Tuesday 10 July
The Chengdu area has been populated by people for
quite a while. Apparently, some 3000
years ago there was a pretty decent civilisation in the area, called the
Shu. These people were around at the
same time as the Shang and Zhou civilisations in the northern plains, and
apparently they helped the Zhou overthrow the Shang around 1100 BCE.
The Jinsha Museum, in north-western Chengdu, sits on
an ancient Shu site. There is a museum building
containing Shu artefacts, as well as a building covering an archaeological dig
site, where the artefacts were found. It
is all set in a pleasant park environment, and we spent about five or so hours
wandering around the area.
To get there, we caught the metro to the Jinsha Museum
metro station. Chengdu metro stations
are often decorated according to their location, and this station had a very
beautiful gold and jade look. Before
going into the museum we had lunch at a restaurant opposite the entrance.
After lunch, just as we were about to enter the
museum, several bus loads of school children (maybe about Mulan’s age) drove
up. We raced in before them, entering
the archaeological dig site building, but about ten classes soon, one by one,
caught up and passed us inside the building.
Mulan and Miya seemed more interested in sociology than archaeology,
preferring to watch the school children rather than the pits.
Despite the sudden crowds, looking at the archaeological
dig was fascinating. It seems like it is
still an ongoing dig site, and they know there is still a lot more buried in
there. After seeing the dig site we
walked around the park area before heading to the museum to see the artefacts.
The star find of the site, in the museum, is a gold foil disc, depicting the sun and immortal birds. This gold disc is used as a symbol on a lot of local stuff, and now that we know it we saw it everywhere. A gold mask is also significant.
Wednesday 11 July
We stayed at home all day resting, reading and writing
— we needed a break. The morning was
quite rainy (though not especially bucketing down), and apparently it was the
wettest in ten years in the area. With
the unseasonably bad weather, transport and various activities in the city seem
to be stopped and closed sometimes. We
ate dinner at the yummy bin-bin restaurant under our apartment.
Thursday 12 July
We’re
off to see the pandas,
The
wonderful pandas of China,
sang Mulan and Miya.
We left home at 6:30 am to beat the crowds to the
Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding (yep, that long mouthful is its
name). We caught the metro to the Panda
Ave metro station, where, around 7:30 am, we got a panda bus to the gates of
the park. It was already pretty crowded,
and we were beginning to think that everyone was trying to beat the crowds as
well, but it turned out that later in the day it was even more crowded.
The weather forecast said it would be a fine day so we
didn’t bother with rain gear, but no, it was raining as we entered the
park. Mama and the girls bought 10 RMB
disposable plastic raincoats each, but I toughed it out (I’d rather a little
drizzle wetness that contribute to the throwaway plastic problem). But luckily someone had thrown away their
slightly ripped raincoat, which we retrieved for me from the (hopefully clean)
bin.
Amusingly, along with the disposable raincoats, many
visitors also wore disposable plastic booties to cover their shoes. It seems that the fashion-focused locals
think it important that their foot coverings are themselves covered and
protected.
The park consisted mostly of pleasant outdoor walks
along paths between bamboo clumps and other plant-life, seeing the occasional
panda in fairly decent zoo-like enclosures.
Panda activities we observed included a bit of bamboo eating, a bit of
playing, and a lot of sleeping and stretching.
There were also two nursery buildings, where we could see panda babies
in their incubators. This was by far the
highlight of the park, as the smallest of the babies had only just barely got
their darker colourings. It was also by
far the most crowded, and crowd control consisted of guards with megaphones
screaming at us to keep moving as we walked in line past the windows of the
panda nurseries.
(Red pandas too.)
We ate lunch at a restaurant in the park, choosing a
bamboo shoot dish, and left the park around mid-afternoon. Despite the crowds, this is definitely a
must-see place to go to while in Chengdu.
Friday 13 July
We were out for over 12 hours this day, though it almost
failed at the beginning due to more train station mistakes. The problem was that Mama misjudged when
we needed to leave home, and we arrived far too late at the hugely busy
intercity train station. Initially we
thought that we had no chance to get through the massive crowds, but Mama managed to politely push to the front of queues and, by running, we boarded the
train five minutes before it departed at 11:40 am. (Miya, who hates changes to plans, was pretty
stressed out by it all, though.)
The place we went to for the day was the nearby city
of Dujiangyan, just 30 minutes away by fast train. The significance of this city is that around
256 BCE an amazingly innovative flood control and irrigation system was built
there, which is still in use today.
