Jan. 10-12, More of Jiangxi Province

It's 1:20pm, Nanchang time. At 2:45pm, we go downstairs to meet CJ. But first, we wanted to post some more details from the past week's travels.

The photos can be found here.

Jan 10 Longhushan (Dragon and Tiger Mountain)

Driving from Nanchang to the national park called Longhushan was fascinating. Like a growing city in the US, Nanchang has its share of suburban and exurban sprawl—large plots of farmland precipitously smoothed over sprouting obtrusive office complexes. The one difference is that each complex seemed to be for one company only; in the US, many of these places have more than one tenant.

Outside the city there is a combination of rural life – the occasional water buffalo grazes in the rice fields that were harvested in October – and the beginnings of industry. Iron-rich red soil disrupted for mining perhaps, and new construction, with bamboo scaffolding, abounds. Many of the buildings are vacant, half-finished; our guide Susan explains that the younger people in the area have left for the cities and are sending money back to family to build as money permits. We see all this while zipping along in our VW Santana on a fairly new toll road. The occasional sign states in both Chinese and English, “No driving while sleepy; Overspeeding prohibition.”

We arrive at the entrance to Longhushan, and before starting our sightseeing, we have lunch overlooking a construction site. The Chinese are discovering their tourism industry and stores selling trinkets and cheap carvings are already sprouting. It’s hard to know how this area looked just a couple of years ago, but when we visit again with CJ ten years from now or so, how different will it look?

The actual sandstone formation of Longhushan is just one of many alongside the Lu Xi river. We are taken up the river in a boat that is poled upstream by two middle-aged women. Small caves high above the river house ancient tombs; no one knows how the bodies were buried there but we saw a performance that describes one possible theory.

The performance is set above a Taoist shrine and features a young guy who, along with demonstrating how the bodies are placed in these caves, performs a few tricks without any safety net. The river scenery is exotic; the weather is mild, and the trip quite relaxing.

Our guide points out the various mountains and notes what they are supposed to look like. We had a hard time seeing the images that others see, but found the sizes and shapes astonishing nevertheless.

We get off the boat and walk the last mile, past a stable with persistent women who are sure we want to ride their horses to the temple, and then men who are sure we want to ride their hand-pulled carts instead of walking. We feel conspicuous.

Sitting in the shadow of Dragon and Tiger Mountain is a 1500 year-old Taoist temple. Our guide, Susan, tells us that the temple, made of wood and sitting near a river, has been rebuilt many times.

The temple is wonderful, all wood and brightly painted. For something rebuilt in the last decade, it is without any modern flourishes. The site itself is peaceful and calming, with wild dogs sunning themselves in the late afternoon. One has a red mark on its belly; Susan comments that it will be killed to be eaten.

We are brought downstream in a bamboo raft poled by men with small bamboo chairs lashed to it. It is less sturdy than the boat we came up in and whichever side the men were poling was a couple of inches underwater. Why the men propel the boat downstream and the women propel the boat upstream was a question that Susan could not answer. She agreed that there was something wrong with the set-up though…

When we disembarked, we were led past a rock formation called something “Maiden” in the shape of a woman’s private parts. No photos of that one nor the matching phallic formation just outside the park. Weirder still was a billboard sign we passed on our way back to the entrance to the park featured a naked woman leering over a glass coffin containing one of the bodies buried in the caves nearby. We didn’t ask Susan about that one.

We drove the rest of the way to Shangrao quietly, meditating on the beautiful scenery and then sleeping.

We didn’t actually stay in Shangrao city; instead we stayed in Shangrao county (the City is the capital of the county). The whole area was either newly built or almost built, like the government decided to add a new part of the city to house and entertain and employ a hundred thousand people. Our room was quite nice, with a broad views of the nearly finished construction, a plaza, and an amusement park.

We ate dinner around the corner from the hotel, in a private room so that we had heat. Heat, especially when it’s no more than 40 degrees and DAMP(!), is a definite luxury.


Jan 11 Sanqingshan

The drive to Sanqingshan was quite interesting, bringing us closer to the Chinese countryside than the highway. We saw more farms, light industry (mainly brick factories), and heavy industry (refineries and power plants).

