Fuddland

Those times when I avoid work for an extended period and get to see more of China.

This category is a subcategory of China.

This category also has the following subcategories [number of entries in brackets]:

• Bozhou [4]
• Chengdu and the Sichuan Province (January 2007) [11]
• Daytrips [8]
• Jiuhua Shan [4]
• Lu Shan [3]
• Manzhouli [5]
• Shenyang [3]
• Xi'an [4]
• Yunnan, Guangxi and Hainan Island [6]

New year, new weblog entry!

I’ll get back into things slowly with a few photos of my winter holiday to Mount Emei, starting with the candles at Wannian Si — the Temple of 10,000 Years.

Mount Emei is one of the four sacred mountains of Chinese Buddhism, and there are dozens of temples and statues honouring Puxian and his six-tusked elephant.

In the dead of winter there were almost no other people staying in the monastaries, and walking through the winter-wonderland forests there were times when we could hear no sound apart from the crunch of the snow under our feet. Even the monkeys were relatively well-behaved.

Subtitle: The Evil Scary Monkeys of Lu Shan

Look at this pathetic little fella:

Feel sorry for him, don’t you? You’d like to coddle and cuddle and love him for ever and ever, wouldn’t you? He’s just hungry and wants a little bit of food, that’s all, right?

Wrong. He wants all of your food, he wants it now, and he isn’t going to take no for an answer.

One part of the forests of Lu Shan is home to a group of some kind of monkey that have, over the years and generations, come to expect—nay, demand—tasty snacks from the visitors that dare to wander through their domain. So it would be quite unwise to, say, take out a half-eaten packet of biscuits from your coat pocket right in front of two of these agile little chaps and attempt to stow it away in your bag, because [as the woman who did this found] they’ll come bounding towards you with their bony fingers and bared teeth, with every intention of relieving you of your biscuity treats. Of course this was not all the woman’s fault; the blame mostly lies with the countless people who have come before and [directly, or indirectly through thoughtless littering] given these monkeys an insatiable sweet-tooth.

Foolishly, we thought we were safe sitting some way from where we first encountered the monkeys, and sat down on a bench at the Dragon Head Precipice to snack on some bread rolls, but before we knew what was happening, a lone and larger-than-the-others scavenger crept up on us. Reverting to our base states, Mary yelped and threw her roll over the precipice while I grabbed my camera tripod and gave the ground a thump in an effort to scare the mangy monkey away. But he was not deterred and made off with our bag of rolls—then sat brazenly nearby and got to work ripping open the plastic and chowing down.

Filthy fish to fry

Walking back up to the town, we came across a formerly-large and now very muddy lake that seemed to have had the plug taken out, with a fair number of fishermen dotted around its banks.

On the pavement above were people selling their freshly-caught fish, which were laid out on the ground—no tables, no plastic sheets, not even a newspaper betwixt fin and filth. As I took a quick photo, the gentleman asked me to buy one, to which I replied that I didn’t want to buy, I just wanted to take a picture; in Chinese, this forms a pleasant little rhyming couplet which caused some snickering from the people standing nearby:

Man

买买买！

Mǎi mǎi mǎi!

Me

我不要买，我只要拍！

Wǒ bù yào mǎi, wǒ zhǐ yào pāi!

There are historic sites aplenty to be seen in Lu Shan and, unlike many of China’s mountainous holiday destinations, they do not all comprise seemingly identical Buddhist temples with a huge bucket of incense burning outside. They do, however, have typically grandiose names such as Dragon Head Precipice, Lion Mouth Rock, and the Grand [and Small] Heavenly Lake, all within easy walking distance of each other.

Immortal Cave

And of course, if you love nothing better than visiting Buddhist temples with a huge bucket of incense burning outside, fear not for Lu Shan caters for you too. The Immortal Cave offers an interesting twist on this, being set in a small cave where the leader of the Eight Immortals of Chinese mythology is said to have hung out, probably being all mystical and stuff.

Nuona Pagoda

Nowhere of interest is complete without a pagoda or seventeen, but at least this one is of a quite different style from the usual square, tiered variety—a sign said it was based on “Indian style” but it is apparently in honour of the tulku [current incarnation of a Tibetan Buddhist lama] of the now-defunct region of Tibet known as Xikang.

Lu Shan cinema

One of the less-historic claims-to-fame of the area is the cinema that has shown the same one film [the tautologically-translated “Romance on Lu Shan Mountain”] every day since it premiered here in 1980, making it the Guinness World Record holder for “Longest First-Run of a Film in One Cinema”. We hung around outside for a while just on the off-chance that one of the staff would come tearing out of the building screaming, “I can’t take it anymore! Every … day, the same … film, over … and over! Raaarrrggghghhhghggghhhhhhhgggurgle…” but we must have missed them.

For a different sort of Christmas we headed out of town for a few days of peace and quiet in the pine forest-covered rocky mountains of Lu Shan. This area was created for and by the wealthy foreigners who mostly lived in Shanghai from the 1800s until the establishment of the PRC, as a holiday-villa settlement in which to escape the cloying humidity of the city. There are still many fairly-well-maintained villas remaining, the most significant of which belonged to Chiang Kai-Shek.

Glories of the past

It subsequently became a regular meeting-place of the CCCPC, and Mao’s former residence has been converted into a combination of a museum of local geology [a few rooms with some rather uninspiring collections of rocks and dirt, together with poorly-translated signs and comically-naff paintings of scenes from the bygone millennia] and a shrine to its previous occupant, complete the preserved bedroom in which everything on display was, it proudly claimed, “personally used” by the man himself.

This claim was not so proudly advertised—although one can’t help but infer it—at the villa of Chiang Kai-Shek, at which Mao was a guest once or twice and, for some reason, includes the bathroom as one of the rooms on display. Perhaps it was to highlight the multi-cultural aspects of its past, containing as it did both a squat- and Western-style toilet as well as a bidet.

There was also an intricately-carved ivory tusk that must have been a metre in length—and however much we may tut-tut over its origins, it was fascinating to see the level of detail they could carve out without destroying it.

Off-peak peaks

Despite it being close to zero Celcius at this time of year, we deliberately chose an off-peak season simply so that we didn’t have to contend with hoards and hoards of tourists [like ourselves, for example]—make no mistake, Lu Shan is one of the most popular destinations in this part of the country and on national holidays is teeming with visitors, foreign and [overwhelmingly] domestic. Our plan worked and we wandered through the peaks in relative solitude, apart from the odd tour group and one particularly boisterous group of male students.

