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Having got delayed for longer than we wanted to be in Kūnmíng (昆明) 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 Yuányáng (元阳), famed for its sprawling hillsides of terraced rice paddies.

The first township we settled in was Xīnjiēzhèn (新街镇), 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 Duōyīshù (多依树) 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 Duōyīshù 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.

An hour’s bus ride out of Sūzhōu (苏州) is the small historic water town of Lùzhí (甪直). 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. Lùzhí is rather less touristy than Tóng Lǐ (同里), 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”?

Update: Disappointingly, it appears that 119 is the emergency number for the fire service. I was hoping for some kind of mystical significance, but I suppose this is still quite useful information that I really should have known before now. And what kind of sign is that anyway? Surely, “In case of fire, dial 119” would be a little more effective than a cute but cryptic couplet?

Whilst the Christian world gets on with all things Easter, this weekend saw the Chinese festival of Qīngmíng Jié (清明节), which goes by any of the following translations:

• Clear Brightness Festival
• Festival for Tending Graves
• Grave Sweeping Day
• Memorial Day
• Tomb Sweeping Day
• Spring Rememberance

Whatever you call it, the traditions are the same: on the fifteenth day after the Spring Equinox, people honour and remember their ancestors, with a graveside clean-up and offerings of food, tea, wine and other goodies. It’s another busy time of year when train-travel isn’t recommended, as city-dwellers travel back to their hometowns to join their families in the sombre festivities.

Long-time readers of Fuddland might be aware that I tend to support Comic Relief’s Red Nose Day whenever it comes around. In the past this has been in the form of sponsored commenting, donating an amount to the charity based on the number of comments I receive on Red Nose Day.

This year, due to living in a foreign country and suffering complications of bank accounts and general relative skintness, I decided on a different tactic to show my support: I waited until someone else had a genius idea, and then proceeded to wheedle my way into it.

Thus, I’d like to wholeheartedly recommend to any, all and more of you reading this to make one, several or indeed nine purchases of Shaggy Blog Stories.

A collection of 100 short humorous pieces from the UK blogosphere. All profits from the sale of this book will be donated to the Comic Relief charity. Contributors include Richard Herring, Andrew Collins (BBC 6Music), Emma Kennedy, James Henry (TV’s “Green Wing”), Abby Lee (Girl With A One-Track Mind), Catherine Sanderson (Petite Anglaise), Zoe McCarthy (My Boyfriend Is A Twat), novelist David Belbin, Anna Pickard (The Guardian), and a diverse selection of some of the UK’s most talented bloggers.

Should that list of well-known names not be enough to encourage a purchase, then perhaps the tingly news that the sixty-fourth contribution to be found within its pages is from this very weblog. In the interests of intrigue, I’ll not be telling you which of the 1,656 [including this one] entries I’ve written over the last almost-five years it is. [Oh okay, one clue: it’s not the one you’re reading now. That narrows it down a bit.]

For full details of all the contributors, and more of the story behind its creation, I’ll point you in the direction of the book’s brainparent and masterminder, Mike Troubled Diva. I’m chuffed to bits to have made the final cut, but even if I hadn’t, I’d still be pimping this book like … I’m sorry, I’m just far too English to finish that sentence. Just go and buy it, and I’m sure you’ll be chuckling at at least 99 of the stories.

One of the most fascinating things about the Terracotta Army is that, in their Chinese name Bīng Mǎ Yǒng (兵马俑), 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 Xī’ān (西安), 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 Sūzhōu (苏州), 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 Xuán Zàng (玄奘), which begins and ends in what is modern-day Xī’ān (西安). On his return to the temple of Dàcí’ēn Sì (大慈恩寺) [Temple of Grace], Xuán Zàng requested the construction of the stone pagoda Dàyàn Tǎ (大雁塔) [Big Goose Pagoda] 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…

The Muslim Quarter, in the north-west of downtown Xī’ān (西安), is the place to go if you want to buy some nice-looking souvenirs, antiques and trinkets — from local crafts such as intricately-cut patterns in paper and jewellery, to novelty items such as Máo Zédōng (毛泽东) watches and playing cards. All the haggling can make you hungry — luckily there are plenty of restaurants and street vendors selling cheap and delicious food on the supposedly-pedestrianised road perpendicular to the shopping street. New dishes for me included yángròu pāomo (羊肉泡镆), small chunks of bread soaked in lamb noodles and hú là tāng (胡辣汤), thick soup laden with strong black pepper, as well as the Xī’ān speciality, candied dried fruit [beware the mixed bags: they also contain thick slices of ginger, which may be mistaken for pineapple at first glance and lead to nasty taste-bud-related surprises when you bite a chunk out of it].

