Tiantang Temple

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Temple atop the Town

Temple atop the Town

Tiantang Si, or Tiantang Temple was a tiny town grown up around a large Tibetan temple nestled in a mountain valley separating Gansu and Qinghai Provinces. The day after having climbed Maya Snow Mountain, we took a bus up to the temple, a three hour journey up dirt roads.

The temple glimmered atop the town, dominating it like a giant golden star on top of a muddy brown Christmas tree. The town was little more than a handful of restaurants and stores.

A Square dominated by a bird on the back of a hare on the back of a monkey on the back of an elephant

A Square dominated by a bird on the back of a hare on the back of a monkey on the back of an elephant

Although a Tibetan temple had stood there for twelve centuries, almost everything inside the temple walls was new, built in the past year. It glistened, but felt fake. The drilling of a temple walkway on a hill behind the temple rattled throughout the complex.

Construction

Construction

Inside the main hall, two old monks were watching over young boys training to be monks, the faint hum of chanting lingering in the entrance. We walked around the hall. Beside the main hall’s exit, a dozen fire extinguishers stood guard in one corner; for the past handful of years, China has been roiled by a series of Tibetans setting themselves on fire in protest at communist repression.

Art at the Main Hall

Art at the Main Hall

Outside the main hall, there were several men wearing monks’ clothes, though they were not participating in any religious activities. They spoke Chinese to each other and they spent most of their time playing games on their phones. We had been told that the Chinese installed spies in monks clothes to watch the real monks. I could not be certain, but I assumed that these two monks were spies.

Monk Friend

Monk Friend

A little ways away, I saw another monk reading from a Chinese Sutra. I talked briefly with him, asking him what he was reading. A few minutes later, when I was wandering around a different hall, he found me again and we talked more. Though the temple dated back to the 800’s A.D., he explained, there was only a single building that was at all old, and that building was just a little more than 100 years old, a small monks’ living quarters made of wood and clay.

The only old building in the complex

The only old building in the complex

Courtyard of the only old building

Courtyard of the only old building

He took me into one of the halls and showed me a photo of the complex from 1955. The complex was then vast and housed hundreds of monks. Rebuilt, too shiny and new, it was a shadow of its former, grungy glory. The monk said that all the other buildings had been destroyed in the 1960’s, when the youths took the banner of Mao Zedong and tore down anything they perceived as insufficiently Maoist.

Melting Butter with Mirrors

Melting Butter with Mirrors

No one else was in the hall with us. Just to see how he would respond, I pointed out that the 1955 photo was taken just a few years before the Dalai Lama left in 1959. His eyes widened, but he said nothing else. I quickly changed the subject, fearing that I might inadvertently get him in trouble.

As we left the town, I noticed something strange. From Xian to here, most of the towns we have stayed in have been undergoing construction booms, the likes of which I had never seen before. That tide of building had even washed over this town. In this wide spot in the road, which few people from this province had even heard of, a three hour bus ride via mostly unpaved roads to the county seat, there were still six cranes standing over the town. It seemed amazing that there could really be that much of a need for construction in this tiny town.

Construction

Construction

We passed down across the river and into the next province.

Temple Kitten

Temple Kitten

Wolves of Tibet

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Prey

Prey

While we were sweating our way up Maya Snow Mountain, the clatter of the baahing sheep enveloping us as a herd passed by, I asked our Tibetan friend, “Other than herd animals, are there any wild animals up here?”

“Oh, yes. They have bears, wolves and a kind of leopard. In fact, just a few weeks ago, two wolves came and killed twenty-two sheep. They did not even eat all of them. They just killed them.”

“Wow. That’s really bad.” I said.

“Yes. It was a tragedy for the family to lose that much. Herders just barely make enough money to get by. A sheep costs $33USD, so that is over $700 USD. That is so much money for one family to lose in one night,” she sighed.

“What did they do?” I asked.

“The whole community tried to hunt the wolves down and kill them,” she said. “It is bad for the wolves, because they are also endangered, but, when these kind of things happens, the families have no choice but to try to kill the wolves. The central government tries to protect the wolves. They have instituted policies to protect the wolves. But, for the locals, the wolves are a threat to their lives and their animals. They feel it is their right to kill the wolves.”