There are well-defined pathways and staircases all over the mountains themselves, which lead you quite naturally to each and every one of the designated vantage-points and places of interest—or rather, to those that weren’t frustratingly closed for the winter. [The frustration lay in the fact that we had to reach the entrance to the place before we found out it was closed. This included one occasion when we purchased one-way tickets for the cable car in the belief that at the other end was a pathway through the mountains that eventually lead back to the town. It was only at the other end that the staff told us it was closed. What did the ones at the top think we were going to do, tightrope-walk back? In fairness, once we protested that they should have really been told at the top, they gave us a discount on the return ticket.]

As if it wasn’t quite clear enough that there is something worth stopping and having a look at, we found most places had been set up with a now-badly-weathered wooden platform from which one can recreate a photo of Mao at the same spot. Previous visitors’ photos were proudly displayed, which somehow all managed to include one balding Chinese man with a paunch doing his best to adopt the pose of his past leader. These fellas must be a hoot at every fancy-dress party. “Oh, I see you’ve come as Chairman Mao … again…”

Although I’m sure it makes a very pleasant day out at most times of the year, there’s really only one time of year that, if you happen to be in the area, you should make an extra effort to visit Tianping Hill [in Chinese, Tianping Shan]: in the latter weeks of autumn, from mid-November to early December, the maple-tree forest turns all shades of reds and deep oranges.

The park is nicely laid out so that you wander through the trees to the foot of the hill, peering into numerous small temples along the way should they take your fancy, before taking your time climbing the 221 metres up the not-too-steep carved-out stairway to the peak. At the top we found nothing more than some interestingly-shaped boulders and a fairly out-of-place fairground shoot-the-balloons game, although there were signs to a tea house which takes it water from a nearby spring that we never got around to following. But being able to look down and appreciate the contrast of the leaves against the surrounding evergreens is the real reason to have made the climb, as well as looking out towards Suzhou and trying to make out the skyscrapers through the haze of the pollution.

After a few minutes checking out the view in each direction, I wondered aloud if the collection of large pools of water in a quite bare-looking area below was a quarry—and if so, was it still active?—when the ground suddenly shook underfoot and a large rumble came from the direction I was looking: an explosion had just gone off, which seemed to confirm that it was indeed a quarry and it was very much still active.

Back down in the maple tree forest, we came across the obligatory couples having their wedding photos taken [every beauty spot comes with them], and of course no Chinese park would be complete without some sort of performance watched by a smattering of pensioners and teenage girls. We stood for a few minutes to watch the feats of a man standing on a wobbly plank, but decided not to stay for the graceful acrobatic displays of the girls with their coats on over their leotards.

One particular treat was coming across a local artist painting the view across the pond. At first I thought she was faking it for the benefit of a professional-looking photographer who had set up a tripod just behind her, but she really was putting paint to canvas. I don’t know how she was managing to hold onto her brush without gloves, let alone put the paint where she intended it to go without shivering, but manage she did, and the results were looking pretty good.

Perhaps due to its location—fairly far removed from other famous tourist destinations or ports of trade [as well as it being in one of the poorer provinces in China]—while the local government seems to have gone some way towards designating certain areas to be of interest to tourists, the old streets and buildings of Bozhou that are in the traditional Chinese style are still plentiful in number mostly because they are still functional: people still live and work in and around them.

Wherever we went, on the street outside shops or walking down dusty side streets, glancing into open doors, we saw game after game of mahjong being played—it reminded me a lot of what I saw in Chengdu, although at least most of these people seemed to be at their actual places of work not working, rather than hanging out in the park all day not working. The general aura of a relaxed attitude to life may or not be related to Bozhou being the hometown of the founder of Daoism [aka Taoism], Laozi [aka Laosi, Lao Tse, Lao-Tzu, Laotze, and Laocius].

Every evening we were there we ate out at a sprawling food court just across the road from our hotel. At around four or five in the afternoon, dozens of tables and plastic stools are set out beneath an old marquee, with several different proprietors offering an enormous variety of dishes cooked before your very eyes. Since we didn’t really know any names of the local dishes that we could order, and even if we were told the names we wouldn’t know what it was, we settled on a much more convenient method of ordering: we simply chose the ingredients and asked to be made a tasty dish using them.

This sort of Chinese fare tends to use only one or two vegetable and meat components, given its pep with spices, garlic and sauces, so it’s quite easy to choose, say, a nice-looking aubergine and get served a huge plate of it flavoured with some sort of thick gravy-like sauce that you’ve never tasted before, but is nonetheless delicious. And of course there are staples like steamed dumplings, rice, and some sort of thick, tapioca-like soup with soy beans that seemed to be a local speciality to fill you up.

There were a few other parks and temples that we didn’t go and check out, but I think we saw the lion’s share of what Bozhou has to offer, and it was well worth the trip. The people were friendly and not overly-curious, even though we were the only foreigners we saw the entire time we were there. The only embarrassing “special treatment” we received was at the train station trying to buy our tickets home. As we were queuing, with a good twenty or thirty people in front of us, a new window was opened and we were beckoned forward. I was half-expecting to be spoken to in English, but [as with every other local that we interacted with in Bozhou] the attendant didn’t seem to know anything beyond, “Hello”. I felt quite awkward being allowed to buy our tickets ahead of all the other people waiting in line, but I expect politely refusing the service and re-joining the queue would have created great confusion [as well as unintended offense], and it was nice to be able to secure sleeper tickets for the ten-hour or so train ride back to Suzhou.

In stark contrast to the imperious Cao Cao, one of his contemporaries and another resident of Bozhou was the legendary physician Hua Tuo. [And when I say “legendary”, I of course mean, “I’d never heard of him until I went to Bozhou, but he does seem to have been pretty important.”]

As well as being a renowned practitioner of traditional medicine, perhaps his most significant achievement was the first recorded use of anaesthetic during surgery—1,800 years ago.

He might have passed his extensive knowledge on to future generations had he not irked Cao Cao by refusing to treat the tyrant’s chronic headaches exclusively—a stubbornness that cost him his life. [In fairness, his recommended treatment was to numb the pain with hashish then split Cao Cao’s head open with an axe to extract the pus, so one can perhaps understand Cao Cao’s desire for continuous pain-relief treatment rather than extreme surgery.]

The fairly simple former monastery of Huazu’an that has been designated a tribute to Hua Tuo doesn’t offer much to see beyond a tastefully-displayed statue of the man himself with a potted biography and a few other historical artifacts, but is worth seeing if only for completeness.

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.]

Last week was China’s National Day holiday, and thanks to some fortuitous timing of the calendar I ended up with a whopping eight consecutive days off, the better part of four of which Mary and I spent in the little-known city of Bozhou in the province of Anhui.