Tucked away Tardis-like off the narrow winding market street is Dàqīngzhēn Sì (大清真寺) — the Great Mosque — the largest mosque in China, dating back to 742. I was slightly confused by its backwards [I thought] layout until it was pointed out that China is east of Mecca, so they pray to the west in this part of the world. Still in use today, it’s surprisingly peaceful considering its proximity to the bustle of the eateries and stalls, and resolutely Chinese in its design: I really was expecting to see a golden-domed building like the London Central Mosque that I’ve seen many times [and I’m quite sure once visited on a school trip, although that was possibly a different mosque], and was a little disappointed to be presented with a traditionally-Chinese structure instead.

The two large museums in Xī’ān that I visited — Bēilín Bówùguǎn (碑林博物馆) [Forest of Steles Museum] and Shǎnxī Lìshǐ Bówùguǎn (陕西历史博物馆) [Shaanxi History Museum] — both contained an impressive display of the region’s renowned history. I found the former more interesting simply because I saw stone tablets detailing conversations with Confucius, the first record of Christianity in China, and the first Chinese dictionary [so it claimed], all displayed with uncharacteristic subduedity. [I think I’ve just made up the word for the quality of being subdued.]

The History Museum houses a nicely-chronological collection of locally-found pottery and metalwork, and it was nice to really see the skills of the craftspeople becoming more and more refined over the hundreds-of-years, although perhaps the most striking thing for me was realising that we, us human type people, seem to have an innate sense of beauty such that the designs on pottery dating back thousands of years are still pleasing to the modern-day eye; we all still like a nice, simple geometric pattern on our breakfast bowls don’t we?

Xī’ān (西安) and the surrounding area is positively brimming over with sites of historical importance, and it’s well worth spending a good few days visiting the city of you want to be sure to make the most of the places of interest on offer.

The downtown area is enclosed by the imposingly-tall city walls, first built in 1370 then rebuilt to last in 1568; eighteen metres thick at the base and not much narrower at the top, you can certainly imagine they formed a bit of a barrier to anyone contemplating a city invasion. You can walk along the wall by ascending at any of the four city gates, and it’s a great way to get a feel for the city below, as well as admire the architecture of the gatehouses and [very recently restored] watchtowers. I started at the South Gate and was intending to walk only as far as the East Gate, but I found the views so interesting, and the stroll so peaceful with hardly anyone else around, that I ended up circumnavigating the whole downtown area along the wall — a 12 kilometre walk that took me about three hours, with plenty of stopping for photos and gazing down at the people and buildings below. [For a high-speed version of the same route, you can hire bikes and tandems for an unusual limit of 100 or 200 minutes (an attempt to decimalise time?)].

The east end of the city was particularly interesting, being noticeably more rundown than the rest of the downtown area and consisting mostly of tightly-packed low blocks of flats along narrow streets, each one with small, almost spontaneous-looking fruit and vegetable markets. Dust and grime pervades Xī’ān, an omnipresent cloud that varies in intensity day-by-day and coats the buildings and streets throughout the city in a layer of filth despite efforts to keep the dust down by spraying the roads with water each morning, but the east end of town seemed to be losing the battle faster than elsewhere.

One of the lesser-known gems in Chēngdu (成都) is Wang’s Tiny Museum of Mao Memorabilia. The name says it all: down a side street that I had to ask three people how to find despite having the address and a map, it’s a small, dark, cluttered room, brimming over with posters and photographs, badges and plaques, statues and busts, books and hats, and all manner of other representations of Máo Zédōng (毛泽东), amassed over the last fifty-six years by one man: the eponymous Mr Wang.

