfast time – eating some very tasty cheese pastries (Xi’an, being somewhat to the West, has a substantial Islamic population, and it is this, I think, that I have to thank for the pastries) whilst doing my best to ignore the conversation of the two men standing next to me, arms folded, discussing me – and by extension the curious ways of all foreigners – in Chinese. Why do they come all this way, and then buy such cheap breakfast? they are asking. Because cheese pastries can’t be beat when it comes to breakfast, I’m tempted to interject; but I don’t really want to get involved.
Yesterday was spent mainly standing in queues. I first went to the ticket office to sort out my final overnight ticket. I was there at nine, tickets went on sale twenty minutes beforehand, and by the time I got there, they were all sold out. I’m never sure what “sold out” actually means – those with connections (as I had in Jinan) can manage to get tickets even if they are seemingly all gone – but the woman behind the counter was insistent. So I thought I’d try my luck at the rail station. Same story there, but I did manage to sort out a ticket that will get me most of the way I want to go by sleeper. The other bits of the journey I’ll cobble together by local train or bus.
Having spent much of my morning in queues, I then went to the Shaanxi history museum, where I stood in line for a long time before being issued with a free ticket. The reason for the long queues was the astonishingly inefficient system that required every visitor to sign in with their name, age, identity card number and so forth. Anyway, after an hour of waiting in line, I took my ticket to the entrance. At the gate, an adolescent in need of demonstration models in moral education, dressed his security uniform, took one look at me, made a violent chopping gesture with his left hand, made a violent chopping gesture with his right hand, and barred my way.
“Sorry,” I said in Chinese. “I don’t understand what you mean.”
Another violent chopping gesture with left hand, another violent chopping gesture with right hand.
“Sorry, you need to explain what you mean.”
Various alarming and threatening gestures.
“Look, I know a little Chinese. Please just tell me what you are trying to say.”
He paused. “You must put your bag in the cloakroom. You can’t bring it in.”
“Oh, OK. Thanks.”
By this time, I was not feeling particularly warmly towards the Shaanxi history museum. The thing about museums of history and archaeology in China is that the exhibits are invariably spectacular, but there are only so many Shang dynasty bronze vessels that you can see without wanting to go and do something else. So I didn’t spend a great deal of time in the museum, which was crowded and far from being the best collection I’ve seen. But in the museum bookshop I was sorely tempted by the hardbound copy of “Hello Deng Xiaoping”, with the diminutive fellow sitting in a big armchair on the cover (the big chair was a mistake for such a little guy), an enormous and glossy book that was so covered in dust that it looked as if nobody had touched it for over two decades. Deng enthusiasts can, I have discovered, find the book here.
Next I’m off in search of bigger prey, however, with the terracotta army of Qin Shihuang. Then I’ll be heading West to Tianshui, from where I’ll catch you up on my news.
Xi'an
Aug 9, 03:05 PM
So here I am in Xi’an, in the raucous Hanwood Hostel, a place just south of the Big Goose Pagoda, presided over by a manager who is as friendly as he is overbearing, and a band of almost impossibly perky and upbeat staff. My room is what you would expect of a solitary confinement cell in some enlightened nation where they ardently believed that prison is about reform and not about punishment. That is to say, it is small and cell-like, with a bare concrete floor, but it has a solid but functional bed, somewhat elegant and very comfortable bedding, and with the welcome addition of air-conditioning.
It’s a chatty place, the Hanwood hostel. And through my conversations here, I am realising that, when it comes to Chinese, I have reached that awkward point at which, in my better moments, I speak well enough to get myself into deep waters, but not well enough to navigate the aforementioned waters with much skill. I put together a few half-way competent sentences, and the person I’m talking to assumes that I’m doing rather better than I am, so launches into a long treatise on something or other that I only partially follow. In fact, it may not be linguistic skill at all, but rather the skill of being able to pull the right kind of thoughtful faces at what I judge are the right moments.
Nevertheless, despite these rather too frequent exercises in bafflement, I am enjoying Xi’an. Behind the hostel, in the few backstreets that have not yet been turned into some kind of weird Tang dynasty theme park (it is only a matter of time, indeed there is in fact a weird Tang Dynasty theme park just up the road, a place that might be weird enough to merit a visit, and given the theme-park feel of the area, it’s a kind of theme park within a theme park…) there are some great places to eat for a matter of pence: I had home-made noodles this evening, fried with a spicy sauce, and sat at a rickety table on the pavement writing. And in the opposite direction, every evening, there is a dancing fountain display by the Big Goose Pagoda, something that is impressive in its way, and made much more fun by the fact that nobody heeds the public safety warnings, and so the fountains are full of people larking around and getting soaked to the skin.