I wanted to present this situation because it is analogous to the situation with wolves in the United States. Environmentalists have pushed Washington to embrace the return of wolves to the American West, and Washington has been enthusiastic in promoting the wolves’ interests. But locals and the state governments out West have resisted Washington, charging that distant bureaucrats are promoting their environmentalist values without recognizing they are disrupting the livelihoods of local ranchers and hunters, who say they are not compensated enough for the loss of their livestock and game.

Often, the narrative in the media outside of China, presents Tibet as a matter of black and white. The Communists in Beijing are always the bad guys and the Tibetans are always the good guys, in touch with nature, and all the problems emanate from Beijing’s interference with locals. However, the world we live in is neither black nor white, and the truth is always more complicated.

Hike up Maya Snow Mountain – Tibetan Gansu Part III

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If you haven’t already checked out Part I or Part II of this series, take a look at them before reading this post.

Google Earth Shot of the Hike

Google Earth Shot of the Hike

Aerial View of the Hike via Google Earth

Aerial View of the Hike via Google Earth

In the 1990’s, our Tibetan friend had once done the hike we were doing, though it was different. Back then, they had travelled on foot from their village for two days. They stayed with a distant aunt and prayed to the two fairies who lived in each of the lakes that we were hiking to, a part of a festival for the holy mountain and the mountain’s lake fairies.

The Stairs Up

The Stairs Up

This time,we took only two hours to get to the trailhead by car. Our driver was a local Han Chinese woman. She had adapted to life in this Tibetan area, wearing Tibetan jewelry and generally respecting the Tibetan way of life, but, in her seven years working as a driver and bringing many people to the foot of the mountain, she had never once climbed the mountain herself. After a minute of encouragement, she agreed to join us.

With the Driver

With the Driver

The hike was not long. One-way, it was only two and a half miles. But the hike started high and went higher. We had stayed the night in Huazangsi, a tiny town at around 9,000 feet above sea level. The drive had brought us up to 11,000. From there, the trail climbed another 2,000 feet to the top lake, ending at about 13,000 feet. Starting up the mountain stairway, we were already breathing heavily. “I thought I was just out of shape,” an Aussie who came with us said when he saw the rest of us gasping.

Games for those with Altitude Problems

Games for those with Altitude Problems

The beauty of Maya Snow Mountain reminded me of Wyoming’s Wind River Mountains or Utah’s High Uintas. Granite peaks towering over green hills, with shale breaking off into sharp pieces and pouring down into crevices. Being in Tibet added another layer to it. Tibetan legend claims that each of the lakes has a fairy that lives in them. The fairies do not like noise, and, if their lakes are not approached with respect and quietude, we were told the fairies would whip up rain to send visitors scattering to dryer ground.

Sawtoothed Beauty

Sawtoothed Beauty

We could see almost sixty percent of the trail’s route as we climbed slowly up the mountain path. It was infuriating being able to watch how slowly we were moving, how little we had progressed. The elevation hit us so hard, it felt as if we were wearing corsets. The hundreds of sheep walked briskly beneath us like fluffy white dots floating along the grassy mountainside, immune to the altitude.

The Hike Up

The Hike Up

After more than an hour of hiking, we crossed over a ridgeline, and the trail quickly turned, dropping down into a smaller valley. From a distance, we noticed a short man taking photos of us. Our Tibetan friend tried to talk to him, but he was not willing to say much. He seemed to mill about, watching us for a while. He was a Han Chinese person and did not seem to be there to hike. We assumed he was a cop, sent to surveil us. Like most government officials in China, he did his job half-heartedly. After a few minutes, he began talking to two Tibetan women with several hundred sheep, then he fell asleep in the valley’s lush grass. We left him behind.

Copper

Copper

We continued in the valley, but were soon overtaken by two Chinese men wearing cheap village suits. They came around the bend and shuttled past us, dropping their still-burning cigarettes into the grass.

The Valley

The Valley

Our Tibetan friend, who was adamant about the power of the lake fairies, asked them to keep quiet, out of respect for the Tibetan tradition. “The fairies will make it rain if you are too loud,” she insisted.

They looked at us for a moment, not comprehending, then the tall one in front yelled, “Cheat. You’re a cheat. We’ll show you. When I get to the lake, I’m going to yell as loud I can. You’ll see. Nothing will happen. Ha.”

