Hop, skip, bounce
Trip Start
Aug 24, 2007
1
35
42
Trip End
Jul 04, 2008
Gongyi,
China
Saturday, March 15, 2008
And I don't think that's that weird - the country consumes the majority of the world's cement and steel (and, I suspect, bathroom tiling. There is a weird fetish with covering buildings in tile that I've only ever seen in showers) in its quest to remodel the nation. When people first come to China, they are confronted with the physical fact of what is going on in this country - a complete overhaul in the Chinese urban landscape and a re-focusing of what a Chinese life means.
Then there's Henan. Dirty, dusty, dire Henan (but oh I love it for those qualities). The province is too poor and too shackled with AIDS villages for the government to hold it in its thick fingers of cemented development. So it does what it can by mixing its fair share of bathroom tiled buildings where cramped hutongs used to be and using its bits of Chinese history to attract tourists.
But we haven't explored most of Henan yet. I've been giving myself the luxury of time since I thought I had it - I was here for a year after all. But now I have something like twelve weeks left and the panic has set in - I need to see as much as I can before I leave.
little ninjas
So Max and I, along with our friend Edmund (Zhengzhouren), ventured to Gongyi - the burial place of seven of the Song Dynasty's emperors. (Two of the burial mounds were either robbed or lost).
Maybe even more than Kaifeng, Gongyi is China. The city itself gasps breaths of soot-filled air while trying to slag towards a "developed" state. As a result, this blackened city on the banks of the Yellow River is sucking its resources dry. It's windy and dust whips around your face and throws itself against the sides of taxis, leaving you with a thin layer of sandy film on your face and neck. People are dressed in the practical yet drab palette of gray, navy blue and black, which is accented by the unbelievably large stacks of bricks, piled haphazardly in narrow streets, patiently waiting to be turned into a new building.
Mostly farmland, the small city's outskirts are flanked with flat beds of vegetables and crops. But even here, where life thrives, the promise of color from life is leeched out of the ground and everything is blanched in the oppressive, all-consuming grayness of smog. And no one seems to notice. This is China. If you haven't seen it, you haven't been looking.
But I refuse to believe that any Chinese city is truly ugly. And so far I've been proven correct. We hired a taxi and drove around farms and through the pot-holed streets, watching as flat land suddenly rose in an explosive grass-covered bump.
statue near tomb
Rounding a corner, we could see the bump being watched over by rows of impressively well-maintained statues guarding the burial place of an emperor. Lions and sheep and former officials were permanently mandated to watch guard as carved stones, but were slowly buried underneath layers of dirt and silt blown in from the Yellow River. They were only unearthed thousands of years later as poor farmers unintentionally excavated through thousands of years of dirt with their farming methods. The farmer who owned the plot of land seemed completely unfazed that he had to maneuver his equipment around the giant sheep's head that poked out from his leafy harvest. He just simply asked that we didn't take pictures because he doesn't want people coming by and trampling his crops. Modern China seamlessly melding with its ancient history. It didn't matter how smoggy and oppressive the pollution-filled air seemed, the Buddhist grottoes in the city were unlike anything I have ever seen. I literally felt like I was in an Indiana Jones movie. Buried for years underneath the fine silt build-up blown in from the Yellow River, the caves were discovered in the 1930s. They are small compared to the giant caves of Luoyang, but apparently better because of that. Walking inside of the caves, it was hard not to feel inadequate - not because of the size, but because I wasn't Chinese. The caves were sculpted out of bedrock and painted around 500 AD. While my ancestors were busy picking their noses and beating the ground with clubs in their skinned clothing, the Chinese were creating works of art that literally left us speechless. Eventually the three of us had to leave the grottoes that were etched into the rock face to catch our train back to our respective cities. I'm excited to see what else I've been missing out on for the past year around Kaifeng.