Apparently, before this, every spring the area would
flood from the excessive water coming down the mountains and overflowing the
river. This was a problem that needed to
be solved, but they didn’t want to build a dam as they still wanted to use the
waterways for military transport. So,
the governor Li Bing was tasked with the complicated engineering project.
With a team said to number in the tens of thousands,
and taking four years, Li built a levee in the river out of rocks and bamboo
that diverted a portion of the water flow.
Taking a further eight years, he then cut a channel through the mountain
(cracking the stone with water and heat) to discharge the excess water onto the
plains. Apparently it was all built and
angled just right to get the right proportions of water down the right channels
at all times of the year. Problem
solved, and no more flooding.
Additionally, this helped irrigate the plains and made Sichuan the most
productive agricultural region in China.
Wikipedia tells us that this has helped to create a
local culture in which the people are more laidback — for a couple of millennia
they must have had a relatively comfortable life with an abundance of
food. This, it seems to me, may also
partly explain the fashion-focus mentality of the region.
When we arrived at the Dujiangyan train station, to
get to the river sightseeing park Mama opted to buy bus tickets from the
State-run company, which had an office right at the train station exit. It was a military-mentality organisation, the
way they organised us customers onto buses and into the park. But maybe it had to be, with the numbers of
tourists arriving. The staff were
certainly impressive in their organisational abilities (Mama told me that
for instance each girl in charge of each bus-load, who also acted as their
tour-guide around the park, also handled the park ticket-buying for their
passengers — remembering everyone’s specific needs with the complicated pricing
system, where those from different regions of China pay differently, eg
Shanghainese pay less because Shanghai helped significantly after the huge
earthquake ten years earlier).
After we bought the tickets, the megaphoned girls
ordered us customers into a long snaking line, before taking us group-by-group
out to our waiting buses. This procedure
must happen at every train arrival. We
were near the front of the queue, having got our tickets relatively early, and,
as luck would have it, we were the last to go to the first bus — those
immediately behind us in the queue were stopped and told to wait. Consequently we were the last on our bus and
we had to dot ourselves separately around on the last four bus seats.
The last non-peopled seat in the bus (the one I
survived my Bolivian bus crash in), which was my intended seat, was already
occupied by several plastic bags of stuff.
No one seemed to want to move them, and, after standing there for
several seconds with not much happening, I asked the man sitting next to them
if he had bought an extra ticket for them.
He mumbled that it wasn’t his (oops, sorry!), and eventually our
megaphoned girl came over, huffed a bit, and moved them into the stair
area. I have no idea what she was
expecting me to do otherwise (she seemed to be gesturing me towards the back of
the bus), and I guess I will never know whose bags they were, but at least I
was not the only one standing for the 20-minute journey.
At the park entrance, after getting off the bus, we
had to wait another several minutes while our megaphoned girl sorted out our
park tickets. It was pretty crowded
there, with buses coming and going, dropping off more tourist groups, each with
their own megaphoned girl (or occasionally boy). Each tour-group leader either had a flag or a
small soft toy on a stick — ours had a pikachu.
Eventually we got our tickets and we went through the gates. We had the option of continuing to follow our
tour-guide megaphoned girl, but chose instead to go our own way.
We probably entered the park around 1 pm, and left
about 7 pm. For most of that time we
were walking, and for a lot of the walk it was up and down steps on the
mountainside above the river. The girls
survived remarkably well, though Miya had occasional moments throughout the
walk of not feeling so happy with it all.
(The next day, Mama and Miya said their legs were a bit sore,
whereas the sides of my tummy were slightly sore from swinging my hiking
poles. Mulan, with all her ballet training,
was as perky and pain-free as ever.) If
I was to redo this day, I’d reduce the amount of walking we did, as it was
pretty tough for Miya.
On entering the park, we walked a few minutes before
finding a quiet pavilion in the bushes and overlooking the river to eat our
lunch. It was very pleasant and
peaceful.
After eating, we walked down the mountainside to the
river, passing through some temple complexes on the way. It seems that the waterway builders and
various others have been elevated to the status of gods, and the temples in the
area are there for their (and other gods’) worship. More importantly for Miya, there was a little
kitten in the temple area that needed a greeting.
On a sign by the temple, it explained that it was
Taoist (Daoist). Mulan wanted to know
what that was, so I briefly explained as we walked. The Daoists were reacting against the
Confucians. And Confucius was reacting
against the pop culture of his day.