Jerks

Jerks

The shorter one said nothing, only following the jerk. We simmered, but there was little we could do. “They are from somewhere far away in central China,” our Tibetan friend said, listening to their accent as they laughed between themselves, walking towards the gap that led to the lake. They were living here temporarily, probably working on one of the construction sites we had passed on the way up. The lake was only a few hundred feet above us. We watched them and continued on, hoping they would leave soon after we arrived at the lower lake.

Summer Snow

Summer Snow

I do not know if it was the curse of the fairies or something else, but, just before they reached the lake, we watched the shorter man pull back. “This isn’t fun. I don’t want to go.”

“What?” The jerk said. “We’re almost there. It’s just up here. You can’t turn back now.”

“It’s just not fun.” The shorter one said. “I’m heading back.”

With that, the shorter disappeared down the valley and back around the bend. The jerk went up to look at the lake, but quickly turned around after his friend, leaving quietly.

View from the Lower Lake

View from the Lower Lake

The lower lake was shallow, tinged with the ochre of the mud that made up the lake’s bottom. In the center of the lake, a small circle of blue marked where the water dropped off deeper. Above us the granite peaks thrust hundreds of feet up, gray crags protruding from rock faces all around. We snapped up marigolds from the pasture and sprinkled them onto the lake’s surface; the lake fairies appreciated flowers.

Lower Lake

Lower Lake

At one end, there was a three hundred foot rock face filled with broken pieces of shale. Our Tibetan friend pointed up to the lip. “The other lake is up there.”

Moving three hundred feet higher, we had slipped into a higher plain of sublimity. Vegetation had largely disappeared. We were in alpine territory, gray rocks surrounding us everywhere. The second lake was three times as large as the lower lake, one end pressing against the flat face of the tallest peak. The water was aquamarine and, unlike the lower lake, the bottom was dappled with smooth stones, no sign of mud. A tanka, a traditional kind of Tibetan painting, had been painted into one side of the mountain. An ovoos, a pile of stones with a flurry of prayer flags flapping from it, marked the spot for sacrifices to the upper lake’s fairy. A small stone-made pathway had been carved around the lake so that worshippers could circumnavigate the water, as Tibetan religion required. We just looked around and let the beauty sink in.

Upper Lake

Upper Lake

But we could not linger for too long. Above us, clouds were moving in, and several noisy Chinese men had made it to the lower lake. Our Han Chinese driver scurried up to the Ovoos for the lower lake’s fairy, making a small sacrifice, and then we moved quickly down the mountain, a line of dark clouds following us.

Clouds Approaching

Clouds Approaching

Ovoo

Ovoo

We made it down in a little over an hour without any rain. Slowing us down most was not the difficulty breathing, but our need to save our knees. The policeman had disappeared, probably too lazy to finish his assignment. The car ride back was quiet, with only one stop for our driver to buy a gallon-sized bucket of yogurt. I nodded off for a few minutes before snapping awake as we careened down the mountain road.

The Group

The Group

When discussing the conflict between the Han Chinese and the Tibetans, people often see things as black and white. The Tibetans are one way, the Chinese are the opposite. The thing that is sticking with me most from this hike, beside the Wyoming-like beauty of the granite peaks, is the fact that the conflict between the Chinese and the Tibetans is not so black and white. Our driver was Chinese, but she was respectful of Tibetan tradition, keeping quiet around the lake and offering a sacrfice to the lake fairy. It was only the two outsiders, the two guys brought in to work construction, who dumped on the local culture. It is not so much a conflict between Chinese and Tibetans but a conflict between outsiders and locals, people who just got there and people who have always been there.

Dem geo boys

Dem geo boys

Approach up Maya Snow Mountain – Tibetan Gansu Part II

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Note: If you haven’t already read the post about Huazangsi, click here.

Tianzhu to Maya with path

Tianzhu to Maya with path

We were moving up out of the city and on the mountain road by 5:45. Though the sun had not yet risen, light illuminated the brown, scrub-less hills. The air had not quite dropped to freezing where we were, but, in the mountains, it was well below freezing.

