Fuddland

One of the other claims-to-fame for the city of Bozhou is as the present-day form of the birthplace of the warlord Cao Cao, who lived during the time of the Three Kingdoms around the second and third centuries. [This period is the subject of John Woo’s latest film, Red Cliff.]

Despite being traditional portrayed in stories from this era as a big of an evil bugger, Bozhou is seemingly rather proud of its tyrannical son, and an enormous [albeit almost characature-like with his barrel-sized chest] statue looks out over the city from in front of the train station.

One of his sneaky tactical ideas is also now a tourist attraction named Dixia Yunbing Dao [which I’m roughly translating as “army-moved-underground tunnels”]: he dug out a short network of subterranean tunnels beneath the city for his army to hide in, waiting for an invading force to wander in under a false sense of the scale of his defences. The tunnels—although quite well-lit with bare lightbulbs and not in the least bit maze-like—are still pretty claustrophobic, smelling of damp earth, barely wider than my shoulders and forcing me to stoop throughout their length. The thought of waiting down there for any length of time, jam-packed between fellow soldiers in the darkness makes me quite uncomfortable.

The last Cao Cao-related attraction we visited confused me a little until I did some background reading. I thought I was visiting Cao Cao’s tomb, but in fact it was the tomb of Cao Teng, Cao Cao’s foster-grandfather, which is nothing more than a grass-covered mound of earth about twenty feet high surround by small flowerbeds, but also on display is the jade burial suit of Cao Song, Cao Cao’s father. [I can’t find anything (in English) that tells me where Cao Cao was laid to rest.] The longer I looked at it the eerier it became, the simplistic facial features somehow making it seem like it could sit up at any moment and start clomping towards me with its oversized feet. [I think I’ve seen too many Mummy films.]