Despite being home to some quite significant historical and cultural places of interest, Bozhou’s tourism industry has barely gotten off the ground. There are street-signs to most of sights throughout the city, but ask a taxi driver to take to you one of them [or even pointing at the sign when you become convinced you must be pronouncing it completely incorrectly] and they have to yell out of their window at one of their fellow cabbies to ask for directions.

Still, we did manage to see almost all the city has to offer, and we started with the main reason we wanted to go there: the enormous traditional Chinese medicinal products marketplace. [Depending on your source, it’s either the world’s largest, or just China’s largest, or just one of the four largest, but just take it from me: it’s pretty blooming big.] As well as the weird and wonderful things that we were expecting to see, one surprise was just how good the place smelled—and not just the market, but throughout the city we got whiffs every now and then of pleasant aromas that we couldn’t quite place.

It was also nice to find that, despite being the only tourists in the entire place [by which I mean, the whole city, for the whole time we were there], the people were completely relaxed about us just wandering into their shops and around their stalls, snapping away with our cameras and poking our noses into the boxes, sacks and tanks on display. The few times I tried to enquire as to what unrecognised items were, or how to ingest something, I fell foul of a combination of a lack of vocabulary and an inability to even make out what words they were saying in a thick, guttural accent that they steadfastly refused to attempt to make clearer, but we were happy enough just taking it all in.

Summer has hit Suzhou with its full force, which means several days of sweltering heat [pushing 40°C] followed by torrential rainstorms which, although a welcome break from the sun, turn the streets into dirty rivers and bring sticky humidity when the temperatures rise again the following day. It’s a far cry from the refreshing change of the final week of my holiday a few months back, which I spent on the southernmost shores of the southernmost part of China, the provincial island of Hainan.

I admit I was fairly dubious about visiting a beach resort out here, and while it wasn’t quite up to the standards I’ve seen while visiting Nantucket or Cancun, the water was clean enough, and the beaches were kept rubbish-free despite the generally carefree Chinese attitude to littering. [Some days it’s all I can do to pick up the sweet wrapper that the kids in front of me have just thrown on the ground and thrust it back into their hands, but then a street-cleaner usually sweeps it away before I have a chance to move. This obviously works for them, but for someone with a deep-ingrained aversion to dropping litter, the lack of convenient bins every few hundred metres means I sometimes walk for miles with a sticky ice-cream wrapper flapping about in my hand.]

All along the south-east shores of the town of Sanya are lavish hotels and resorts with private beaches, but being a man on a budget I stayed in the Dadonghai area, home to two youth hostels, the better of which I found to be the Blue Sky International Youth Hostel. It was right around the corner from a very nice stretch of beach, with plenty of restaurants overlooking the sea and lots of street vendors peddling deliciously fresh fruit—I’ve never tasted better mangos.

The area is apparently astoundingly popular with Russian holidaymakers—so much so that most of the shops and roadsigns are displayed in both Chinese and Russian, although a Ukrainian woman that I met at the hostel told me that the Russian was mostly as amusingly wrong as much of the Chinglish that can be seen all over the country.

Walk a few hundred yards away from this vibrant, luxurious district and you find several huge hotels that have gone out of business. It was quite eerie walking around these deserted places, which looked as though everyone had simply walked out one day and never come back: through the padlocked glass doors, I could see plants that had wilted and died in the lobby, newspapers on the coffee tables; the adjacent restaurants still had their tables and chairs set out. [I half-expected the Chinese name of the hotel to translate as Mary Celeste.] A large smelly skip was thankfully downwind from the currently-populated areas.

Between these two areas were small groups of local fisherman, whole families catching crabs and molluscs, and—to be expected—more than a few wedding photo sessions taking advantage of the scenic backdrops. Despite not being much of a beach person, I did enjoy my week or so walking with the soft sand between my toes, my breakfasts of coconut jam on toast, and the surreal experience of Chinese taxi drivers and waiters trying to speak to me in Russian.

One of the must-dos in the province of Guangxi is a leisurely cruise down the Li River from Guilin to Yangshuo, taking in 83 kilometres worth of the renowned karst scenery. The weather was not totally on our side, presenting us with a rather overcast day, but it was still a lovely way to spend five-or-so hours.

A coach picked us up from our hostel and stopped off at a couple of other nearby hotels to collect the other members of this particular scheduled cruise. Once we were all aboard and on our way to the pier, we were given a brief history of the region by the tour guide, but the most entertaining thing he said was when, since lunch on the boat was part of package, he enquired if there were any vegetarians on board. Several people raised there hands, only to be told:

Okay, can you tell me who you are again when it’s time for lunch? All foreigners look the same to me.

[Aside: this appears to be genuinely true and not an intentionally ironic twist on the racist stereotypes displayed in many a terrible British sitcom from the 1970s; several other Chinese people have told me they have a hard time distinguishing many Western people from each other. Mary explained to me that this is because although people of East Asian descent generally all have straight, black hair and brown eyes, they have a much wider variation in their facial features—the width and positioning of their eyes, the length of their noses, and so on—than Caucasians. So whilst people of European descent are conditioned to use the visual clues of hair and eye colours when recognising others, if those aspects are subconsciously disregarded, there’s a lot less to distinguish one Caucasian from another.]

The journey took us past some imaginatively- and not-so-imaginatively-named rock formations such as Yearning for Husband Rock, the Painted Hill of Nine Horses, and Writing Brush Peak, and there was a sublime moment of comic timing when, just as we were tucking into our lunch below deck, our guide informed us that we were about to glide past the most famous of all the Li River vistas—the one that appears on the back of the ¥20 note.

The cruise ends at the town of Yangshuo, which these days is entirely given over to tourism: literally every place of business is either a travel agent, restaurant, cafe, bar, hotel, souvenir shop or some such establishment. There were more eating places specialising in Western food than Chinese cuisine, and at night the main streets are garishly lit with ill-thought-out neon, waging war on your eyes while your ears are similarly assaulted by the clash of dance music pumping out of every bar. That’s not to say these places are all dreadful—the Karst Cafe and Drifters Cafe both had good food and wine, and we sampled the Rosewood Cafe’s ice cream menu a couple too many times. My two-years-in-China anniversary on February the 17th was celebrated with Shepherd’s Pie, apple crumble, and a nice bottle of French red—not a particularly Chinese meal but delicious nonetheless. But the real reason to spend any time at all in Yangshuo is to visit the surrounding countryside.

I think most people hire bicycles, but we opted for what we thought would be the easier option of an electric scooter. [For the benefit of any parents who might be reading, let’s all pretend that, yes, of course helmets were provided.] We asked what the best direction to head was, jumped on, and away we went.