Mountain Sunrise

Mountain Sunrise

The trailhead up to the holy Tibetan mountain we would hike, Maya Snow Mountain, was more than two hours away from Huazangsi, the nearest town of any size. The road was dirt for hour long stretches, and our path was marked on one side by colored flags with the names of construction companies from places faraway in central China. They were constructing new sections of paved road or cutting into the alternating brown and green Tibetan hillsides.

The Road Up

The Road Up

Past the flags, the dirt road dropped off the mountain. Swinging around corners, our driver was occasionally confronted with the sight of coal-laden semis barreling down our side of the road. “They think it is safer to drive on the wrong side of the road…they are less likely to fall off the road,” our friend told us.

Green Mountains

Green Mountains

The areas surrounding the town of Huazangsi were mostly Han Chinese, tight-knit communities of farmers eeking a living off the bad soil in the mountain’s river bottoms. But as we moved into higher elevations, into the more rural parts of Tianzhu County, the Han and Tibetan population mixed, the two groups sharing villages. Even higher up, the soil was completely unarable and the people were almost all Tibetan herders.

Recently, large movements of Han Chinese into cities in Tibet has raised concerns that Tibetans will be completely sinocized, wiping out any trace of Tibetan culture. However, here it works both ways. Tibetans in Huazangsi speak little Tibetan, becoming sinocized but the Han Chinese who move into Tibetan areas and take up herding tend to become Tibetans. They take on aspects of Tibetan culture and dress, eventually becoming almost indistinguishable from Tibetans.

Looking Towards Tibet

Looking Towards Tibet

It was only 7:30, but the sky was a midday emerald blue. Our driver laughed as she scanned the horizon for clouds, saying something in the local dialect that I could only half understand. My friend laughed with her, turning to tell us, “She says that, a few days ago, some people went up to Maya Snow Mountain and the weather turned on them. It changes quickly if you are too loud. The lake fairies do not like it. When the weather changed on them, they got lost in the fog. One of them died up there.” Our friend turned back to the driver, adding, “But she doesn’t think that will happen to us.”

“I’m excited she thinks its unlikely we will die,” I quibbed.

Galen, the Mountain

Galen, the Mountain

Past a coal mine, we turned onto another road and the mood changed. The flags of the construction crews were gone. No more strip mining was to be seen. Lines of fur trees ran up along the ridges unmolested.

The Herd

The Herd

Little Lamb, who made thee?

Little Lamb, who made thee?

The local Tibetans felt it was warm enough to begin moving their flocks to summer pastures.We had been early enough to avoid any delays from the construction crews, but, because of the migration, we were caught several times in traffic jams with herds of animals moving to higher ground. Once, we were stuck in a herd of four hundred sheep, pushing our way through the herd for a full five minutes before we were able to return to a normal speed.

Baby Yaks!

Baby Yaks!

We pulled into the parking lot, a tiny square of dirt where the road ended. Craggy granite peaks towered over us. The mountain path rose before us, a series of stone steps snaking up the mountain. This was the beginning of the hike up Maya Snow Mountain.

This is the video of our approach up to Maya Snow Mountain:

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Tibetans along the Silk Road – Tibetan Gansu Part I

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Huazangsi

The invitation came unexpectedly. An old friend on Facebook saw that the post I put up on our Silk Road Hitchhiking project. She contacted me in a message, telling me that a friend of hers was in Huazangsi, in Tianzhu County, just along the Silk Road in the Gansu Corridor, and she and an Australian friend were planning on doing a hike up to a nearby mountain considered sacred to the Tibetans. Would we like to join?

Of course.

Hills along the Silk Road's Gansu Corridor

Hills along the Silk Road’s Gansu Corridor

It was chilly when we arrived in Huazangsi. Only a few days before, we had been pouring sweat on the streets of Xian, the heat almost overwhelming, but, here in Huazangsi, the temperature was in the high 50’s Fahrenheit in June. I had to throw on a long-sleeved shirt. On either side of the valley floor, dirt brown hills grew barren of any sign of life on them. Further on, we could see distant mountains peaking through the horizon. The next day, we would be climbing out in those mountains.

Beauty in Green, Gray and Brown

Beauty in Green, Gray and Brown

We eventually met up with our Tibetan and Australian friends and made plans for the hike the next day. The square where we met them had hundreds of people line dancing in the darkness beneath the twenty-five foot statue of the White Yak, a local variety of the burly beast which the Tibetans were particularly fond of.

