Yungang Grottoes

2009 09 19 – Days 85 – near Datong

Not too far from Datong, but in the opposite direction to the Hanging Monastery, is one of the most famous ancient Buddhist sculpture sites in China, the UNESCO World Heritage listed Yungang Grottoes.

A couple of the grottoes had wooden temples constructed in front.

While the rest are vulnerable to the elements and display signs of significant weathering.

I'm sure weathering is not the only explanation for this Buddha's lack of nose and other surface detailing - looting and vandalism must have occurred at some point in its history.
The many small holes were to hold short sticks of wood that supported a coloured plaster surfacing, both now fallen away by fair means or foul.
A couple of the grottoes have kept some of their colour and detail:

And this Buddha retains his surfacing in the form of blue robes up to his waist:

Either side of him:

Our guide told us that, rather than having complex scaffolding, the sculptors would cut in through the cliff and sculpt the head before gradually working down the figure and then cutting the door. Aside from the practical nature of this approach, it results in an aesthetically and spiritually pleasing arrangement whereby a visitor walks in through a darkened doorway to stand, often in dim light, by Buddha's feet. From there, your gaze is naturally drawn upwards to the light, the main source of which is Buddha's serene visage bathed in the natural light entering through the upper cutting.

There are 252 grottoes spread along the site,

many of them quite small,

but some are pretty big and of impressive craftsmanship.

This is the best preserved face on one of the large Buddha sculptures and is an iconic tourism image in China.

Hanging Monastery

2009 09 19 – Days 85 – near Datong

One of three non-industrial reasons to stop in Datong, the Hanging Monastery is truly a fantastical sight.

Who would live on a cliff face like this?
Monks it would seem and not only those of a particular type as the Hanging Monastery has Buddhist, Taoist and Confucian elements.

The nearby trickle with pretensions of being a river must become a raging torrent with spring snow melt because some serious concrete channels had been constructed and our guide told us that the Monastery had been washed away a couple of times and rebuilt slightly higher up the cliff face.

Despite the place crawling with tourists, a well thought out one-way loop of a route enabled frustration free touring and appreciation of the vertiginous positioning.

Despite the simple wooden construction and sheer drops beside most walkways, the building felt stable, with a magical quality to the way it clung to the cliff.
Experiencing that stability while walking around it made the location seems slightly less ridiculous than when viewed from the valley floor.

One of the best preserved shrines.

Ceiling art, accompanied by an entirely necessary, but unnecessarily conspicuous smoke detector.

Is this really necessary!? Whether it should be there or not is debatable, but that it should be so conspicuous?

Building Capacity

2009 09 19 – Days 85 – near Datong

My CITS tour group for the day was an eclectic mix, consisting of a French couple and Spanish lady all about the same age as me and an older Chinese couple who didn't speak any English. The six of us fit tightly but neatly into a little minibus with our driver and English-speaking guide.
The drive to the Hanging Monastery was a little less than two hours and mostly unremarkable. The road was in decent condition for the most part, there was little traffic to compete with and the countryside rolled by offering little to the eye, with the dust and smog I'd grown accustomed to draining the colour and life from the world.

However, there was one noteworthy event of the journey – a thought – a powerful and scary thought.
About an hour into our journey, we had to negotiate some road construction works. Nothing remarkable about that as there are construction projects everywhere you look in China. The new road was at least double the width of the one we were using, no doubt it would become a motorway with three or four lanes in each direction. Again, not a particularly noteworthy observation, but as we were driving away, I wondered why they would build such a big road when our much smaller road was far from full? What vast volume of traffic would it take to fill the new road? And what did that say about the expectations of car ownership and usage in China?

Considering the already terrible air quality, the prospect of such a huge road being filled with traffic, and car ownership becoming normal for the many millions of Chinese people, was a profoundly scary thought. How can the environment cope with such punishment?

Welcome to Datong, We've Been Expecting You...

2009 09 18 – Day 84 – Datong

Datong is an industrial city with no particular reason to visit. It is, however, well placed to use as a base for visiting a few otherwise remote sites.
As with most of the Chinese stations I'd experienced, the arriving passengers spill out into a large square in front of the station without passing the ticketing or departure areas. So there I was, in the fading twilight, knowing that it's wise to buy your onward ticket as soon as possible, trying to decide whether to stay one night or two, as I really didn't want to stay any longer than possible, and whether I should even try and answer that question now, when I didn't yet have a bed for the night and didn't know if I could get on a tour the next day or not.
Not knowing anyone in the city, I was unnerved and on guard to see a middle-aged guy in a brown corduroy jacket striding purposefully towards me. I glanced around, confirming that there wasn't anyone else he was aiming for. Nope. It was definitely me...
Thankfully he turned out to be well intentioned. He was from CITS, the Chinese state tourism company, and he often looked for foreigners arriving from Beijing to see if he could help, despite it being beyond his normal working hours. Chatting about the tourism scene in Datong, he revealed that most visitors were, as I was, only passing through, not keen on staying and with a mind to see two or possibly all three of the tourism-worthy sites within range of the city.
Back in his nearby office, we struck a deal over a tour of two sites the next day and sorted a dorm bed in the basic hostel run by CITS.