Now excuse me while I gush: whizzing along the roads through the undulating countryside—karst after karst towering over small plots of farmland; passing through small villages and townships—with Mary riding pillion, her hands tucked into my coat pockets for warmth, her face pressed against my back as she too admired the scenery, is simply one of my happiest memories of the past thirty-one years. Even though the battery ran out of juice earlier than we estimated because we kept going further and further out and, despite stopping for a late lunch at a roadside noodle place and borrowing their electricity to charge it up for an hour, we ended up having to push the scooter for about 10 kilometres back to Yangshuo, in the dark and the rain, and I was a cranky old so-and-so for most of this time, thinking about that day gives me a goofy little smile that I have no intention of hiding.

Tearing ourselves away from the beauty and tranquility of Duoyishu and the surrounding countryside of Yuanyang was hard, but we also wanted to go and see the famous scenery of the Li River in Guangxi, which meant we had to first get back to Kunming in order to catch a train to Guilin.

The bus that we had originally caught heading south from Kunming to Xinjiezhen in Yuanyang left in the mid-morning and took about eight hours. So, when boarding the return bus at half past four in the afternoon, we were figuring on being back in Kunming somewhere between midnight and one o’clock in the morning—not ideal, but not too bad.

But when the bus turned out to be of the sleeper variety—comprising no seats but two rows of bunk-beds along either side of the aisle—we started to suspect that we were in for a longer ride than we were banking on. Neither of us had been on a sleeper bus before, and the experience was a lot less comfortable than the comparatively-luxurious sleeper train carriages. The duvet covers provided were a hotch-potch of children’s designs [we had Pokemon], all of dubious levels of cleanliness. Smoking was allowed throughout, and the driver’s reckless confidence at handling the mountain bends had Mary cutting off the blood-flow to my hand for most of the evening.

In order to warrant the use of a sleeper bus, it seems that the driver had been instructed to stretch out the journey as much as possible, so we found ourselves making many more stops than on the way down, and of course given that any and all activities in China must stop dead at mealtimes, there was an extended break beside an outdoor restaurant a few hours after we first set off. [Having spent so much time getting comfortable in our twin top bunk, we opted to stay aboard and chow down on the snacks we had brought with us.]

It was now well past sunset and there were so many more stops for toilet breaks and the like that eventually we just stopped trying to ascertain where we were and, after some reassuring of Mary that I would do my level best to prevent the driver from careening off the mountainside, we drifted off to a restless sleep.

At some point I half-woke up, enough to notice that we had yet again stopped for some reason, and caught a glimpse of another bus parked immediately in front of us. I almost wondered what was going on, but it was still pitch dark and I instead immediately fell back to sleep.

Some time later, Mary and I both woke up to find it was daylight, but we still weren’t moving and, moreover, I saw that the same bus was still parked in front of us. We then noticed that there were yet more buses parked all around us. We were, we had to deduce, in a bus station. Kunming Station, to be precise, and had been there since before whenever it was that I had woken up.

It was gone nine o’clock on the morning. Sitting at the front of the bus, chatting around a charcoal fire in a metal bucket, were the driver and the bus attendant. The rest of the bus was completely empty, and all the beds had been made up. We had arrived in Kunming in the middle of the night, but rather than wake up the dozing foreigners, they just let the rest of the passengers disembark around us and then allowed us sleep for about five more hours, which meant that we had missed the possibility of catching a morning train on to Guilin. I still can’t decide if their hearts were in the right place or they simply didn’t care whether we were still fast asleep when the bus started making its way all the way back to Yuanyang.

One of the villages in county of Yuanyang was either selected or has the savvy [and I suspect it was the former] to charge tourists to wander its streets. Beside a particularly beautiful expanse of terraced rice paddies about halfway between Xinjiezhen and Duoyishu lies a small market where you can haggle over silver trinkets and hand-finished throws, and a large entrance gate to the village of Qingkou.

In a masterful sales move, this entrance gate leads to a path that winds fairly steeply for fifteen minutes or so down into the valley below, and it is at the end of this path that you pay for your entrance ticket to the village: anyone who didn’t know about the tariff would surely take one look at the way they’ve just come and decide they might as well pay to explore the village before they huffed-and-puffed their way back up to the main road.

On their part, the citizens of Qingkou have installed a small museum of local culture, and restored and maintained their homes and buildings in their traditional designs with thatched roofs, although there are one too many brazenly-displayed gift-shops, and they couldn’t quite conceal their use of modern technologies such as satellite dishes by using them to dry their traditional clothing. But it was nice to spend a couple of hours exploring the designated attractions such as the old mill house, as well as going off the beaten path. At one point Mary acquired a new potential suitor in the form of a little boy who followed us for a while crying, “Miss! Miss! You’re beautiful, I love you,” until he got to his house, at which point he stuck out his tongue and ran inside.

Back up at the main road, waiting for the minibus to ferry us back to Duoyishu, we watched a steady stream of elderly women walk past us carrying large baskets of damp sand on their backs, depositing them further up the road for a group of men to use in the building of a new wall, occasionally stopping for a rest and a chat on the way back.

While we waited for the minibus [which actually took almost two hours to turn up], Mary was subjected a couple of instances of drive-by photography from Chinese tourists deciding that she was part of the scenery, and we were both entertained by a tiny young girl—she couldn’t have been more than four- or five-years-old—who was in charge of collecting the fee for using the public toilets. While I was busy looking the other way for an alternative means to get us back to our guesthouse, Mary saw this little girl, dressed in beautifully woven clothes and a wearing a hat decorated with silver, allow a tourist to pose with his arms around her, before she marched up to the photographer and demanded a payment of one yuan for her troubles. Qingkou: village on the take.

Having got delayed for longer than we wanted to be in Kunming due to the whole of China shutting down to celebrate the Chinese New Year, Mary and I were itching to get away from all aspects of city life and enjoy a bit of peace and quiet. Nine hours by bus later, we arrived in the mountainous county of Yuanyang, famed for its sprawling hillsides of terraced rice paddies.

The first township we settled in was Xinjiezhen, our bus winding its way up some precarious mountain hairpins and getting there in the late afternoon to find it all a bit foggy. The hotel we checked into was supposed to overlook a spectacular expanse of countryside, but all we could see from the balcony was the blanket of cold, grey cloud that pervaded the interiors of the buildings as well as the town streets.

After a cold and damp night’s sleep, we woke the next morning to find the weather exactly the same as yesterday’s, so rather than hang about in the hope that the cloud would soon burn off or blow away, we elected to try and move on to one of the smaller villages further up the mountain. I’d read about one called Duoyishu that had a well-recommended place to stay called the Sunlight Guesthouse, run by an elderly local couple. This turned out to be one of the best decisions we made on the entire trip, and possibly of all time.