Most of the dancers in the square were Han Chinese, but, this far out, I could see slight differences in appearance of these Han, when compared with the Han of Xian or Beijing. Their faces were slightly redder, their skin tanned by the unforgiving Tibetan sun. They spoke a kind of Chinese that I was having trouble understanding. The number one, normally pronounced “yi” in standard Mandarin, was here pronounced “ji.”

Dancers

Dancers

Though most of the people living in the town of Huazangsi were Han, Tianzhu County was a Tibetan County, and, over the years, the town had developed a sizable population of Tibetans coming in off pasture lands to give city life a try.

Line Dancing

Line Dancing

When we had first conceived of this trip along the Silk Road, I had been afraid of the heat, not the cold. Yet, as the sun set, the temperature dropped into the forties fast. We were above three and a half thousand feet in a small town which Silk Road traders had once passed by. Tibetans and Han Chinese mixed amicably as the line dance music wafted across the square, these cultural interchanges the heritage of this long passed network of traders.

This is not the Silk Road I had expected.

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Children Smoking

Children Smoking

New Friends

New Friends

New Friends

New Friends

Kids in the Square

Kids in the Square

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Red Flags and Lemonade – Failure and Success in Hitchhiking

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We were leaving Lanzhou trying to make an appointment in Huazangsi, an hour and a half northwest along the Gansu Corridor. Lanzhou is a dump of a city in country known for its dumps. It is an industrial wasteland of two million people. This provincial capital is surrounded by desert mountains, and, in the winter, those mountains trap all the city’s pollution, making it one of the most polluted places on Earth.

We were happy to leave, but it was more trouble than we realized it was going to be. We took a city bus to the entrance to a dusty expressway. Semis and buses swirled around us, a long line snaking towards the toll booth. We posted in a strategic place and I began to flag down drivers.

Within a few minutes, a black sedan made by a company called “Red Flag” pulled up to us. “Where are you going?” The driver asked across his son riding in the passenger leather seat.

“Huazangsi.”

“Okay. I can take you there.”

He helped us put our stuff into his trunk and then we hopped in.

Things started off well. I thanked him for the ride, and we chatted. He had his son look up where Huazangsi was on his phone.

He did something weird though: instead of entering the expressway, where he had picked us up, he continued along a dirt frontage road, paralleling the expressway for several miles. Chinese people have penny-wise, dollar foolish ways of saving money. At night, they often drive without their lights on to save money on the battery. Of course, the amount wasted on car accidents dwarfs the few cents saved on the battery.

This driver taking his nice sedan on the frontage road to avoid the toll seemed like a case of this penny-wise, dollar-foolish mentality. The amount of potholes he was eating was certainly doing more damage to his suspension than he was saving on tolls. Plus, I thought it was strange that any man who would pick up hitchhikers for free was that pressed for cash. This should have been a red flag, but I did not think anything of it.

About forty-five minutes into the ride, once we had gotten into the rolling desert with few houses, he told us that he was going to ask for nine hundred RMB for the ride, about $150 USD.

I was stunned. If they are asking for money, they usually say so at the beginning of the ride, before you get in. Plus, what kind of man in a nice car would bring his son along to pick up riders?

“That’s way too much.” I began to argue with him.

“What are you going to do if I just force you out in the middle of nowhere?”

“I’m not giving you any money. If you wanted money, you should have told us at the beginning of the ride.”

“This is my car, and I make the rules. You don’t know how far it is. It is three or four hours from here.”

“I checked last night. It’s an hour and a half.”

We argued like this for ten minutes. He pulled off the interstate into a satellite city near the Lanzhou airport called “New Lanzhou.” New Lanzhou was dead, empty of any sign of life except for the construction workers building this entirely new city. Looking around at the forest of empty sky-scrapers, I guessed there were homes for a million people. All of them empty.

He had stopped in the middle of nowhere, near a series of empty apartments, telling us to get out and pay him one hundred RMB for getting us this far. “I won’t accept anything less. I’ve already driven you this far.” I told him I was not going to pay him any more than fifty RMB, and that he had to take us somewhere we could get a ride. He yelled at us more, but I did not feel threatened. I read while we waited, knowing I could break him.

