LONGMEN CAVES, PINGYAO, YUNGANG CAVES, BEIJING

Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Longmen Caves, Pingyao, Yungang Caves, Beijing once more, and simple kindness by an unknown young woman.

This last chapter of the diary is taxing my memory as it's being made days after the events on arrival home. Unfortunately the internet access in Pingyao was not reliable after completing the Xi'an posting we did not find a venue near our hotels in the final two large cities Datong and Beijing.

Trains, buses and travel logistics
Xi'an seemed the obvious place to try for our first train since we were staying close to the station as well as the major bus park. Getting a ticket was unusually easy, since having talked to a couple from Cardiff about it we went straight to counter 4 out of a total of around 30, having been told at the hotel that the lady there would speak good English. Joan noticed that it was the only counter with Ticket Office written in English rather than Chinese, otherwise there was nothing to direct foreigners to this queue. 

The Chinese need to learn that almost no foreigners can read their syllable character based script, but many can deal with Pinyin. Another lesson should be to avoid translating into English, it is confusing, even when it is accurate - which it rarely is. Pinyin Chinese can be recognised easily since it uses our alphabet and even more importantly it allows a decent attempt at speaking the words in Chinese with the reasonable expectation that they will be understood. Translations of names of streets or food dishes are extremely unhelpful, we don't need to know that this is Democracy Street or that this dish is known as Lotus Blossom, just a means of knowing how to recognise and pronounce the Chinese name in a way that a taxi driver or a waiter may understand. Picture book menus are virtually useless without giving the main ingredients in Pinyin, We recently assumed a picture was of a dish we had recently eaten and enjoyed, namely broad beans in a sauce, but it turned out to be peanuts and small pork cubes in sauce!

Buying a train ticket at a train station is normally difficult, which is why most travellers opt to buy tickets at a slight premium through their hotel or guest house. Catching a train on the other hand was simple at Xi'an. The ticket gives the train number, the coach and seat number and the time of departure. A half dozen queues form at gates which give the train number and the destination. At the appropriate the gate is opened, just as in an airport, and people stream to the appropriate platform to board the waiting train. Each carriage is numbered and each seat is numbered. 

Only one thing can go wrong and it did. There is one essential Chinese character on the ticket, and this tells whether your seat number applies to the lower or upper deck. Having realised to what the character refers the character significance is obvious. All Chinese characters started life as such simple pictures. Learning to recognise a few characters is essential survival skill, the signs for Bathroom, Men or Women, and to recognise place names of immediate interest is equally valid. Many long distance buses go back and forth between two destinations, the two place names are usually two or three characters long and are linked by two arrows pointing in opposite directions to indicate the shuttle.

The most difficult issue in buying long distance bus tickets is to decide how far to expect to get in a frequently departing bus thus determining a likely destination before attempting to buy. For it is usually better to make a single day's progress by two or three easily found hops. Oh for Pinyin timetables in bus and train stations, then travelling would be child's play.

As for the train journey itself, it was agony for me. Not because I had chosen the cheapest fare, a hard seat, because in truth the seat was not particularly hard. No, because I had a stiff neck and the seat forced me to sit bolt upright. Next time I will try a soft seat and sit with the knobs, but someone will first have to persuade me that train is better than bus.

LONGMEN CAVES, near Luoyang

LONGMEN CAVES

LONGMEN

We had decided to go to one of the Lonely Plant recommended mid-range hotels at Luoyang and forced our way speechless through the crowd of shouting touts who met the train. One persistent young lady just followed and bided her time before persuading us to look at a hotel next to the station. It was a good option, but they had presumed any traveller wanting a room would also want their bus to Shaolin Temple, and having been refused still woke us up at six the next morning to advise us the bus was leaving. Shaolin, meaningless to us at the time, is described by Polly Evans as a kung fu school for 7000 would be Chinese wanabee movie stars, and travellers can sign on for a one day course. It was also apparently the original location of the Triads.