We had escaped from the miserable weather below and from the rooftop of the guesthouse could look down the valley at the paddies stepping down the hillsides. For three idyllic days we slept late—“We’ll definitely get up for the sunrise tomorrow!” We sat in the courtyard in rocking chairs, read, drank tea and looked at the view. We walked to and through some of the other surrounding villages, past busloads of Chinese tourists armed with foot-long camera lenses and, for some reason, dressed from head to foot in all-weather gear like they were going on an Arctic expedition instead of being ferried up and down the mountain on a heated coach; down through tea plantations to teeter along the edges of the paddies and back up to the road; past oxen coming down from the fields and enormously fat boars suckling their boarlets; children playing in the stream running though their village; women in traditional dress buying live chickens from the market; men in their standard modern-day clothing of loose-fitting slacks and a dark-coloured suit jacket chewing on and spitting out chunks of sugar cane. We caught the minibus back to Duoyishu when we got tired of walking, and wondered why so many of the women were getting physically travel sick. In the evenings we ate good, home-cooked meals together with the other guests around the kitchen table. Our decision to leave was based entirely on time-constraints and having other places we wanted to visit. If we had had more time or nothing else we wanted to do, I think we could have happily spent the entire trip staying at the Sunlight Guesthouse.

For the record, here are the places I visited during my recent trip to the west of China:

• Yunnan
  • The city of Kunming
  • The county of Yuanyang
    • The town of Xinjiezhen
    • The village of Duoyishu
    • The village of Qingkou
  • Shilin—the Stone Forest National Park
  • Xi Shan—the Western Hills
• Guangxi
  • The city of Guilin
  • The Li River
  • The town of Yangshuo
• Hainan
  • Hainan Island
    • The city of Haikou
    • The Dadonghai area of the city of Sanya

I also dipped my toe into the province of Guangdong in order to catch a bus to the ferry port on my way to Hainan Island. And, okay, yes, I misled you in the title of this entry because one of the above isn’t really a province—Guangxi is technically one of the five so-called autonomous regions of China, like Tibet and Inner Mongolia, which means it has more legislative rights than a province, I think mostly due to having a higher population of a particular minority ethnic group.

I’ll be sharing photos and stories with you all over the next few weeks, but right now I’m hitting the books in swot-like preparation for the beginning of my Mandarin Chinese course which starts at 8.30 tomorrow morning at the local university. I’m actually looking forward to being back in the classroom after an extended break from learning!

Last month I was treated by my nursery school to join them on a daytrip to Shanghai Wild Animal Park. Having had a pretty bad experience with the zoo back in Benxi, I was a little apprehensive, but thought that a modern, wealthy, progressive city such as Shanghai might be a little more clued-in animal-welfare-wise.

Can you guess what’s coming?

To be fair, the animal enclosures were of a decent quality: good sizes, and the animals [for the most part] looked to be in fairly good condition, which is surprising once you witness the general public’s complete disregard for any and all prominent notices [of which there were many] imploring them to not feed the animals.

It was simply amazing: children and adults alike, gleefully throwing bread to the red pandas and offering cake and biscuits to the ostriches, or trying to pet birds doing the best they could to avoid the out-stretched hands whilst tied to a perch by a six-inch chain.

One mother couldn’t seem to accept the fact that alligators generally don’t do very much apart from sit on rocks for most of the day, especially when the weather is on the chilly side, so she decided to lob a plastic bottle at them so they’d get up and do an elaborate five-minute song-and-dance routine for her precious son. Sadly for her, the bottle just bounced off their tough hide and they barely even raised a scaly eyebrow. [One of the teachers decided that they were not, in fact, real alligators, but statues, although if she could have been bothered to stand still and simply look at them for a few minutes, she would have seem them blink and move everso slightly.]

But all that was left in the dust by the grand finale: a 45-minute long animal show, featuring, amongst other things:

• an elephant performing acrobatics with two girls, being encouraged to stand on its hind legs through the use of a metal spike on a stick

• three monkeys on chains scurrying up and down poles

• a chimpanzee dressed as a shoe-shiner engaging in slapstick routine with his handler [who, for some reason, was dressed as a Frenchman]

• a bear riding a bicycle, and later being made to walk upright with cymbals strapped to its front paws, whilst two other bears [also upright] took part in a wedding ceremony, attended by the elephant, monkeys, a llama, and a zebra.

Still, at least: the kids were pretty cute; I got to see white tigers for the first time; and, most importantly, there were many fine examples of Chinglish on display, my favourite of which was in the stay-in-your-vehicle stage, and said,

In case of breakdown, please dial 61180113. In case of no communication equipment, please whistle for a while, our working staff will tow out your troubled car.

Longtou Shan—Dragon Head Hill—is a gorgeous little place. You make the gentle climb up through an orange orchard, with some other fruit trees such as the Chinese strawberry tree, locally called yangmei, dotted around the place for good measure, which is sure to look spectacular when the oranges are almost ready for picking.

Just at the top is an old, pretty unmaintained temple. The overweight caretaker was asleep on a bench as we approached, but he got up and made a few token gestures with a broom as we looked around. Although the temple isn’t up to much, the view beyond it is fantastic: miles and miles of fish-farms and rice paddies stretch out in every direction, to the horizon and beyond. You can get a pretty good idea of just how many individual plots there are if you look on Google Maps at our approximate location and start to zoom out.

After a while, exploring the hill a little off the beaten track, we headed back to the ring-road and started walking along the side of the road, hoping to flag down another tuk-tuk, but none was to be seen. As we walked, and throughout the day, I was struck by how undeveloped the area is: this is supposed to be one of the major sight-seeing areas in the province, and yet the small villages that we passed through were pretty rundown, and as lunchtime approached our bellies were surprised at the apparent lack of restaurants.

Eventually, after thoughts of food were put on hold by the sight of a large dead dog hanging from a tree, I saw a minibus speeding up the road towards us and flagged it down, asking to be dropped off at the ferry terminal on the north side of Dong Shan. From there our plan was to catch the ferry to Xi Shan. As we got to what looked to me a lot like a ferry terminal, one person outside the bus told us we had arrived, but others on the bus told us we had not. A bit confused, we stayed on the bus for a couple more minutes drive, during which time an older Chinese man piped up in English and told us that the ferry would cost us a hundred yuan. But my guidebook, which I double-checked and showed him, said it should cost only five yuan per person, and whilst you can generally expect prices to have risen slightly in the couple of years since the book was published, we couldn’t believe a 2000% increase, even here! We were starting to suspect we were being taken to a different docking area for a much more expensive ride.