After five minutes of waiting, I had broken him. He agreed to drop us off at an expressway entrance as long as I paid him eighty RMB. For the next, fifteen minutes, he drove around the empty city, trying to find where an expressway entrance was, asking everyone he saw along the road. We paid him, removed our bags from the trunk of his Red Flag, and he disappeared back into the forest of uninhabited apartments.

In the shade of a newly built hotel in the middle of this empty city we took account of our situation and asked for directions from the hotel staff. We received several different sets of directions, so we just began walking along the wide deserted avenues in the direction we thought we wanted to go.

Almost immediately, we saw an SUV pulled over on the side of the road, two old ladies and a young man fiddling with the luggage in the back. I asked them if they knew which way to go. They told us and asked us what had happened. We told them.

Almost immediately, they said they would take us back for free and gave us each a bottle of lemonade. They were not going in the direction that we wanted to go, but they were going back to Lanzhou.

“There are no buses from here to Huazangsi.” They told us as we sped back through the countryside we had just gone through, this time taking the expressway the whole way. “And that driver was taking you the wrong way. He probably did not have any idea of where he was going.”

Considering what had happened, I first believed that that the Red Flag driver had intentionally dropped us off in the wrong place. However, when I remembered how long it had taken him to get to the point where he had agreed to drop us off, I thought they were probably right. The man just had no idea of where he was going. I was mad at myself for missing all the red flags.

The nice people dropped us off at a bus station, and, one of the ladies, a pretty fifty-something, walked us into the ticketing hall. Because we were already late for meeting with our friend, we had little choice but to take a bus. The tickets ended up costing us about 60 RMB and took only an hour and a half.

That night, I got a call from the fifty-something who had walked us into the bus station, just checking to make make sure we had arrived safely.

Failure is the first step to success. We learned a lot about the Chinese from this back and forth experience, seeing the worst and the best of the Chinese.

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Taiwanese at Fuxi Temple

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I thought I was imagining things. We were just about finished with a temple dedicated to Fuxi when I saw a score of oldish people hustling into the temple, orange sashes tied around their waist, all speaking Taiwanese, a language related to Mandarin about as closely as French is to Portuguese. I was only able to pick up bits of what they said, despite my forty hours of trying to learn Taiwanese.

Taiwanese Worshipers

Taiwanese Worshipers

This was strange for several reasons. First, most people who speak Taiwanese do not like China, so it is surprising to see them in China at all. Second, it was particularly surprising for them to be at this particular temple, Fuxi being the celebrated mythical ancestor of the Chinese race, just when Taiwanese people seem to be moving further away from being identified as Chinese.

Preparing for Worship

Preparing for Worship

I tried to pick off members of the group to talk to them, but they did not want to talk with me. They told me they were there to worship and that they were from Taoyuan, a suburb of Taipei, but they were willing to say little else.

Writing Prayers

Writing Prayers

I wandered around, stumped, for several minutes before I was able to pump some information from their tour guide. He said they were a group of Taiwanese Daoists and that they had come here because they looked upon Fuxi as the founder of Daoism (not true, but it is a religious belief).

Talking with the Guide

Talking with the guide

The tour guide thought his Taiwanese tourists were strange, a little backwards. He had taken them all around the area to worship at sites connected to Fuxi and his sister/wife, the Chinese mother goddess Nuwa. Nuwa’s birthplace was located one hundred and forty kilometers away from the city Tianshui, in a cave deep inside a canyon. He took them to the cave but decided not to go into the cave. He did not believe in that stuff.

Temple

Temple

None of the mainland Chinese do, he claimed. The Taiwanese did not experience the Cultural Revolution, the period between 1966 to 1976 when an ideological civil war broke out within China’s Communist Party and all efforts were made to destroy religion in China. So, unlike the Taiwanese, the tour guide did not think of Fuxi and Nuwa as religious figures. As I mentioned in the earlier post on Fuxi Temple, this tour guide did suggest that he believed Fuxi and Nuwa were the progenitors of all the people who make up the modern Chinese nation, historical but not religious figures.

Worshipping

Worshipping

To believe that these figures are historical is more problematic than believing in these figures as religious figures. I can respect someone else’s view of religion; that is just what they believe. But it is much harder to do with history. History is a truth we all have to agree on. Do the Chinese expect me, an American of European descent, to really believe that I owe Fuxi a debt of gratitude because he was supposedly the guy to introduce the system of marriage, as this tour guide said he believed?