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

Right next door to the hostel I was staying at in Chēngdu (成都) was the Buddhist temple of Wénshū Yuàn (文殊院); it is a Chán (禅) temple, Chán being the Chinese for what is more popularly known as Zen Buddhism. Although initial visual impressions resemble any of the numerous restored dynastic palaces you might find in China, one key difference here [aside from being a temple not a palace of course] is that the temple is still in use, so mingling with tourists like myself are Buddhists monks and Buddhist Buddhists, paying their respects to the many statues housed within the temple walls, lighting incense, or chanting in procession.

Read the rest of “Wenshu Yuan”…

Aside from the dominant Han Chinese nationality, there are 55 other officially-recognised minorities in modern China; the province of Sichuan is home to four of them, and the village of Taoping has been occupied by the Qiangzu people for around…

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In the mountains of northern Sichuan is the 720 square kilometre reserve of Jiuzhaigou. The name means “Valley of the Nine Villages”, after the nine high-fenced Tibetan settlements that originally populated the area. The 1000-or-so permanent residents of the…

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I made a few videos at the Panda Breeding Research Centre in Chengdu, the first of which shows two three-year-old giant pandas play-fighting in the cold morning air. [View the “Young pandas play-fighting” video on YouTube]…

Read the rest of “Panda-ing”…

After spending a few days there at either end of my trip, I really warmed to Chengdu. The guidebooks and information I had read about the city all mentioned the laid-back approach that its citizens have to life, and it…

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Having received my last full-time pay-cheque from my former company, the full cost of leaving their employment early has been revealed: equivalent to two months’ worth of rent, plus a passed-on fee for terminating the contract with the internet service…

Read the rest of “The price of teaching”…

Just outside Ding Shan is a series of caves open to the public, the largest of which is Zhanggong Dong, set in a small park with the usual offerings of ponds, rocks and winding pathways. The caves would be a…

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Allow me to quote from The Rough Guide to China: This obscure town has been producing pottery since the beginning of recorded history. Primitive unglazed pots have been found here which date back … some three thousand years. Ceramic lampposts…

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To bridge the gap between the many different dialects in China, some [almost] universal hand gestures have developed to facilitate trade and bargaining by representing the numbers one to ten, which differ from the usual Western signs by using only…

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I realise this isn’t going to be pleasant reading, but I do feel that some guidebooks lack certain details for people about to embark on a short holiday to China [hello Mum!], and this particular area is something everyone should…

Read the rest of “Notes on Chinese public toilets”…

Here are a couple of small problems I had whilst upgrading to Movable Type 3.3, the solutions of which I’m putting here in case anyone else has similar troubles: During the database upgrade process, the error message “Categories must exist…

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Today I needed to transfer some of my hard-earned cash to my UK bank account via the Bank of China, so I thought I’d list what information one needs to provide in order to fill out their form, for anyone…

Read the rest of “How to transfer money from China to a UK bank account”…

coComment is a new service that allows you to keep track of any comments you make on weblogs; it’s currently in the early stages of development and needs a bit more tweaking to make it work perfectly with the most…

Read the rest of “Integrate coComment with a default Movable Type installation”…

Filed under “I shoulda sorted this out ages ago but it became a priority for me so I finally got around to doing it” was finding an easy way to guarantee that I’m always sending emails over a secure connection,…

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The first night at Crisis was fantastic: lovely volunteer people, and genuinely grateful [for the most part] guests. I was really nervous to begin with, and for extra fun my first task [with my fun new pal Sarah — you’re always with…

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Over the Christmas week I’m volunteering for Crisis, the London-based charity for homeless people. Their work carries on year-round, but they are probably most famous for the Crisis Open Christmas scheme, started nearly forty years ago, which provides shelter, hot…

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At some point, presumably around the time Audioscrobbler became one with Last.fm, the format of the RSS feed changed, so it’s time for an updated version of my original feed parser. [Requires a PHP-based site.] If it’s something you’ll find…

Read the rest of “New version of Last.fm “recent tracks” feed parser”…

Prompted by Gordon’s Laziest-of-the-Lazyweb-pleas plea, I’ve made a quick modification to my original Flickr-feed script, so that it now applies various effects [including greyscaling] to the grabbed images. [For example, mine are currently sporting a hint of a bevelled…