But we pulled up on the side of the road just a short distance from the first terminal, and I embarked on a really quite tiresome conversation with the woman running the minibus—we kept going round and round on the fact that Rose and I wanted to go to Xi Shan, and we didn’t want to take the road as it meant going all the way back to the mainland and back out again along the bridge to the island. We’ve found, on our winding trip to Jiuhua Shan as well as talking to this woman, that some people can’t understand that the journey can be as much a part of the trip as the destination: we wanted to take the ferry because we thought it would be nice. At one point Rose and I realised that my guidebook probably had a typo, and it was supposed to say fifty yuan per person, which would tally with what the old chap had told us, and on second thoughts sounded pretty reasonable for a half-hour ferry ride. But now the minibus woman was fixated on the fact that we’d previously said the ferry was too expensive, and kept suggesting we take the land-based option.

Having established that the place we’d passed through earlier was indeed the ferry terminal, and still confused about why we were told at the time that it wasn’t, we just got off the bus and started to walk back along the road. But the minibus woman started following us, telling us to hurry up, which we were in no mood to do, being really quite hungry by now, as well as hot and bothered in the midday sun. Eventually she peeled off and turned back towards her bus.

Some very large restaurants loomed up on the shore just next to the ferry terminal, and the lure of air-conditioning and nourishment pulled us into the first one, which was beautifully empty of customers. Upstairs and at the back was a cool breeze, under some shade, looking out over the lake. We ordered a fish dish [caught locally, naturally] and sat back to enjoy what we came to realise was probably the most peaceful place either of us had been to since we’d come to China. The food wasn’t up to much to be honest: I’ve always found the fish-dishes in Suzhou to taste distinctly of mud; the vegetable dish was uninspired, and the rice was on the dry side. But there wasn’t a soul about, save for the waitress [hovering at a respectful distance for a change] and a couple of fishermen on row-boats out on the lake, and this rare treat more than made up for the culinary disappointment.

A short time later we saw the ferry leaving, and after a moment of frowning, we understood why the minibus woman was so concerned that we should hurry, I had a quick look in my guidebook and realised that, in my head, I had managed to transform the half-hour length of the ferry ride into the notion that ferries left every half-hour, whereas in fact there were only two a day, and we’d just missed the last one. But we were so relaxed by then that we simply shrugged, finished our food, ordered a couple of beers and sat reading and admiring the view for a while longer, happy to be in each other’s company in such a peaceful place.

Just twenty miles or so west of Suzhou lies Tai Hu, the third largest lake in China, easily reached from Suzhou on the number 502 public bus from opposite the train station [well, it’s opposite the train station at the time of writing. There’s so much construction going on around there at the moment, the bus stops are continually being moved around]. You can also take a minibus from the bus station down the road, but why pay a lot more just for a bit more comfort? It’s only four yuan for the hour-long journey if you take the 502, and you get to see a bit more of the surrounding towns as it winds its way through them, rather than taking the express route.

Read the rest of “Getting to Dong Shan”…

It took us a while to get started. The town of Jiuhua Shan is not very large, but its layout rather confused Rose and me; the maps on the various signposts didn’t seem to tally with the one we had purchased, and the way to proceed up the mountain wasn’t as obvious as it could have been.

Consequently, we set off on a path that ultimately led to the main road to the summit—that is, a twisting, winding, tarmacced route around the peaks built for mini-buses and cars to ferry passengers speedily to the top. This meant we were missing all the temples and small settlements that are dotted around the mountain.

So after about an hour of following this road, vainly hoping we could find a way off it and onto the mountain path proper, getting rather frustrated by local shop owners who didn’t seem to know where they worked when shown a map, I decided the best course of action was to throw a mild temper tantrum and curse the whole of Jiuhua Shan for being so bloody difficult. Thankfully Rose has the patience of a notably-patient saint and an outlook on life that says, “Well, we’re here now, so let’s make the best of it,” so she shook me by the shoulders until I calmed down. We went back down the road to the town and started again, finding the correct path almost immediately.

So here is the key to finding your way up Jiuhua Shan: whenever you see a flight of stairs, climb it. Then climb it some more. Then turn the corner and climb the stairs you find there. Savour each and every level pathway you come across, for just a few yards beyond them are more and more stairs, all of them relentlessly going in an upward direction. To reach the very top takes a good few hours, even if you take the cable cars part of the way [which we didn’t] and is pretty hard on the thigh and calf muscles even if you’re in good shape [which Rose is but I’m not].

It’s stairs all the way, and it was stares all the way too: as I mentioned, the place was pretty busy with other visitors, we seemed to be the only foreigners there, so for the entire day we were subjected to barrages of, “Hullo!” or catching whispers about the approaching laowai. Most of the time we replied, sometimes through gritted teeth, but for me at least, it started to get old within the first eleven seconds of being in China, so to have to put up with it all the live long day wasn’t the most fun I’ve ever had.

Thankfully the scenery more than made up for it: after almost a year of living with the flat, concrete-covered expanses of Suzhou, it was a real treat to see tree-covered mountains and valleys surrounding us, disappearing off into the haze. Sadly more disappointment was to be found in the people who dropped litter wherever they stood, showing as much respect for the countryside as they do for city streets. The wrappers for the hundreds upon hundreds of sticks of incense that were being lit at the numerous temples littered the floor of the temple grounds, and I saw more than a few people drain their drinks and simply chuck the empty plastic bottle into the valley below.

As you climb you come across more than a few very small settlements—nothing more than a few homes and some adjoining restaurants, offering a quick and cheap[ish] meal to restore one’s waning energy. There are also some small, very basic snack bars at many junctures on the way, providing instant noodles and bottled drinks. Of course, all of these establishments need their stocks constantly replenished, a job performed by some not-young men carrying carefully balanced, but very heavy-looking loads across their shoulders, hanging from a sturdy length of bamboo.

Eventually, sometime in the middle of the afternoon, we made it to the top. Jiuhua Shan is one of the four sacred mountains of Buddhism in China with a history of over 1,500 years, and the goal for the majority of the people who make it this far is to visit the temple of Tian Tai Si, but we opted to walk in the opposite direction along the peaks and get away from the hordes of people and their cursed shouts of “Hullo”. We found a peaceful boulder on which to perch—but clearly we were not the first there, for a few sticks of incense were jammed into a crack, which we re-lit and sat looking out over the peaks.