LONGMEN CAVES

Equally the hotel failed to sell us a taxi to the Longmen caves, our only reason for visiting this unattractive industrial mega-city, because we had read in the Lonely Planet of a bus from the station. Starting from the station and terminating at the cave park we got the an hour's ride on a bus for 1Y. It dropped us at the start of the park, cheekily called 'The Scenic Trade Route', which after a frustrating 1 km of chanting 'Want Water, Water ?' as we hurried past the stalls, discharged us into a truly scenic park leading to the entrance to the caves. The caves themselves were spectacular, again vertical cliffs on either side of a river in which caves had been hollowed out to provide some protection from the elements for the carved statues of Buddha. Unlike the Maiji Caves however there were crowds of visitors, mainly Chinese tour parties, but significant numbers of American and European ones too.

By the same old tried and trusted technique we found yet another excellent restaurant, though this time it was almost too popular as we had to wait almost an hour the second day in order to get a table.

PINGYAO

CENTRE OF PINGYAO AT NIGHT

Getting there was an excellent example of the vagaries of travel, for in going to Luoyang from Xi'an we had passed the branching off of the north bound route to Beijing via Pingyao. In order to avoid the need to retrace our steps as far as Xi'an I concluded there would probably be a bus to Juncheng a few miles north of the turn-off, and indeed there was and a fixer led me directly to the bus and then accompanied me back to the ticket office. But when I asked for a ticket to Yuncheng the answer was Mei You (haven't), about the only phrase of Chinese I recognise without problem. This surprised the fixer as much as me since we both knew there was a bus, but my Chinese was not up to identifying the problem. After I little thought I went back and enquired about a ticket to Sanmenxia on the west bound route at the point of the turning north. Yes I could have such a ticket. The fixer led me back to the very same bus and matching the symbols on the front windscreen with the Chinese map I established that it was indeed headed for Yuncheng, doubtless via Sanmenxia. 

We joined the bus, and a little to Joan's concern who feared we would end up lost, I sat still at Sanmenxia because the bus was showing every sign of being on the way to Yuncheng. Indeed it was, so we ended up going to our intended destination without a valid ticket and therefore at a lower fare. I still don't understand, the only postulation left is that I was unable to purchase a ticket crossing a provincial boundary - it certainly wasn't for lack of seats.

The new bus station at Yuncheng unusually had an information desk and in my best Chinese I enquired about a bus which stopped at Pingyao and was again told 'mei you', I would have to overshoot and go to Taiyuan and bus a third of the way back to get to Pingyao. We had decided instead to go to the railway station for the occasional train did stop there, but just before leaving I decided to ask at the ticket counter for a bus to Pingyao. 'you', there was one for a bus leaving in a few minutes time. Off we went by the express highway which bypassed all the towns before Taiyuan and thus we were dropped on the highway at the start of the slip road to Pingyao - so that problem with tickets was now understood. We walked a 200 metres or so to the exit toll gate and hitched our way into the outskirts of the old walled town of Pingyao, which is largely traffic free.

PINGYAO< VEW FROM WALLS

Pingyao looked grim. An expensive golf cart took us near the main street and we then understood why Pingyao is frequently used as a film set, being the only town still true to the old Han Chinese way of elegant living. A beautiful room, small but with traditional Chinese pictures painted on the windows, and well fitted, was ours for 200Y. We were later offered a slightly smaller room further down the road with the wall to wall fitted bed wide enough for two rather than three for the attractive price of 60Y, the lowest we had seen anywhere. You can judge the intended room size in China by the number of slippers made available for trips to the toilet. 

OUR ROOM IN PINGYAO

Joan decided we were going to stay put because of the excellent English cooked breakfast buffet at Tianyuankui Kezhan, the Lonely Planet 's top recommendation. Pingyao was undoubtedly nothing but a tourist town which in general commanded a premium for beer, food and unreliable internet access. Lonely Planet has moved on a lot since the days of the reliable slim volumes we first used, it used to be aimed almost entirely at backpackers, budget accommodation and travel information, nowadays their top recommendations tend to be full of small tour groups, and this one was no exception. the power of being recommended by the Lonely Planet was evident in the price discrepancy just noted.