The towns we drove through were a hodgepodge of poor and poorer; rush hour consisted of folks walking, riding dilapidated one-speed bicycles, or riding old scooters or motorcycles to work. No one seemed inclined to make way for the car traffic.

The pollution, always prevalent, was even worse in this area. In our research and from what the guide explained, Shangrao is known for its natural resources: copper, tungsten, silver, gold, even uranium. Mining the ores and refining the metals makes for a lot of air pollution. Think Northern New Jersey, alongside the turnpike, except the plants are spread out and several miles from each other. There’s less concentrated pollution but more haze and soot and smog spread out over the countryside.

We arrived at the base of Sanqingshan, “Three Peaks Mountain,” to have a man yelling at us in Chinese to hurry up; the cable car that would take us up the mountain and to our hotel – a 45 minute ride – was about to shut down for the day.

We climbed on board the car, a two-seater, with our guide in the car behind us, and up we went. On the drive over, I was concerned at how much of the mountain we would be able to see with all the pollution. But miraculously, Sanqingshan rose above the smog, and after a short while, the visibility increased dramatically.

Our hotel was about 1,500 meters high—about a mile from sea level. A foot trail, made up mostly of steps, made its way up the mountain beneath us. Porters carried supplies for the hotels –water, rice, cooking oil –up the many stairs. To carry their wares, they used a bamboo rod that rested on one shoulder with their load split in two, dangling from either side of the pole. One hand held the load in place and the other used a smaller stick to help counterbalance the awkward burden.

Dan has run a marathon, a half-ironman triathlon, up Mount Washington, and even the Empire State Building, but watching these guys toil made him feel incredibly soft.

Sanqingshan is more than just a pretty mountain. There is something about it, how the steep rock peaks work in harmony with gnarled thousand-year old trees, that is regal and sublime. Photos can capture a sense of what it was like, but they don’t do the place justice.

After checking in and eating lunch, we went for what was supposed to be a brief three-hour walk. The government had put in a network of concrete paths and platforms that wound through the peaks and promontories. The paths in some ways stuck out like sore thumbs amongst the awe-inspiring natural beauty, but in other ways lent a different kind of amazement to the scene. We have no idea how they made these paths that cling so precariously to the rock face, or how they could even have first imagined such a thing.

A porter told us that the mountain altogether held 16,000 steps. Even though we didn’t walk up the mountain, by the end of our hike it felt as thought we had walked just about every single one. That’s because our three-hour jaunt became a five hour walk that ended in total darkness (albeit Dan remembered to bring flashlights) as our guide Susan took a wrong turn. The poor woman, with cellphone reception but a dead battery, became absolutely panicked.

Neither of us were as panicked. Dan was amused to be lost when it was someone else’s fault; Meg was so used to being lost, it didn’t phase her one bit.

We looked closely at the map, made for tourists and lacking scale and elevation lines, estimated where we were, and kept going. As we were trying to find our way, we passed an old Taoist temple and shrines that had been built about 1500 years old. The temple was made of wood and had been rebuilt; the temple gate and the shrines were made of stone and dated back over a millennium ago.

The temple caretaker was nice enough to point us in the right direction, and we kept going. As it became lightsome and misty at the day’s end, it was if the mountain changed and showed a softer side, playing with the light and shadows. Sanqingshan holds a spiritual quality that we had never experienced before. We had seen a rare grouping of Chinese landscape paintings from the Song dynasty while at the National Palace Museum in Taipei, and we felt an uncanny sense of déjà vu, that we had stepped inside one of those moody, mysterious, sublime paintings. As we walked up and down stairs and along the ledges of the cliffsides, we truly felt we were at the place where the earth touches the sky, where the physical and the spiritual converge.



Jan 12, Sanqingshan and Shangrao

There was no point in getting up early, as the mountain was completely socked in with fog and while we had no hot water (we were there in the off-season and the only guests at our hotel) the beds had built-in heaters.

Breakfast in Sanqingshan was more traditional than the buffets we had been served at the hotels and consisted of congee (rice porridge) with pickled vegetables that could be added, noodles in chicken broth, eggs boiled in tea, steamed buns, hot soybean milk to which sugar may be added. Green tea of course. Since arriving in China, both of us have been eating to our heart’s content. The only thing Dan has missed is coffee at breakfast. Meg’s been missing restaurants that are smoke-free and heated.