The time came to head back down the mountain; we were pretty exhausted and had intended to take the cable car most of the way down, but the queue was so long that we ended up walking the whole way back down the stairs too, arriving back in the town just as it was getting dark. On the way we passed some lazy folk being transported down the mountain on bamboo-based sedan chairs carried by two men, and a troop of scavenging semi-domesticated baboons licking plastic wrappers and banana skins in search of a snack, another sad reminder that although this beautiful, historic area is officially protected and a designated national park, some people still don’t afford it the respect it deserves.

We were prepared for it to be busy: after all, we were visiting during the week-long national holiday, so virtually anywhere we might have chosen was going to be overflowing with tourists. My personal hope was, drawing from my experiences climbing Feng Huang Shan, the number of people around us would be inversely proportional to our height above sea level. [Translation: the higher we went, the fewer other people we’d see.]

Of course, despite being on a bus bound for Jiuhua Shan, and being in possession of tickets that clearly said, “Destination: Jiuhua Shan”, our transportation didn’t actually terminate at Jiuhua Shan, but instead threw us off at a place called “So You Wanna Visit Jiuhua Shan? Then Give Us Your Cash”: a large building in which we had to buy two entrance tickets to the township and surrounding area of Real Jiuhua Shan. Then it was a further minibus-ride up the winding mountain roads to the town proper, which served as a wonderful introduction to the landscape, all lush green trees and rice paddy-covered farmland.

The small town of Jiuhua Shan is given over entirely to hotels, restaurants and other tourist-friendly services. As predicted, it was teeming with people, although interestingly we didn’t see any other foreigners almost the entire time we were there. In the town and at many points up the mountain path are various Buddhist temples and monasteries, and it seemed that a lot of the visitors were there for religious reasons as much as anything else.

Having arrived quite late in the day, we set aside the mountain ascension for the next day and decided to simply find a hotel, then have a bite to eat and a few beers. I’d read in my guidebook that it was possible to stay in the monastery, but disappointingly when we went in and asked, we were told that we couldn’t stay there because we weren’t [and aren’t] Chinese. It was the same problem I was faced with in Ding Shan: forcing foreigners into the more expensive establishments under the assumption that we’re all significantly wealthier than locals.

Sensing our dejection with his well-honed emotional skills, one of the monks conjured a mobile phone from somewhere deep within his robes and made a few enquiries at other hotels on our behalf, but the one he led us to was on the pricey side. The monk just sort of wandered off without saying anything more, so we decided to take matters into our own hands and check out the other hotels in town. But just as we were about to start negotiating with a woman who’d approached us with an offer, our monk friend came running over, looking rather annoyed that we’d just walked away while he was—it transpired—still trying to help us. He called over a different woman who was hovering nearby and we agreed to check out her place, which turned out to be fine and about as good a price as we could hope to pay given the peak season. It was up some stairs and away from the town centre, providing nice respite from the bustle and noise of the crowds.

We picked a busy-looking restaurant and found that by merely hesitating slightly over whether to order a particular dish or not, the waiter offered to give it to us for a much reduced price. That’s the kind of non-aggressive haggling I like! A few local beers later [which, as with many Chinese beers, were so weak as to have no discernible effect—at least, that’s what I told my besht mate the traffic warden as I returned her hat], it was time to turn in and get a good night’s sleep ahead of the next day’s climb.

We only stayed in the capital of the province of Anhui for one night, so I can’t really comment in great detail on what it has to offer, but it was immediately apparent that the city was a lot less affluent than Suzhou. As opposed to the beggars that are rife throughout Suzhou, in Hefei we saw homelessness in the sense of people sleeping rough, at bus stops and in shop doorways. I can’t think of a time when I’ve seen anyone actually sleeping on the street in Suzhou. Perhaps there’s a shelter somewhere that I’m not aware of.

[Aside: the previous statement notwithstanding, people nap anywhere and everywhere in China. They think nothing of lying down and catching forty winks on a public bench, on the ground outside the restaurant where they work, or using their hardhat as a pillow on a construction site.]

Read the rest of “Jiuhua Shan [Part II—Hefei City]”…

A few weeks ago I travelled with my faithful companion Rose to Anhui, the province just west of my home province of Jiangsu, to visit a range of mountains known as Jiuhua Shan: Nine Glorious Peaks.

Our route from Suzhou was not the most direct: first we went a couple of hours north of Suzhou to spend the night in Taizhou, the hometown of one of Rose’s colleagues—a woman in her early twenties—and were treated to an insight into Chinese family life and culture. We arrived late morning and were presented with quite a lavish lunch—amongst the many and varied dishes, I remember a combination of tofu and crab’s lung being quite tasty, although Rose seemed to think that you’re not supposed to eat the lungs of crabs. [We didn’t suffer any ill-effects, so at the very least perhaps they’re okay in small quantities.]

The conversation was pleasant enough but quite simple, and once Rose’s and my Chinese skills had pretty much been exhausted, talk consisted of various members of the family pointing at a dish, saying, “吃” [“chī”, meaning “eat”], us smiling politely and chopsticking a token amount into our mouths.

Taizhou itself is spectacularly unspectacular, with no real claims to fame beyond being the hometown of a few renowned masters of the Peking Opera. I thought at one point my hosts told me that Hu Jintao, the current president of China, is also from Taizhou, but this appears to be false so I probably misunderstood what they were trying to tell me.

Dinner was taken at a lush public bathhouse, and proved to be mildly farcical in that we changed into cute little short pyjama sets [cream for the boys, pink for the girls], went to the restaurant upstairs for a buffet dinner, then came back down to the changing rooms, stripped off the jammies and went to enjoy the [separate, unisex] sauna, steam room and pool. Why we had to change out of our own clothes in order to dine is something I’m still trying to figure out.

The sleeping arrangements were quite awkward: Rose, her colleague and the mother shared the main bedroom [with the mother insisting on sleeping on the floor]. The father was sent to sleep at a friend’s place [in case he caught a glimpse of Rose’s bare elbow, or something], and I was given the daughter’s bedroom. A child of the one-child-policy era, the room was adorned with portraits of her, glammed-up to the eyeballs and post-processed beyond recognition.

Lunch the next day was along the same lines as the day before, save for the beverages. In an effort to make us feel even more special, and to make a change from the beer that we [the men] drank with yesterday’s lunch, the father decided that a triple brandy was an appropriate lunchtime beverage for a strapping lad such as myself. Rose, being a more delicate—but still Western—female, got away with a standard, shot-sized helping. I managed to finish mine and had a warm fuzzy feeling for my troubles, but it was a shot too far for the dad and he was clearly more than tipsy at the end of the meal, making it even harder than usual to make out what he was saying.

My still cheeks a-glow, and laden with a generous parting gift of fruit, buns and soft drinks, we set off on the next leg of our trip: a train to Hefei, the capital of Anhui.

