To follow any ancient historical road in the modern age feels a cheat, as a journey that once took an entire year (Xi'an to Kashgar for example), can be done in less than two weeks. But certain hardships can remain. My own flight to Xi'an was four hours late. Hardly life-threatening, but a less than auspicious start. Still, the delay allowed me time in Tsingtao to sample a pint of that city's eponymous beer. It was my first Tsingtao on tap, though its bottled imports had once served an important role back in university, to wash down the sumptious sushi dinner with which friends and I would celebrate the end of our final exams. I suppose the auspices were there after all.
Xi'an welcomed us at night, on a slow drive over the construction zone that will become a new subway line. A massive statue to the northeast marked the site of the old Han capital. The parameters of the T'ang capital which eventually followed were well defined by high walls marked with impressive gates and watch towers. These were rebuilds of course, thought the dimensions of the city had stayed the same. But more changes were ever-present, none more so than the James Joyce Coffee shop. And the laser show and decorated dancers as night fell was the ultimate welcome, seen from our hotel window that overlooked the auspicious South Gate. Camp as it all was, it brought out the T'ang flavor of the city, as well as the Silk Road to soon follow.
Morning broke and we set off early, first to the tomb of Xuanzang, located in Xingjiao Si temple to the south the town. (In looking up Xiangjiao Si I came across the expression XingJiao Ni, or "Fuck You!" in Mandarin.) The drive out of the city wasn't terribly impressive, beneath haze like fogged glass, and past the usual domino towers of a burgeoning Chinese city. But a reward came with the picturesque countryside, as we moved through fields and villages reminiscent of my long travels through China 22 years before. Despite the hardships of that journey, it oddly made me want to return. The temple was set on a low hilltop before crumbling cliff, composed of a series of interconnected courtyards with circular doorways, and the tell-tale squat brick block that is the Chinese temple. It was quiet and pleasant here, with the sun streaming through the trees and bamboo, and the birds chanting their morning sutras. Here was the stereotypical old China.
We found Xuanzang at the far end of the complex, his resting place marked with a tall thin pagoda of baked earth. A family was offering incense at an opening at the southern end, which forced them to bow low as if in supplication. And Xuanzang certainly deserved that respect, being a man whose T'ang Dynasty travels had taken him to India and back, from which he returned 15 years later laden down with sutras that he'd spend the rest of his life translating. I too bent my knees before this intrepid traveller, in a fitting start to our own trip along the Silk Road.
Our next stop back in town served as an overlap of sorts to a previous pilgrimage of mine. Long before he undertook the Shikoku pilgrimage best associated with him, Kukai spent a year at Qinglong Temple, learning from the Chinese priest Huiguo the tantric practices that would form the heart of the Shingon sect of Buddhism that he'd found upon returning to Japan. The temple was now set in the middle of a large park, one known for the sakura trees gifted by Shikoku's four prefectures as a show of friendship in 1985. Being the end of the season, petals littered the grounds, which were alive with carnival rides and punters enjoying a warm spring Saturday. A stele on a small rise stood to honor Kukai, just above an old brick hall that served as a modest museum, housing scrolls and books, and a display case dedicated to the Shikoku pilgrimage. There was another memorial in front of the temple's main hall, in the form of a new-ish statue of Kukai bowing before his teacher. They sat side by side within the hall itself, equal in status and stature.
Another temple followed, this one the Taoist temple of the Eight Immortals, Banxia Gong. Our driver was a little confused due to recent construction, and asked a local for directions. This old man man knew immediately, saying all the foreigners seemed to be going there. (I debated introducing him to the Lonely Planet phenomenon.) The temple was down a quiet alley lined with fortune tellers. The interior courtyards were likewise quiet, but for a handful of locals going about their worship. We too strolled about the courtyards, poking in to see the tall deities with their lavish clothes and beards far bushier than the wispy chins of the priests who sat reading below them in their exuberant caps and robes.
The sky was clouding as we arrived at the Forest of Stele, set upon the broad courtyards of a former Confucian temple. It was aptly named place, where rows of rows of stele filled the exhibit halls well into their dusty dark corners. A number of men were busy doing rubbings, tapping away a white substance with mallets most often associated with gongs. Being a busy Saturday, the crowds were here too, but they seemed little interested in the underground display of beautiful Buddhas taken from the religious oases that strung the Silk Road stretching west.
But my personal interest was in the stele with the Nestorian cross, dating back to 781. Kukai had arrived soon afterward, and it is interesting to speculate on any encounters he'd have had with Christianity. I've spent time looking into this, but have never found any scholarship that would expand upon it. Contrarily, there is plenty of speculation that he'd drawn more from the Zoroastrians, whose fire-worship may have been a factor in Kukai choosing the sun Buddha as the central deity in Shingon (which also meshes nicely with Shinto's sun goddess, Amaterasu).
