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Sunday, 06 May 2007 00:00 |
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Huang He Gong Yuan or the yellow river park was our destination for that day. I had read about it in the guide as a place worth visiting, not for it's temples which it said were very dilapidated and not worth a glance but for the views of the Yellow River and also a nice place for a walk for the afternoon. The one thing I remember reading about the yellow river was that apart from it being the life blood of the region it was also one of Chinas natural disasters with the route the river takes over history has changed by about 300 miles. Sun Yat Sen used the Huang He to defeat the japanese by destroying the dykes and flooding hundreds of miles of farmland and villages in the process. Taking the local bus out to the park was interesting in its own right we joined the throng at the bus station and stood by the no. 16 bus which looked about ready to depart. One of the bus company personnel directed me towards the end of the queue which turned out to be 3 bus stops away, I guess this was a popular place to visit. It was something of a surprise to actually find what looked very much like a theme park and a well organised one. The recently constructed heads of Huang di and his successor tower over the park and look out across the river. We wandered past large bells which we could use suspended logs to chime if we wished up to the top of a raised concrete area where we could get a good view of the park. The river extending across the flat plateau in front of us was the major feature which dominated everything around us with the rail bridge extending out into the hazy mist in the distance. On turning to the left we could see a range of hills with temples perched right on the top and a cable car stretching up to the tallest peak and a slide which runs all the way down, which naturally we had to try. Towards the end of the afternoon we took a hovercraft along the yellow river and had a bounce about on some of the mud while trying to avoid being sold a ride on some very hot looking horses (that would be temperature hot!) |
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Saturday, 05 May 2007 00:00 |
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Our next trip was to see the Peonies in Luoyang the other option was a trip to Bai Si and yet another temple was more than I could manage so we settled for the gentler option of the peony gardens. Now the only thing I knew about peonies was that they were probably a flower, however I was to find out they were the national flower of China and the gardens of Luoyang was the place to come. As we passed through the entrance the wilted offerings protected under netting was a little uninspiring but I hung in there as there wasn't a temple in sight. We passed through the initial collection of buildings past what look to be a great collection of vividly coloured flowers showing all of the many varieties of peony, however these turned out to be plastic! We soldiered on through what looked to be the back yard which turned out to be a large expanse of land with as many varieties of peony as you would ever want to see, with scenic bridges and pagodas to sit in out of the sun, there was even a large fake waterfall to frolic in if the mood took you. After a peaceful hour it was time to head back to ZhengZhou and our Hotel for the night. |
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Saturday, 05 May 2007 00:00 |
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The Long Men complex is near to Louyang one of the seven ancient capitals of China I think this was one of the Wei Dynasties. As I had just finished Bamber Gascoignes Chinese Dynasties I was capable of showing off to our guide whose services we had hired for the day. Beijing, Nanjing, Anying, Luoyang, Hangzhou, Xian.This was the hottest day I'd had in China sharing it with many Chinese tourists as we wound our way panting up the staircases lining the cliffs walls of the Yi river, past hundreds of thousands of buddhist images carved into the limestone. Some images over 17.5m in height others no larger than a fingernail. The larger images carved as a means of worship or dedication for various members of the royal family, the smaller images were the ones permitted to the merely wealthy. Some of the images were headless due to the changing religious proclivities of Chinas rulers, oscillating between the indiginous Daoist religion and its richer foreign import. The opposite side of the river has a number of other images but we passed these and pressed on up the cliff to the temple at the top a garden which looks out over the river. |
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Sunday, 29 April 2007 00:00 |
The temple and its surrounding area is quite beautiful and the first visit there in the morning had only a few people passing through and we saw more monks than tourists. On a later visit I was there during Wu Yi Jie a week long national holiday. During this time 50,000 people a day visited the temple many of them walking the 1Km from the main gate complex at the entrance to the "Shaolin Scenic Area". I did try walking in the opposite direction to the main flow of traffic which proved a little interesting as it was very much like swimming against a strong current, there were so many people heading towards the temple it was almost impossible to leave.