We set out on a brief hike, walking the way we came in so we could see what we had missed in the dark. But what we saw was a new Sanqingshan, one enrobed in clouds of soft white furs that slink up and down the peaks. The fog ebbed briefly, and as it began to close around us Susan told us we needed to get back to the hotel to take the cable car down.

Murphy’s law being what it is, we check out and arrive at the cable car at 11:30 only to find closed for repairs until 1:00. Dan’s thought was, oh well, let’s eat a second breakfast. Meg’s first thought was, “how long does it take to walk down?”

Poor Susan looked even more bewildered at this turn of events, asked the question, and was told that it took only an hour. So off we went, walking down the steps, wondering if it really only did take an hour and what crazy person had counted all 16,000 steps. By the time we got to the bottom, we could confidently say we walked on most of them.

The walk in some ways was uneventful. The fog was still quite thick, and only occasionally could we catch a glimpse of the cable cars. There was nothing terribly photogenic about it, a walk through the woods with fog that was light enough so you could see where you were going yet thick enough to obscure any views. No quaint little tendrils wrapping around a thousand-year old tree or anything.

But in a deeper, again more spiritual way, the walk down was wonderful. A happy little stream followed us down, growing in strength and voice with every step. And it took an hour fifteen, not too much longer than the cable car. However, our calves paid the price and were sore for more than a few days afterwards.

We passed several porters bringing wares up to the hotels and other people on the stairs, the most memorable being a guy in a dress jacket carrying a pitchfork in one hand and a briefcase in another. What he did for a living we didn’t ask but we didn’t see a forked tail, thankfully.

After a well-deserved lunch, we drove back to Shangrao. This time, we took a tour of the downtown, a hectic affair with lots of construction, poverty, and even more air pollution. Many of the shops and stalls along the main roads were dedicated to the building trade—tiles, doors, windows were all on display.

We stopped at what Susan had thought was the most likely the Bureau of Civil Affairs where CJ was abandoned as an infant. We were able to photograph what seemed a nondescript office building back in the states but from a distance – an iron fence blocked entry to the grounds. Dan was amazed nobody tackled us and took away our cameras as we photographed the building and determined that China is decidedly less paranoid than the US at this point. Three nine year old girls crossed the street said hello in English to Dan. When Dan responded in Chinese he was happy to meet them, one said under her breath “bu gaoxing, bu gaoxing” (not happy, not happy). A man asked me in Chinese why I was taking a picture because it was cold and raining. I agreed that the weather was indeed quite bad (tianqi bu hao le)..

We briefly visited the Shangrao City Welfare Institute, a large depressing building off a dirt road that winds along an offshoot of the Rao River, with small farms along the way. Our presence at the institute was greeted with caution. We remained neutral, trying neither to enter the orphanage or make contact with any of the institute workers. We just wanted to see it. It was a several story building, with sounds of crying children emanating from within. There was a large display on the front façade of the building; we’ll be curious to know what it describes. We may have the opportunity to visit the orphanage again with CJ later this week.

We drove around Shangrao, making our way to the Rao River which flows through one side of the city. We visited a hundred and fifty year old tower that was built to ask the gods to not flood the town, and I also photographed the dilapidated apartments and shanties across the street. The city government was building a few tourist buildings next to the tower, as if this hectic town had a second thought about perhaps becoming a little bit tourist-friendly.

A policeman came up and suggested we also see a larger tower, also built in the middle of the 19th century, a few blocks away. We did so. The tower was nice, but more remarkable to me was a lone boat on the Rao. It was hard to figure out, through the smog, what the boater was doing. If the water was anything like the air, it probably wasn’t recreational.

After dinner, we went to a supermarket next to a middle school that was just letting out at 8 o’clock at night. All the sales help in the store were immediately trailing us, as were many of the customers, or staring at the very least. There was a vast snack section and oOne saleslady offered us the local favorite – a pickled pumpkin jerky.

And that is Shangrao, the city where CJ was born. It’s a rough place, as diametrically opposed to the majesty and tranquility of Sanqingshan as possible. But her heritage includes both places, and hopefully we can help her find the balance between them.