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Cutting to the chase: I’ve knocked up a PHP script which takes any Flickr photostream RSS or Atom feed and makes a Flickr “badge” out of it, with some extra bits thrown in to make it all worthwhile. Download the…

Read the rest of “Use a Flickr feed to include any photostream on your site via PHP and MagpieRSS”…

Notice anything different around here? No? Well, I guess that’s a good thing. I’ve moved hosts again. Whilst Servage do offer good packages which would perfectly suit the majority of people, they fell short of satisfying the needs of this…

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I really am confused. When I first tried posting the previous entry — even when attempting to preview it — MT kept throwing up an internal server error [code 500, for all you HTTP status code fans]. After some investigation, involving writing a couple…

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Although I’d read about it earlier in the month, Lyle reminded me today about Odeon Cinema’s complete lack of understanding regarding accessibility issues when it comes to website design. The backstory goes like this: Matthew Somerville coded a very nice,…

Read the rest of “Access this, Odeon Cinemas”…

Gmail is still in its cliquey, beta, invite-only stages, so of course I wanted in to the party as soon as possible. But who needs to bid for one on eBay or set up a Blogger account in the hope…

Read the rest of “Over-used “I’ve got Gmail” pun goes here”…

After being fairly happy with ZoneAlarm’s performance for a while, I upgraded to the full ZoneAlarm Security Suite [firewall, anti-virus, privacy controls], which allowed me to ditch Symantec’s products completely. This upgrade coincided with a new base release of the…

Read the rest of “Fortuitous fluctuations”…

I’m not sure what the boffins at Symantec have done whilst patching up the serious security flaws in their firewall software, but whatever it is doesn’t play nicely with my PC. Browsing the ‘net with my firewall enabled became unbearably…

Read the rest of “You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s disabled”…

Update: This version is no longer valid as the format of the feeds has changed. See the updated version. A few weeks back Gordon mentioned a new web-based service called Audioscrobbler, which sounded pretty interesting to me. Essentially it builds…

Read the rest of “Audioscrobbler”…

User-editable comments are go!

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It’s come to my attention that Kinja users can’t subscribe to my RSS feeds using their usual paths, because my robots.txt file prevents the Kinjabot from accessing them. [Kudos to Kinja for making their robot standards-compliant.] To overcome this, please…

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Okay, not me specifically. Via Design Detector it is revealed that the BBC Online Web Development team have been advised to not even bother to test their sites in Opera [or the Mac-based Safari], instead deciding that if they try…

Read the rest of “The BBC hate me!”…

My mobile phone has been increasingly temperamental of late: the symptoms include mysteriously switching itself off and — more immediately annoyingly — rebooting during the sending of a text or email message [with the message unsent]. My first port of call was the Orange…

Read the rest of “Running rings”…

MTIfNoEntries plugin: conditional tag that displays its content if there are no entries in the current context.

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In one of the weirdest duets ever, for the Man on the Moon soundtrack Michael Stipe performs with Jim Carrey reprising his role as Andy Kaufman [and Kaufman’s alter-ego Tony Clifton], covering Fabian’s This Friendly World, and you can’t help…

Read the rest of “This friendly, friendly world”…

Update: The following refers only to Movable Type versions 2.5 — 2.661, and not the dynamic features of MT 3.1x. I’ve never really figured out the best thing to do with entry categories. There are some categories for which I want to…

Read the rest of “Dynamically-generated MT category archives”…

Last week Yahoo! officially unveiled their new search engine — previously their results had been powered by Google, but now they have their own spiders crawling the interweb. Since their algorithms for indexing and ranking are not the same, it’s highly unlikely…

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When I wrote the previous entry, I noticed that the link to Daisy’s comment did not necessarily make the comment appear at the top of the page, because there was not enough text below it. In order to make it…

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This is the kind of thing only I would worry about. I could try and blame Richard and his throwaway comment about ordered lists, or mrtn for very kindly buying me Eats, Shoots & Leaves, but if I’m honest I’d…

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Ten Mistakes Writers Don’t See [But Can Easily Fix When They Do] is a very entertaining read — and informative too, listing the top grammatical or stylistic errors that have most editors reaching for their red pen or — worse — their rejection letter template. Most…

Read the rest of “Crutch words”…