Our final stay in Chengdu, this time hitting up some of the lower-tier tourist sites and getting ready to say goodbye to China (for now). We awoke to a rainy morning, and after camping out in the hostel for as long as possible eventually went out with umbrellas and ponchos to explore a nearby monastery. Afterwards we had an adventure in the noodle shop that we were introduced to by our food tour on our first visit, and eventually managed to order the "right" noodles after accumulating a pile of pretty-tasty-but-not-as-amazing bowls of noodles. After a trip back to the hostel to dry off and rest, we headed down to the Culture Park to explore a little before taking in a Sichuan opera. Sichuan opera is famous for fire-breathing and "face-changing", in which characters change their masks seemingly instantaneously while on stage. It's a little hard to describe, so here's a video that shows it in action:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fWVAN0Er_4
Going to the Sichuan opera is a little bit like going to a ballgame. The theater we went to was actually outdoors with just a canvas roof, and we spent the entire show munching on sunflower seeds. The show was a combination of story, singing, comedy, dance, and musical elements highlighting the cultural traditions of Chengdu.
The next day we were picked up by a driver and we went out to visit Quingcheng Mountain, the birth place of Taoism. But first: A Ghost City! China has been adding commercial and residential high-rises at an astounding clip for the last decade. Enormous projects like the one below would be entirely sold before ground was even broken in Shanghai and Beijing, but out in Western China they either sit completely un-sold, or with units purchased as investments but left vacant. As a result, there were city-sized development projects with only a handful of cars and businesses, waiting for demographics and migration to catch up with the infrastructure.
Quingcheng Mountain was home to a mix of Buddhist and Taoist temples and monasteries, and figures prominently in early Chinese mythology. It was where Zhang Ling synthesized the various indigenous belief systems into the formalized doctrine of Chinese Taoism, and thanks to a real estate dispute in the 17th century is now regarded as the "official" home of Taoism. We could have spent a full week exploring the small temples and caves and side paths, but instead we had three hours to hike to the top of the mountain and get back to the car. Still enough time to splash in the stream, though. The mountain itself was almost impossibly beautiful and idyllic.
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| Taoist temples look like Buddhist temples. Maybe they both just look like Chinese temples? |
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| Another misty day in the mountains |
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| A rare moment: Danger Monkey with zero danger. |
After getting of the mountain and getting a "quick" lunch in a completely empty dining room of a fancy local hotel (sometimes our guides had strange ideas about what we would like and didn't always consult with us first), we drove a short ways to visit the Dujiangyan Irrigation System, a water works project that was constructed roughly 2300 years ago. Michael was highly skeptical based on the description, and was expecting to wander around some rice paddies. It turns out that this was the site where the first Qin emperor BLEW UP A MOUNTAIN AND DIVERTED A RIVER so that it could be used to irrigate the Sichuan basin to feed his army and provide transportation to allow him to invade a now-downstream province, kicking off his conquest of China in earnest. One thing our time in China hammered home was the fractal nature of human history and geography, that the closer you look anywhere and anywhen the more amazing detail you find.
The main administrative offices had been converted into a tourist attraction, which included the imperial governors gardens which housed a world-class collection of
pensai trees, from which the Japanese got the word "bonsai". There were, in fact, two trees that dated back to the 13th century, when the practice was beginning to really catch on in Japan.
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| "The Buddha Palm". About half as old as the actual Buddha. |
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| This garden is slightly off the main track, and so has zero other tourists |
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| The "new" branch of the river |
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| The structures on the hillside are old customs houses for the Horse Road that led to Mongolia. |
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| The little gap on the right is where they used steam to break the rock apart and create a new channel |
Finally it was time to head back to the airport, scarf our last fast-food dinner, and catch our red-eye flight home.
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| Taking the shortcut. |
And that's it for this trip! Thanks for following along!