RESTORING THE WALL

An unfortunate downside of accommodating tours is that this makes them clicky, with no necessity or incentive to mix and share information. In this case the groups were largely French once again plus for the first time on this trip a Spanish group. Undoubtedly the French outnumber any other tourist groups in China by a considerable margin, the Italians sharing second place with the USA. France have invested a considerable amount in their diplomatic presence in China, since being the first western country to recognise the communist government in 1974. President Chirac was on his forth official visit to China  at the time and it was notable that when a Chinese poster carries a translation in English it often is also translated into French.

A few hotels offer Chinese TV Channel 9 in English, which seems to feature propaganda emphasising today's governmental pride in the ethnic diversity of China. Unfortunately none of their population seems to know they invaded and occupied Tibet in 1950, even graduates like Michael, though they are well aware of similar modern invasions of their country by Japan. Just this week there was CNN TV footage showing Tibetans fleeing across the snow covered Himalaya into India being shot dead by border controls, thirty others were arrested and not accounted for. Then suddenly the TV programming was stopped! We heard plenty of rumours of unrest of the Muslim communities in Western China, but for us this is just hearsay. The other main factor to emerge from Channel 9 is the huge importance China attaches to building up relations with African (particularly Namibia) and South American nations like Brazil. They are an impressive role model when it comes to leading these territorially large, resource rich, nations out of poverty to realise their potential strength on the world market, or are they just self serving like the old colonial countries of yore.

Pingyao, the main streets at least, is an attractive city, and particularly so at night when many red lanterns fill the streets with light and colour. For 120Y a ticket can be bought which gives access to the city walls and many other attractions in the form of temples, and one time houses of the wealthy, usually three courtyards deep as you penetrate from the road. People over 70 like me have only to show their passport to get in free, Joan missed out by less than a month, but I felt rather guilty at this largess once I understood the extent to which ordinary inhabitants of Pingyao are being kept in poverty with appalling living conditions in order to retain this air of old time authenticity.

BANKERS SUITS FOR HIRE

Pingyao's main historical claim to fame is as the founder of the first Draft Banks in China. Successful merchants with geographically widespread markets became trusted with savings and loans because of good governance, they gradually migrated until banking was their main function. It was clearly an important city from the 1750's and held a key financial role in China to the start of the twentieth century.

We made two half day side trips, firstly to the Qiao Family Courtyard House, dropped off by the bus outside the entrance, half way to Taiyuan. The six courtyards were bigger, cleaner and more impressive than the courtyards in Pingyao, but they essentially used the same layout model, though more modern and better presented so even more valuable for film sets. The downside was a big presence of Chinese tour parties, making us wish the noisy amplified tour leaders would be swallowed up and leave the rest of us in peace. The family house's main attraction stems from the fact that it was the site of a famous Chinese film 'Raise the Red Lantern'. 

There were other attractions in the same small town. We were welcomed into one site as the first ever foreign visitors, in fact no-one else had made it that day so we wondered if we also qualified as the first visitors. An unkind reflection because we were called for a free viewing into what we thought was a stadium but turned out to resemble a graveyard full of extra large gravestones. The welcome came from the artist who had produced an illustrated form of a famous Chinese story by skilfully engraving some some 600 large black stones (slates?), probably one illustration per page. He and his wife insisted in being photographed with us, a not uncommon request, though on this occasion it may have been intended to record recognition of his work.

We couldn't help observing, throughout the holiday, the Chinese obsession with photographs to record their own presence at every point of a site, making it very frustrating for us to photograph the things we had come to see.

The other side trip was to Shauglin Temple, nothing spectacular but a pleasant enough ride by motor cycle rickshaw into the countryside

Linda an American returning from Tibet, which she loved, had discovered the local theatre ran a nightly show. Being fond of theatre we were only too willing to join her. Instead of the expected amateurish performance attended by a handful of spectators we had a wonderful evening of high quality humour. It is tempting to think of it in terms of the British pantomime tradition, but this would be to underestimate the quality of the sketches drawn from incidents in the traditional tales of the city folk. Why we were the only non Chinese in the audience I cannot imagine. Clearly even in tourist-land the European tour leaders still have things to learn from independent travellers and Chinese tour parties. It was a nice touch too, to be sat at tables and to be served with pots of jasmine tea.