My main preoccupation at the moment is getting train tickets sorted for the rest of my journey. I now have a new train ticket strategy, which goes roughly like this. First of all check the train lines on the very useful cnvol.com. Next select the trains that I’d like to go on and write down all the details. Then head to a booking window – not the main station, which is chaos almost everywhere – first thing on the morning exactly ten days before I intend to travel, and try to sort a ticket with the help of my list of favoured trains. I’ll see how well this works tomorrow morning, but hopefully I’ll be able to get from Tianshui to Anyang – my only remaining long-distance journey – without another hard seat.
Meanwhile the stories continue to come at a fairly steady rate, which is gratifying. I’ve cracked the difficult no. 18, I think, which has been bugging me for months. It’s not fully written yet, but the idea is now resolved. It’s good to have that one more or less sorted out. The story that was occupying that slot was terrible, and can now be consigned to the great wastebin in the sky.
Meanwhile, I’ve been playing with WordPress, getting a website set up for the fun creative writing collaboration that I’ll be setting up between Zhongshan University in Guangzhou and De Montfort. It should be a whole lot of fun, but we need to get a solid platform for the collaboration sorted out before or shortly after the term starts. So I’ve been putting my webmaster hat on (a hat that, I’m glad to say, I don’t wear very often these days) for a while, to get something up and running.
Tomorrow I’m finalising train ticket plans, and heading to the history museum here in Xi’an. The day after will be the obligatory visit to the terracotta army. After that, I’m heading West again to Tianshui.
For now, however, I’m off to bed. The guy opposite me, who has been earnestly trying to teach me about the wonders of Chinese culture, has ceased showing me photos every two minutes, and is now playing mournful traditional Chinese tunes on his laptop, and singing along for my edification.
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Unforeseeable
Aug 8, 11:04 AM
As I’m without internet for a day or two, I’m writing this in my trusty notepad, and I’ll upload it later. I’m currently with my friends in Jinan, eating watermelon and waiting for the train onwards to Xi’an. Shandong has been an absolute pleasure from start to finish. Historically, it is a fascinating province. And I’m leaving with the sense that there is much more here that I would like, at some time, to explore.
Anyway, once I’ve arrived in Xi’an, I’ll be pretty much in the last phase of my trip. There’s still a bit of work to do in terms of more formal research for the trip, although hanging out with dog-meat sellers, eating watermelon with friends, and stumbling through Chinese conversations in shops whilst buying an MP3 player to replace the one that I managed to crack in Qufu can all equally be considered to be research when it comes to the curious business of writing stories. So far, of the sixty four stories that I have set myself the task of writing, I have written about forty two. This is a pleasing figure, and I’m hoping that by the end of the trip I’ll be well into the fifties. Ideally, I’d like to have no more than ten to complete by the time I get home. Although, of course, this is only the beginning. There is the business of writing the remaining stories. There is the business of editing. And there is the curious framework into which I am fitting all of this work, which needs to be revised again and again until it is exactly right. All of this, I think, could take a long time.
It is always interesting seeing a book take shape. This one has been on the boil for years on end. In fact, many of the things I work on tend to have been on the boil for a long time. There are some writers who write in series. They write a book. They finish it. They have another idea. They write another book. And so on. I tend to write in parallel, which is a much messier process. I always have a number of possibilities on the go at once. Some of them fade away, some of them turn into other projects (so for example, I was reminded only today as I looked over some old work lurking around on my hard drive, that my PhD thesis and Sea-Legs, the book that came out of it, had their origins in a curious novel that I was once trying to write), and some of them eventually emerge, but never in the shape that I had anticipated. One of the reasons I like writing, in fact, is that it is a process of engaging with the unforeseeability of things. One of the reasons that I feel suspicious about some of the mechanisms of academic research is that they are designed for minimum unforeseeability: we have to know in advance what we are going to find, and the unforeseeable is considered as a threat.
This is perhaps why I tend to write well on the move as well. The not-knowing-what-comes-next of a life on the move is similar, in a way, to the not-knowing-what-comes-next of the process of writing.
Uploaded in Xi’an, after a great overnight rail journey…. More anon!