With my objectives for Datong 'in the bag', I returned to the station and was delighted to be able to also secure an onward ticket for the following night. Sometimes everything just seems to fall in to place so effortlessly it's amazing. I'd arrived in Datong with nothing booked, having never been there before, barely able to utter a word of Chinese and yet within a couple of hours I had a bed for the night, a tour for the next day, an onward train ticket and was sat enjoying a basic but tasty local dinner! Incredible.

About Turn! - Westward Bound

2009 09 17-18 – Days 83-84 – trains to Datong via Beijing

Just a few days earlier, leaving Beijing, I had thought that after Dandong I'd go further north and east to hike in a large national park, but my growing appreciation of the sheer size of China, and the realisation that it could be unwise to go hiking solo in an unknown mountainous area in autumn (off-season), forced me to make some more cuts to my possible destinations list and led to an overnight train to Beijing.

Stopping just long enough to buy a ticket and wait for the train, I was soon on a standing-room-only train to Datong, a short six hours to the east.
My standing status wasn't to last the full six hours though, thanks to the effervescent Shar Shar (aka Sarah) sat in front of me:

It came as no surprise that she normally worked in Beijing's infamous tourist trap The Silk Market, as she proceeded to assault me with her enthusiasm, transferring her everyday sales skills instead to social interaction. Surrounded as I was on all sides by other passengers, there was no escape from her verbal barrage, so it was of huge consolation that she was so smiley and good-humoured. It wasn't long before she forced her seat upon me. I tried to resist, but there's only so many times you can refuse someone's hospitality before you cause serious offence. I did manage to add in the clause that I would take it for only an hour and then she could have it back by which point she was actually quite pleased to sit down again. Although Shar Shar was a lovely person, friendly and fun, I wasn't too upset that she wasn't going all the way to Datong as her lack of interest in pausing for breath lead to one of the best demonstrations I've seen of what it takes to literally talk the hind legs off a donkey! Although she was a funny and engaging person, I was exhausted by the time she got off.

Much of the journey had been winding our way around under and through steep-sided mountains, but the last couple of hours were mostly over level terrain and I had a seat and conversation free calm to enjoy view.

As the sun set over the iconic yellow earth, it occurred to me that, throughout the entire six hour train journey, we'd never once escaped the smog! Could it really be that such poor visibility over such a large area was entirely man-made!?

I supposed it probably was, sadly, both possible and probable.

Korean War Museum

2009 09 17 – Day 83 – Dandong

One of the few 'sights' of Dandong, this Korean War museum has an impressive title that simultaneously demonstrates both the descriptive nature of Chinese and the 'editorial line' of the curators. It's official name translates as:
'The Museum to Commemorate the War to Resist American Aggression and Aid Korea.'

A 53-meter cenotaph commemorates the 1953 cessation of conflict and the 115,000-400,000 (depending on who's counting) Chinese conscripts and volunteers who died executing Mao's "human wave" strategy, designed to overwhelm superior firepower and weaponry with sheer numbers.
For a small entrance fee you can climb the inside of the cenotaph for grand views of the arrayed hardware of war;

and, were it not for the smog, I'm sure there'd be spectacular views across the city and into North Korea, but sadly I couldn't see much further than the main museum buildings less than 100m away.

More hardware welcomes visitors,

followed by Mao Zedong and Kim Il Sung, the first among equals from the Chinese and North Korean sides, celebrating their hard won 'victory' with their comrades.

Flanking the statue are two short, two-storey, introductory texts: a "Joint Declaration of Democratic Parties in China" announcing the US/allied intention to "not only destroy [North Korea], but also annex Korea, invade China, rule Asia, even conquer the whole world." (4th November 1950); and an "Order of the Formation of the Chinese People Volunteers" declaring the righteous nature of their cause assisting their Korean neighbours in resisting the imperial aggressors (8th October 1950).

Somewhat surprisingly, the museum entrance was free which was a welcome change from my Chinese tourism experience so far and especially generous considering the scale and scope of he exhibition.
The range of artefacts on display was impressive and well presented including:
Chinese weaponry;

and standard kit;

US kit;

dynamic summaries of offensives and troop movements;

a mini reconstruction of a North Korean/Chinese tunnel base;

propaganda espousing the pointlessness of war and the joys home, dropped to break US/allied moral, and poignant letters home from GIs;

An informative section on the nascent Chinese airforce and an impressively arranged, painted and lit 360 degree diorama of a battlefield;

it was actually quite difficult to identify the join between three-dimensional models and painted backdrop.