A downside of Pingyao was a fall from the high standard of Chinese food to which we had grown accustomed. When all around are in tour parties a crowded restaurant means nothing so it is hard to separate the chaff from the wheat, even following the Chinese parties rather than the western ones brought limited joy, for even if the food was a little less bland, it was still nondescript and far too expensive. Maybe we should have followed Giscard d'Estaing into the hotel advertising his recent stay, all part of the French diplomatic onslaught I suspect. Bill Clinton was there too! Where's Britain, Iraq and Afghanistan, enough said! An excellent exhibition of photographs included several by Thomas Cappa and Ansel Adams, and Chinese names unfamiliar to me.

VIEW FROM THE WALLS

A walk around the walls allowed on to study the present day life of the ordinary inhabitants. Dirty grey with outside toilet pits without roofs and lean-to kitchens exposed in their ablutions and cooking to voyeurs like us high on the city walls. A few householders had tried to clean up their homes by adding white ceramic tiling to cover up exterior walls, but that had been stopped in the interests of retaining the authenticity of grime and grey bricks. At the south end in particular it was evident that traditional materials bricks, tiles and wooden structural timbers were being stockpiled as commodities of increasing value. 

PINGYAO, 7 km of wall

Over 7 km of city walls formed a complete circuit and only a single section was still being restored. New road surfaces were being laid around the city just within the walls, kerbs and narrow pavements were being installed for the first time, allowing the clearance of soil, which had long been banked up on the inner (house courtyard) walls, revealing decay in the foundation brickwork which was being slowly replaced with authentic materials in good condition. Coal brickettes were being hand made, to contrast with the use of pollution free electric transport in the centre. Mortar was being mixed in huge quantities, again by hand, as properties were modernised internally. A few more prosperous home owners were adding solar water heating panels, a bizarre addition to the landscape - but who are we tourists to deny the inhabitants the right to a better lifestyle.

Keeping towns in the past undoubtedly makes them interesting to us, as was so apparent in the survival of inefficient traditional manual manufacture by craftsmen in say Yarkand. Modern China is damned politically as they sweep away traditional communities, Muslim areas in the east and Hutongs in Beijing, and replace them with the kind of living conditions which we wouldn't live without. The government are damned if they leave people people behind in a fast rush to adopt modern manufacturing. But they are undoubtedly destroying cohesive communities, just as we did in say the East End of London. Here and there we see the occasional attempt to modernise with dense high quality low rise accommodation, but too often that too seems false and unsuccessful.

A hot air balloon flew wealthy tourists overhead, how a balloon keeps to the scenic commercial central area I do not understand but it did. The city's poverty is hidden, one can pretend the centre is an anachronism - a film set - maybe that's the only solution.

Datong and the Yungang caves
This was a simple journey over a well used route. A bus to Taiyuan and another to Datong, yet for the first time I had trouble pronouncing my destination so it was understood at the ticket office. It's not Datong but Dah Tong with the first syllable short and falling and the second rising and longer - not easy to say, but tone does make a difference in a language where the paucity of sounds is compensated by the correct tonal slurs. The wrong slur is worse, as so often in my speech, than none at all. However since the destination was so predictable I do think the woman was trying her best not to understand and laughed at my attempts at pronunciation when shown the Chinese script. Having said that it was the very first case of unhelpfulness I have encountered in China, in contrast with how often I've witnessed English bus drivers deliberately set out to make foreigners struggle. There is little doubt that the western deserts were infinitely more welcoming, but that is always the advantage in being an insignificant minority.

YUNGANG CAVES

Datong the Lonely Planet says is poorly served for hotels. Their top choice Datong Binguan was good but full of tour parties and with cramped rooms for the expensive 360Y price. That night we discovered within 300 metres in either direction alternatives at 128Y and 190Y, both with larger rooms and still with breakfast. We changed to the Tongli for a second night. Linda wasn't prepared to pay the asking price for a single room of 350Y and went after a choice near the railway station, but having got there didn't consider the en-suite bedrooms were reasonable value and so opted for the dormitory. Everywhere we travel in China it is obvious that Lonely Planet need to do some research and stop underwriting old outdated choices in largely unchanged new editions.