The vast majority of tourists in China are Chinese of course, as it can be harder for them to travel abroad than visit other parts of their own country, so over the last 30 years the internal travel industry has grown into a massve operation. In the time I was there the number of westerners I could have counted on one hand. Everywhere I went I drew the usual sort of stares you get in any areas that you don't see many white faces however this was amplified by the sheer number of Chinese tourists, 50,000 people a day were staring at the weiguoren! I was hailed by the cry of "Hello Laowei!" (sort of hello honoured foreigner) and in one case by a startled 5 year old staring up at me in amazement "bu shi zhongguoren!" (you're not Chinese). The adults tended to look a bit surprised, occasionally smiled and nudged each other to make sure everyone in the party had seen the big nose but it was usually the kids who tried out their one word of English. In Deng Feng when stopping at a chemist (don't ask!) three young kids about six years old who where amusingly sitting on the door step sharpening the families large cooking knife on a whet stone, managed after a lot of whispering and nudging each other to ask me my name in English. During the time I was here I only came across one person who spoke English who was checking into the Hotel as I was asking in my best mandarin whether I could use their internet connection, I have been told by independent observers that my pronunciation of "internet bar" leaves something to be desired as a slight tonal variation turns it into "turtles egg", which for reasons no one seems to be able to tell me is some sort of deadly insult! |
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Saturday, 28 April 2007 00:00 |
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During the journey to Henan I read through the guide book on what I could expect to find at the temple and the image I was left with was somewhat colourful leading to expectations of a Chinese version of Sodom and Gomorrah. Crowds of merchants hawking all manor of goods fake martial arts schools lining the road all the way to the temple. The noise apparently drowns out everything in the local area - so much for peaceful meditation. The reality turned out to be a little different to the reports. Shi Yongxin when he achieved his appointment as the 33rd Abbott of the Shaolin Temple a few years ago had built enough influence with politicians and the military to wrestle control of the shaolin temple back from the local government. In the past the temple was an extension of the government tourist service who paid a fee for the upkeep of the temple. Once in control Shi Yongxin cleared out the market stalls, tore down all the individual schools and moved them to nearby Deng Feng and now the place has been replanted with trees and bamboo and is a well kept beautiful place and relatively peaceful too. Deng Feng is the nearest town about 12Km from the temple, all the schools except for the wushu guan and one campus of the Tagou school has been transplanted into new buildings built for the purpose in Deng Feng. Our local contact who picked us up from the train station and delivered us the our hotel informed us that the Tagou school remained within the scenic area as it would have meant making 13,000 kids homeless, this may be true, however I expect that a school as large as Tagou would have a certain amount of political influence of their own and proximity to the temple adds to their reputation. The temple itself has had many buildings rebuilt during 2004/2005 to restore the temple to it's former glory. The first impressions of some of these new buildings are that they are built for the tourist industry, which of course they are, but it helps to note that it has been the practise throughout history that the wooden pagoda style buildings, as they all are, are often torn down when they reach the end of their natural life and rebuilt in the exact same style to last for another generation. So it is possible over hundreds of years to see new buildings built in a Tang dynasty style, continuing a long tradition. Other examples of this can be seen in the forbidden city. There have been a number of other initiatives taken by the venerable 33rd patriarch Shi Yongxin, which don't seem to be so widely publicised and like many of the things he's done seem to be aimed at preserving and promoting the tradition. In the last few years he has re-introduced buddhist scholar monks into the temple, by this I mean monks who are there exclusively to study buddism not Gong Fu there are currently about 50 of these Wei Seng. The number of Wu Seng or warrior monks is between 60 or 80. There is only a total of about 200 people living at Shaolin the remainder being made up of workmen and caretaker personnel. With the fame of the temple I was expecting to see a lot more than 60 to 80 warrior monks especially when there are 40,000 students studying Gong Fu down the road in Deng Feng. However there is a big difference, it does seem that the monks in the temple are actually the ones who want to take their vows and spend a portion of their time in meditation and other religious practices, whereas the students outside the temple are placed their by their parents either because they have shown an interest, wish to become movie stars or body guards or in some cases where the parents are using it as a sort of military school for kids who get into trouble with their peers back home. Another of Shi Yongxin's initiatives is a type of forum for safeguarding the future of their art, by looking out to secular martial artists to bring their skills and knowledge into the temple so their systems are not lost and the temple becomes what it was hundreds of years ago - the centre of learning for martial arts. |
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