Fuxi Temple

Fuxi Temple

But, this is what China is becoming. A country without religion, but a strong, almost irrational belief that its mythology is history.

Selfie with the Ancients

Selfie with the Ancients

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Race in China – Fuxi Temple

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After getting a ride back from Maijishan, Galen and I went to the temple dedicated to Fuxi. Fuxi is an ancient Chinese god/mythical ancestor who was the first at a lot of things in Chinese mythology. According to Chinese legends, Fuxi and his wife/sister, Nuwa, created all humans after a flood washed everyone else away. Fuxi did a lot a lot of things for the Chinese people. He taught people how to fish with nets, he came up with the whole Yin/Yang thing and the eight trigrams that make up one of the oldest Chinese texts, the Yijing (also spelt I-Ching) and he was the originator of the Chinese writing system. Fuxi was also responsible for giving to humanity the gift of marriage. Before Fuxi, children only knew their mothers and men were thought unnecessary for procreation. Fuxi changed all that.

Fuxi, the creator of the Chinese

Fuxi, the creator of the Chinese

In the temple, I talked to a guide who told me that this temple was being used by the government as a gathering point for the Chinese race. Ever since 1988, the mainland Chinese government has sought to bring representatives for all the Chinese people here to the Fuxi Temple on June 22nd, the Dragon Birthday. These representatives included Chinese people from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan and even the United States. They were all invited to worship the founder of their race.

Talking with the Guide

Talking with the Guide

I asked the tour guide more about who was included in the race that Fuxi founded. At first, he said it was mainly the ethnic Han Chinese who worshipped him as their founder, the Han being the ethnic group we think of as “Chinese.” Then, he used the term “Zhongguoren,” the word that is used in modern Chinese to mean “people who are citizens of China.”

Fuxi, the creator of the Chinese Race

Fuxi, the creator of the Chinese Race

I pursued this more. “Zhongguoren” includes Tibetans and Uighurs, but certainly, Fuxi is just the founder of the Han Chinese. Tibetans do not believe that Fuxi is the founder of their race. Uighurs, a group of Turkic Muslims who live in the far west of China, where we are heading, certainly do not believe that they came out of some hairy dude who created the Chinese writing system.

You really expect a Tibetan or a Uighur to believe this is their progenitor?

You really expect a Tibetan or a Uighur to believe this is their progenitor?

For real?

For real?

“No, they did” the tour guide insisted. “All the children of the yellow dragon are descended from Fuxi, and this includes all Chinese people. It was not until later that the ethnic groups divided up into Han peoples, Tibetans, Uighurs, etc.”

Fuxi was responsible for the first Yin-Yang, which looked like this. He is considered the founder of Daoism because he is purported to have concieved of the Yin-Yang figure and to have writting the Yijing.

Fuxi was responsible for the first Yin-Yang, which looked like this. He is considered the founder of Daoism because he is purported to have conceived of the Yin-Yang figure and to have written the Yijing.

The reason this is interesting is because this is the kind of mythological nonsense that the Communist Party intended to sweep away when it came to power in 1949. And it was largely successful at that, though at a great cost. Few in the 1960’s cared about Fuxi or Confucius. They certainly would have never invited Chinese groups from around the world to celebrate the birth of the Chinese race.

Fuxi also invented music

Fuxi also invented music

Yet, now, as Communism in China is largely an empty shell, the Communist government has had to rely more and more on Han Chinese nationalism rather than Communism as a justification for its rule. The leaders in Beijing justify their authoritarianism not with Communist ideology but with the idea that they are restoring China to their rightful place in the world. That mission will butt heads with those Chinese citizens who are not Han Chinese, like the Tibetans or the Uighurs.

Incense in the Temple

Incense in the Temple

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Spazzy Anna Hitchhiking Video

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One of the reasons we chose to try to hitchhike our way across China is because we wanted to meet people and show folks back home the real China, in all its weird variety. When we hitched a ride from Anna, the spazzy girl I mentioned in the previous post, she struck us as one of the least stereotypical Chinese people we had met. So, Galen got some video of her and put this together:

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