An hour’s bus ride out of Suzhou is the small historic water town of Luzhi. Just over a square kilometre in size, and dating back 1,400 years, it’s famed for its surviving small bridges and a Buddhist temple containing treasured sculptures of arhats—the term for those who have attained enlightenment.

A single ¥60 ticket gains you entry to eight local sites of interest—as well as the temple there are a few museums displaying farming tools and detailing the lives of some of the town’s famous inhabitants, as well as some historic houses—all within walking distance of each other, and it makes for a nice little daytrip. Luzhi is rather less touristy than Tong Li, but then it is also less well maintained—although that didn’t seem to bother the good few local artists from setting up their easels along the canalsides.

One of the more interesting sights was housed within the Buddhist temple: three thousand-year-old ginkgo trees, which I have since learnt is a species of tree with no close living relatives—an example of a living fossil [think crocodiles, horseshoe crabs and coelacanths]. But I was most intrigued by this sign off to one side in the arhat room:

Anyone got any theories as to the meaning of “119”?

One of the most fascinating things about the Terracotta Army is that, in their Chinese name Bing Ma Yong, according to my dictionary the last character 俑 translates as “earthen figures buried with the dead in ancient times”—isn’t it lucky they came up with that one, just in case they should ever need it?

Getting to the site, about an hour’s drive from Xi’an, is very simple even if you don’t want to go on an organised tour [which I didn’t, both to save money and to have no time constraints]—you catch the green 306 bus from the car park on the east side of the train station and get off at the very last stop. The ten-minute walk up to the main site is disconcerting; it feels as though you’re walking through a modern housing development [and not a very populated one, most of the buildings appear to be empty], with pointless Chinese rock music blaring out of speakers [disguised as fake rocks] and hordes of peddlers repeatedly offering you miniature warriors until you punch them on the nose to make them go away. [Believe me, saying, “No thank you!” has no effect whatsoever.]

Once you’re through the museum gates life is a little more peaceful, although for some reason those souvenir sellers are also allowed in to harass the visitors as they wander around. I think most people head straight for Pit 1, the main hangar housing the largest restored collection of figures, but we veered off to the right and went for Pits 2 and 3 first, saving the “best” ‘til last. These two smaller pits contain many broken, partially-uncovered figures, horses and chariots, and work is still going on to unearth the remaining artifacts, the majority of which are still completely buried. It was nice to be able to see the statues without obstructive glass or netting, but how long this will be the case I’m not sure, seeing as there was a half-drunk bottle of Pepsi and a tourist map accidentally [I hope!] dropped into Pit 3.

The main pit is enormous, and it was a relief to actually be impressed by the scale of things—even moreso when you consider that, having recovered around 1,000 statues, there are supposed to be another 7,000 or so to go. Towards the back of the hangar—we entered through the exit, continuing our maverick, shoot-from-the-hip approach—is a reconstruction area, where you can see dozens of partially-restored figures and a big pile of broken pottery, together with a couple of computers and other gadgets which help with the jigsaw puzzle. The remaining two-thirds of the building is dedicated to the main show, and after the relatively dim previous pits, it was a surprise to see so much sunlight allowed to flood the room. The more you look, the more you come to realise that it really was quite an achievement for the people of the time. It’s hard to imagine even today people working with such patience and dedication to produce this volume of individually-crafted figures [and let’s emphasise this: each and every figure has a different face!].

Not everyone was so in awe of the millennia-old sight before their eyes: as I stood overlooking the main site, I turned and realised that the Chinese man next to me was not, in fact, taking photos of his cultural heritage, but decided that it was much more important to snap pictures of the foreigner. I quickly ducked out of view and gave him a look that said, “Oi, ninny, no!”, although this might not have translated very well as he immediately tried to take a photo of my Australian friend instead.

[Aside: back in Suzhou, I was walking down the street the other day, a few feet behind a Western man with his two young children when suddenly two Chinese men pulled up on their bicycles. One produced a camera and motioned [repeatedly saying, “Very cute, very cute!”] for the dad to pick up his sons and pose with them for a photo. Somewhat dazed by the speed at which it was all happening, the dad complied. I have no idea what they wanted these photos for. It was all a little creepy.]

Those of us of a certain age and nationality will fondly remember the classic Japanese kung-fu television treat that was Monkey Magic—the story of a Buddhist monk, Tripitaka, and his three mystical protectors, Monkey, Pigsy and Sandy, on a quest from China to India and back, seeking sacred Buddhist texts and battling all manner of demons in a variety of camp costumes.

The story is based on an ancient Chinese legend, Journey to the West, in which the monk is called Xuan Zang, which begins and ends in what is modern-day Xi’an. On his return to the temple of Daci’en Si, Xuan Zang requested the construction of the stone pagoda Dayan Ta within its walls to house and protect the precious scripts as he translated them into 1,355 volumes [as well as negotiating the rights to the television series, sticker albums, action figures and so on].

The Temple is currently undergoing a face-lift and, sadly, looks as though is was all constructed in the last twenty minutes instead of portraying its 1,500-year-long history, although the pagoda itself has largely been left alone and looks sufficiently weather-beaten for you to believe the legends surrounding it, and even today, still emits enough mystical energy for a few moments of levitation…

Read the rest of “The Muslim Quarter and the museums”…

Read the rest of “Xi’an city walls”…

Read the rest of “No rest for the David”…

Read the rest of “Wang’s Tiny Museum of Mao Memorabilia”…

Read the rest of “Wenshu Yuan”…

Read the rest of “Round the bend”…

Read the rest of “Taoping”…

Read the rest of “Candids”…

Read the rest of “Jiuzhaigou National Park”…

Read the rest of “Panda-ing”…

Read the rest of “Chengdu”…

Read the rest of “Citizenship”…

Read the rest of “Chengdid”…

Read the rest of “Chengdon’t”…

Read the rest of “Zhanggong Dong”…

Read the rest of “Ding Shan”…

Read the rest of “Feng Huang Shan”…

Read the rest of “At the Russian border”…

Read the rest of “Dalai Lake”…

Read the rest of “Manzhouli”…

Read the rest of “Probably the last thing I expected to see in Inner Mongolia”…

Read the rest of “Getting there”…

Read the rest of “The ordeal begins”…

Read the rest of “Shenyanged”…

Read the rest of “Daytrip to Shenyang—the Imperial Palace of the Qing Dynasty”…

Read the rest of “Daytrip to Shenyang—ni hao, Chairman Mao”…

Read the rest of “Daytrip to Shenyang—the train ride”…

Read the rest of “The flight”…

Read the rest of “Shanghai blogging”…