Exiting the grounds of the museum gave you a closer encounter with the field of hardware.

Despite its impressive array of artefacts, information boards and well laid out displays, the museum was somehow a frustrating blend of the positive and negative possibilities of museums. As far as a museums responsibility to deliver a sense of how things were at a time in history, it was a huge success, with ample artefacts and plentiful pictures well edited, arranged and curated. However, as far as a museum might be expected to deliver an objective reflection on past events, the politics dictating the editorial of the information boards was perhaps more evident in what was not said rather than what was. For the most part, the boards offered an exhaustive catalogue of events, delivered without much more imagination than a list of names, dates, times and quantities (or whichever appropriate combination). It took me until I was about half way round to realise that of all the many information boards I'd read, not one had mentioned a US/Allied victory and while there were plentiful reference to (dubiously large) numbers of enemy killed or captured at each battlefield, there was not even one mention of a single Chinese or North Korean casualty or strategic loss. Campaigns were always presented as victorious, with no explanation as to why there were multiple 'successful' campaigns, at different times, for the same territory, no mention of the (presumably) enforced retreat between the different 'successful' offensives.
Throughout, the US/S.Korean/Allied forces are labelled as imperialist aggressors and oppressors while the Chinese/North Koreans are labelled as valiant volunteers and courageous defenders of freedom.
The walk back to my hotel gave me plenty of time to reflect on what effect that kind of one-sided account would have on Chinese visitors to the museum.... no wonder it was free entry!

Everyone Equal and Some More Equal Than Others

2009 09 17 – Day 83 – Dandong

Returning to Dandong from The Great Wall should have been, as with the outward journey, a simple bus ride. But with no clearly defined bus stop on the nearby road, and having been ignored by the solitary bus that went past, I found myself increasingly open to hitching a lift from any vehicle going my way. A countryside local farmhand (I assume) joined me squatting by the side of the road and I attempted to say something useful about a bus to Dandong in Chinese, but his response only confirmed that we didn't understand each other beyond the fact that we were headed in the same direction
Eventually a taxi came by and I managed to flag it down. Although I was in no position to haggle with so few cars on the road, I gave it a go if only to minimise the degree to which I got ripped off. While negotiating I made it fairly clear with my arm gestures that my farmer friend would be coming too, but the driver was having none of it! I tried various ways of getting him to take both of us, including pushing for one price for me and a higher (but not double) price for the two of us, but the driver was immovable. His attitude stank of elitism, as if the country bumpkin wasn't worthy of a lift in his vehicle – so much for the egalitarianism of communism.
With the taxi driver threatening to leave both of us stranded, I had to concede defeat. Offering an apologetic shrug to the farmhand, I clambered in and abandoned him to his fate.

The Great Wall and North Korea

2009 09 17 – Day 83 – Dandong

Not far from Dandong is the most northern and eastern section of The Great Wall. Dandong is about sixteen hours by train from Beijing and I found it mind boggling to reflect on the size of The Great Wall given that it runs not only to Beijing, but further west at least another twenty four hours of train journey! The question arises – Does the word 'Great' do it justice?

Rising quickly, The Wall provides a Great vantage point to survey the juncture of China and North Korea. The hills of the former falling to meet the flat farmlands of the latter, separated by the silver ribbon of the Yalu River.

The only North Korean settlement in sight was a small farming village and, at the crest of the wall, a local entrepreneur provided an old, possibly military, telescope to satisfy the inevitable curiosity of tourists. For a small fee of course. Though it felt a little wrong, I couldn't resist a peek and paid the 3 RMB to spy on the unsuspecting villagers below. It felt like I was looking back in time. The way the people dressed, the tools they used, no evidence of basic modern improvements like road surfacing or telegraph or power lines. I tried to capture an image using the telescope to assist my camera and though I didn't manage to photograph exactly what I'd just been looking at, I managed to get something:

Before I could take any more shots, the telescope owner spotted what I was doing and made a noisy display of disapproval, shooing me off his prize asset.

Sometimes even the ambitious engineers of The Great Wall can't improve on nature's natural barriers:

Walking back around the base of the hill takes you literally within a stones throw of North Korea. About as close as you can get without actually trying to cross the border.

I don't know what the sign says, but I could swim it from here.

Teasing those who might be tempted to try and cross, this boats bottom was so holy it would be about as buoyant as a colander!

At busier times, these small boats would be offering tourists a slightly closer view of their neighbours, but without some pretty good yarns to go with it, I doubt if the few feet of proximity gained would be worth it.