Confucius, around 500 BCE, was unhappy with the laxness of the current
people. He was a conservative who wanted
to return to what he thought of as the good old days of several hundred years
earlier. This involved, amongst other
things, lots of strict rituals and elaborate ceremonial activities.
The original Daoists (in particular the mythical
Laozi’s text Daodejing and Zhuangzi) wrote laugh-out-loud stories often
poking fun at the seriousness of the Confucians. Their texts are often multi-layered ironic
works telling stories about simple craftsmen and labourers who, without
conscious thought, exhibit their superior expertise. In part, Daoism was a reaction against the
artificialness of rituals and a return to normal, practical life. But as often happens with teachings that
catch on, over hundreds of years the later Daoists themselves have turned their
practices into elaborate rituals, as we saw in the temple.
Miya observed that the candles burning at the temple
and dripping onto the ground were a big waste.
I pointed out that Miya was thinking like Mozi and his followers, who
were also reacting against the Confucians.
Mozi thought that all these elaborate rituals were highly wasteful, both
in time and resources, and they should be abandoned or simplified.
Arriving at the riverside, it was as if we had walked into
an air-con-ed room, such was the sudden coolness of the river air. It really was amazing to feel, and we
experienced it several times in various places along the river. The brown river water was rushing by, with
lots of swirls and whirlpools, at a fairly quick pace. I certainly would not have wanted to fall
into it.
With Mama leading the way, I didn’t try to
understand the poorly-designed tourist map, just enjoying the walk and
scenery. We walked approximately
anti-clockwise around in a loop and eventually back to our original
entrance. On the way we walked alongside
the river, up and down mountainsides, through ancient gateways, up a
mountain-top pagoda and to a long two-part outdoor escalator. This escalator, at something like 150 metres
long and with a 50-odd metre elevation, is a pretty sizeable rest from walking,
and Miya was looking forward to it for quite some time. Most people walk the trails so that they go
up the escalator, but we went down it.
(I couldn't resist the Chinglish!)
While walking, we were intrigued by a girl wearing
old-style Chinese clothes. She was
accompanied by a few people periodically taking photos of her posed in various
spots. Mama said that it is starting
to be a thing for Chinese girls to want to wear traditional clothing, since
Japanese have their kimono and Koreans similarly have their traditional
clothes. The Chinese qipao, from the
1930s, is too modern.
Back at our original entrance, our walk wasn’t nearly
over. Instead we repeated our walk
though the temples (no kitten this time) and down to the river. The purpose of this was to cross the river
over a swing-bridge and onto the levee island, then over another bridge and
towards a different park entrance/exit.
But before continuing, we had an afternoon tea break
at a restaurant overlooking the river.
Mama and I had chrysanthemum tea and the girls had an iced jelly
dish each.
While resting it was drizzling a bit, and continued to
do so as we crossed the swing bridge (fortunately we had brought our
wet-weather gear this time). Miya was a
bit worried by the swing bridge, but holding my hand and with lots of
assurances that it was all safe, she made it across. Mulan wanted to bounce across the bridge and
had to be restrained from making it swing too much. By this time, around 5:30ish, there were far
fewer tourists around and the tour groups had finished.
There were two more bridges in the park after this —
one solid one and another swing bridge.
Miya was much more confident on this second swing bridge, walking across
it on her own and standing there for photos.
We took our time with photos, as there was almost no one else around.
At 7 pm we exited the park into a large paved public
square, where many locals were enjoying their evening social activities. The girls shook hands with a Monkey King entertaining the crowds, alongside a panda (lots of panda-themed things in this
part of China) and a few other dressed-up characters. We ate in a local restaurant, listening to
the cook at the next restaurant sing out of tune to accompanying music. We applauded his genuinely happy attitude, if
not his singing abilities.
Around 8 pm, we caught a local bus back to the
intercity train station. Mama didn’t
have any change with her, as China is mostly cashless these days (most people
pay by WeChat or AliPay from their phones), and the bus driver very kindly let
us on for free. We caught the 9:17 pm
train back to Xifu, a different station in Chengdu, meaning we had slightly
further to travel on the Chengdu metro.
We finally got in home around 11 pm.
Saturday 14 July
Tired after our long day, we spend this day resting at
home. Miya quietly informed me that she
has decided not to eat meat. She feels
sorry for the animals, she said. I’ve
been vegetarian since 2003, so it seems that for now half our family is
vegetarian.
(Part 3 here)
(Part 3 here)
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