YUNGANG CAVES

Our reasons for being there were to pay a visit to the Yungang caves where we met Linda again briefly the next day.The local bus journey was not that easy since it involved two buses and changing at a bus station. Sounds easy but not when the first bus 17 merely passes close to the station.


Luckily I asked a young girl at just the right time. She had just a little English but ascertained that we were going to the caves and indicated she was also going there. We followed her off the first bus and onto the second 3-1 at an ordinary back street bus stop. Then she insisted in paying our fare even though we had not even exchanged names. That was her way of saying 'welcome to China' a phrase we heard with great regularity. The fare was just 1Y, but far more to her than us. Unfortunately she got out without warning at the entrance to a coal mine and jumped on a motorbike taxi to complete her onward journey. Thinking we would be spending time together at the caves we had not even time to thank her for her kindness. 

RESTORED

We continued two more stops and the conductress waved us off at the caves. This time the caves were on a single vertical cliff and included several of the most impressive large statues we had seen to date, though some of this resulted from the sensitive but very significant restoration which was being carried out here on the sculptures. The Lungang caves pre-dated those at Longmen by a century or more, since they were built before the capital of the Northern Wei was transferred from Datong to Luoyang in around 500AD.

A short abortive attempt to find the small section of the Great Wall described in the Lonely Planet led to our return to the city. 

BEIJING

BEIJING UNDERGROUND

There seemed little reason to change to train for this last hop to Beijing, so we stuck with the bus. The main problem was that it dropped us at a new bus station, not even mentioned in the Lonely Planet needless to say. Still not speaking the lingo and not even knowing where we I opted to instruct a taxi driver to take us to metro station on the meter. I had not bothered to establish which was nearest station so the driver extracted his some reward by driving east along a street parallel to the adjacent one along which the metro ran. Sensing the problem I queried in my best Chinese 'is the station still far?', on which we switched streets and found a station immediately. It would have been quicker to drive straight to the hotel, but I still didn't know how to instruct a taxi of its whereabouts.

The Youth Restaurant, our favourite from the start of the holiday, had closed and was being gutted behind a bright red tarpaulin (possibly for reasons of hygiene which would explain the row overheard on our previous visit, so we went in search of another and found one not far from the bus stop. Here we learned from patient helpful waiters how to order a split wok filled half with chilli and half with gentle ginger/galangal broth in which to cook our own selections of raw meat and vegetables. We were late the following evening and the staff had sat down to their own meal, but they still insisting on taking time to ensure we got a sensible selection, aided by Joan's ability to draw a Lotus pod to complete our choice of vegetables.

TEMPLE OF HEAVEN PARK

Next day we went in search of The Temple of Heaven Park. Based on the thought that our luck with buses must change, they surely wouldn't all turn at right angles the moment we got on, I selected a street that led straight from near our hotel to the said park. The bus did turn right at the first opportunity so we shrugged our shoulders and walked the few blocks shown on our street map along an increasingly narrow, straight, bus free street. Unfortunately Beijing is a big city and city blocks are large, although not quite worn out by the walk to the park we were by the time had walked around and so eliminated any thought of going that afternoon to other attractions. 

These Temples, where traditionally good harvests were sought, were OK but nothing special, I observed to Joan that nothing we had seen in China which came anyway near the refinement so widespread across the capitals of Europe. True but I for one had also seen enough of the sort of complex as in the Forbidden City and the Theme park in Xi'an and temples everywhere, which promptly cancelled any desire to visit the Summer Palace. 

Fatigue played its part, poor visibility another. Is it really a case to be likened to the London smogs of the 1950's ? Is there really a sun up there? If not why is it so hot and muggy? Observations that have applied nearly every day since we first encountered these conditions in Eastern China at Xi'an, on our re-introduction to mega cities. We did however secure the purchase of an indispensable map from The Foreign Language Bookshop with English and Chinese names, and vitally bus numbers.