We left the museum to stroll a shopping street, done up in an old T'ang style that was less touristy due to their absence. Women spun noodles in the front window of one shop, so we settled in as the rain increased, the hot broth taking the edge off an afternoon rapidly growing cool.
When we pulled away from the hotel in the morning, it was as part of a group, again with Wild Frontiers. This day too we began with a monument to Xuanzang, the Dayan Ta (Big Wild Goose Pagoda) having been built to house the sutras that the monk brought back from his travels. The grounds were busy with visitors, as was the interior of the pagoda itself, but I moved amongst them as I wound up the staircases to the top. People crowded the low windows found at each cardinal direction, each now covered with plexiglass with a small hole cut to the circumference of a smart phone clenching fist.
The views were of a city sprawling toward me. But I had to say that this developing China impressed me, in regards to how it had changed over two decades. The streets were clean and free of litter, and recycling bins were everywhere. Each corner had a fleet of rental bikes that could be cheaply borrowed with a quick swipe of the Alipay app. (I'd earlier spied one old uncle sitting atop one, getting his morning exercise by pedaling backwards.)
But not all of this modern China proved to my liking. The city to the north could be considered a forest of stele in its own right, to be joined soon by similar patches to the south and to the west. Huge swathes of the city looked abandoned, row after row of older apartment housing of a lower height cordoned off and falling into ruin. No doubt these are soon to be knocked down, to be replaced by even more of these domino towers. I thought about how lucky I was to travel when I did, and see the end of what Asia once was. But then again, when I had walked beneath these same type of older apartment houses back then, had I found them beautiful? Had I even noticed them at all?
I returned to earth. Old men were flying kites, young kids chased blown bubbles. (I thought how the only time you see a Chinese person smile is when they are with their grandchild. Or maybe when a foreign guest does something foolish.) There were more crowds in the Shaanxi Provincial Museum, and though I'd find myself frustrated when I'd turn away from a display to find myself hemmed in, it was a worthwhile stop. Nowhere else would you find so many Silk Road riches standing beside treasures of the T'ang. Though pots and the bronze mirror grew redundant after awhile, the little clay figures were interesting and incredibly numerous. I instinctively gravitated toward the Buddhas, the oldest dating back to the 4th Century. These would be the oldest I'd yet seen.
There was a quick stroll atop the city wall (which I hope to explore more thoroughly by bicycle next time), then the day wound itself down in the old Muslim quarter. The mosque was very much a Chinese temple, courtyard begetting courtyard begetting courtyard. The mosque itself at the far end was a beautiful structure of painstakingly-carved wood, and covered with painted Arabic script. The floors beyond the open doors were filled with the striped blue of cushion, and judging from their number, could host the needs of a sizable Islamic population.
The market itself was quite bustling, not touristic per se, but mainly with local Chinese out for a pre-dinner bite. The stalls themselves were inevitably manned by Hui, tell-tale in their oval white caps. Most of them are young, barely above school age, and looking more like the Han, and less than the Uighur, as I'd come to expect of the Muslim in China.
The road east led of course toward the Terracotta warriors. The forest in the hills above had long ago been denuded, and the new regrowth was coming in in strange patterns like a weird hair transplant. Maybe it was the water up there, the Huaqing Hot Springs where Emperor Xuanzong enjoyed watching his concubine Yang Guifei bathe, and 1200 years later Chiang Kai-shek was kidnapped by his own generals to force him to partner with his Communist enemy against the Japanese. In either case, things didn't turn out so well for the nation, history undergoing odd twists and turns like those same trees.
One thing that never changed was Qin Shi Huang's tomb, the round mound untouched even by Red Guards due to superstition. It is well known that his now famous army was found by a farmer digging a well. I don't know if in doing so his luck and fortune grew any worse due to his mistake, though I presume it didn't get much better as history doesn't recall his name. Perhaps he was the old man I passed in a wheelchair souped up like a chopper.
The Terracotta Army stood where they always had. Or nearly always. We tend to assume that they were found standing at attention, but in fact two millennia of shifting soil pressed upon them, shattering them into random bits. All the king's horses and all the king's men were put together again, by a team of very patient archeologists. Shards of others still lay scattered at the bottom of long trenches. And more remain buried still, awaiting their call of duty, as cannon-fodder for the flash of millions of smart phones.
On the turntable: Keb' Mo', " Keb' Mo'"
No comments:
Post a Comment