Next day I had to eat my words, it was lovely and sunny. We had   saved the best conditions to visit the best site, Lama Temple. Yes    the best things we have seen here in China are all Buddhist. Maybe this one was not quite the equal of the monastery in Xiahe, but the  light playing on the smaller interiors made everything more visible

LAMA TEMPLE IS WORTH SEEING

.

MAIN CONCERT HALL

TWO LEVEL EXPRESS and STOPPING

In the afternoon we went in search by bus of the artist's colony Jean Pierre Angremy had told us about so long ago in the desert at Niya. Not really knowing what we were looking for but armed with the map and a knowledge of bus routes we set out to find Dashanzi, a dot on our map. The conductress after first assuming we were bound somewhere else, in search of shops, studied the map and set us down at the correct point, lucky because we were on a central express way and could establish nothing of our location by eyesight. Then we set out in search of Dashanzi which turned out to be nothing other than an industrial estate which had been handed over without any modification to the artistic community, originally conceived as a means of offering artists cheap spacious studios.

 NO

TWO IN A CAGE

Three years later the galleries and restaurants have moved into this bleak site, transforming the interiors but doing nothing to soften the bleakness of the exteriors. About 60 properties have now been occupied, mostly by galleries, we saw one with a wide range of expensive paintings another with a good range of portraits of weathered, cold, red, Tibetan faces. Most of the galleries featured large paintings which would need wall space unlikely to be found in ordinary homes in Europe, let alone China. 

Some art was experimental but we only once saw an artist at work in his studio, clearly the area has moved on from its concept. Some venues sold pottery, others fashion clothing, photographers were having a great time photographing attractive models in designer clothes with their faces close to large crane hooks in the industrial landscape outside. Others specialised in embroidery, a English gallery invited us in to have a drink with a half dozen others as they were on the point of closing down their temporary exhibition, but we refused since we had only just arrived and were intent on looking around. Another English run gallery had just been opened, they claimed to be the first to have opened a gallery in London devoted entirely to contemporary Chinese art. 

A restaurant offering Pumpkin soup for lunch tempted us in, although it was now 5pm, and I quite forgot that the second attraction was free Internet access. We badly needed to email home since we had now been out of contact for nigh on 10 days. It is ironic that Internet so readily available all over the unpopulated west of China was almost impossible to find in the big eastern cities. No doubt there are avid games players in those cities too, but where they operate we never discovered, maybe they owned their own computers like us, anyhow the old ruse of looking for a pavement full of motorbikes failed totally in industrial China.

A MAIN SHOPPING STREET

The last of the sixty days we decided to devote to shopping. The Lonely Planet suggests the covered Clothing Market at Sanlitun, like a similar multi-storey emporium in Bangkok. The only problem was getting realistic prices, since they were prone to ask for 8 or even 10 times the goods value as a starter and start bargaining from there. I think everything we bought was at somewhere near the correct rate, but it was a hard struggle. 

Later that evening we went to find Beijing Duck for dinner in a pedestrian precinct shopping street in the centre of the city, Wangfujing, and found cheap jewellery on sale at clearly defined prices, identical to those we paid earlier, being sold in mass to Chinese customers. Sanlitun on this evidence is not the place to go, but it is being tripled in size ready for the invasion of suckers attending the Olympic Games.

After a final fine breakfast at the Holiday Inn Central Plaza we were off by taxi running on the meter to the airport. Fare 150Y, that's £10 for 35km in 90 minutes. At the airport I joined a queue of 10 at the Bank of China's Exchange desk. An hour later I had received 72 Euros for my spare Chinese RMB, by which time I was as frustrated as everyone else in the queue. You're not legally allowed to export RMB (yuans), though in practice those who intend to return don't bother.

Come the Olympics the currency queues will be unbelievable unless something is done to ease currency conversion, and the pedestrian death toll on pedestrian crossings could be staggering because most visitors will expect them to offer protection, not exposure to danger. On such stupidly inefficient logistics China may fail and get up everyone's nose, but I doubt it, and when it comes to construction of stadiums, infrastructure, planning and innovation and colour in display we expect them to astonish the world.