Day trip to Quanzhou -- the ancient seaport of Fujian

Today we headed off on a long anticipated day trip to Quanzhou (pronounced qwin-djoe), which is about 90 km north of Xiamen along the coast. For hundreds of years beginning around 1100 AD, this area was the most important port for trade in the world, and the start of the "Silk Road of the Sea" the source of much of the silk and tea shipped from China around the world. Two fun facts according to my guidebook -- Columbus was looking for Quanzhou when he discovered America...and the tea sunk in Boston Harbor at the Boston Tea party was on a ship whose original port of call was Quanzhou. There were people from all over the world living in Quanzhou in the early days, and we got some ideas about that as we toured some important sites with Michael's student, Guo Jinjie..a PhD student in philosophy who is our good friend. It was a whirlwind tour of 3 temples, a stone statue and a museum -- all in one day!

We began at the local temple to Mazu, the Goddess of the sea, worshiped only in Fujian, Guangzhou and Taiwan. Mazu was a real person who attained the statues of a deity due to her piety, and has been worshiped especially by sailors and fishermen. The temple was interesting to me because of all the ocean motifs..sea horses, sea dragons and such...


Her altar was very colorful, and Helen was very interested and had us burn some incense like other people were doing.

Mazu worship is not part of Buddusim or other major religion, just a local deity with a number of temples...having a tree altar to highlight the divine nature of the tree is also still common in some places..

We set off to walk along the main street (named Zhongshan Road of course, like nearly all main streets in China, after Dr. Sun Yatsen). Michael snapped a photo of this quaint barber shop (although it evoked Sweeney Todd for me...)



At the Confucian temple nearby, there was a museum showing a replica of a parade of successful scholars. Remember Michael went to Qufu, the birthplace of Kong Zi (Confucius) a few weeks ago? This is a very old temple dedicated to him,Fu Wen Miao, built around 900 AD. In the system Confucius helped establish, everyone was able to participate in examinations, and the best students, regardless of family background, were given the best posts in the government. Of course it was easier for wealthy young men to do well, since they had tutors and free time for study, but the notion that anyone could study hard and achieve some position in life was a truly revolutionary one in its time. Some temple drums...


My best attempt to sneak a photo, although there was a sign, I turned off my flash and was stealthy...

Outside Guo showed us hundreds of maobi (calligraphy brushes) left by students who had some to pray for success in their studies..

May of them had some fervent notes attached...


We did take a "kid break" from the temple world for a few minutes at the carnival on the plaza by the temple and some lunch. then it was tie for the Buddhists, and the Kaiyuan temple with its graceful pagodas...


And its ancient trees -- this one a mere 800 years old was the most impressive, but the 1200 year old tree looked like it might be shrinking...can you imagine? This tree was a sapling in the time of Charlemagne...amazing!


Thomas gives me a good thoughtful pose..."if you aren't a little bit intellectual, this would be boring..." Question:"ARE you bored?" Reply: "no, not really...."

Note the monk on the cell phone above..
Now, I live next door to a Buddhist temple. And I regularly see monks playing basketball, grocery shopping and even talking on cell phones. BUT I have never seen one do it while about to step over the threshold into the temple proper -- that was a first. And a minute later he was telling me -- "no photos" but I got one in anyway...the images all have different hand positions which represent mini"sermons". There were may Buddhist images here -- quite impressive.




The architecture of the city reveals a bit about its past. Quanzhou was a very Arabic city in ancient times, and there is a thriving Muslim community today. At the height of Quanzhou's importance, around 1000- 1300 AD, there were many Arabic people, some even in positions of leadership in the city, and all of the world's major religions (and a few minor ones) were allowed to flourish and coexisted peacefully. The Song dynasty emperors even gave some religious leaders a salary for their work, like the court philosophers and priests would receive.

In the museum of world religions adjoining the Maritime museum, we saw dozens of ancient stone grave markers which have been excavated in Quanzhou over the years..do you see the combination of Chinese and Arabic on this one?

Here are the Christian ones..
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Andrew of Perugia was based here, and there were also Nestorian Christians, Hindus and even the last remaining center for worship of the prophet Mani (below) -- a Persian from the 4th Century who taught that all religions contain some truth and lead on the path to "Light." St. Augustine followed Manichaean worship until his conversion. Some of the followers of Mani came to Quanzhou to escape persecution and established a nunnery which is the last know place on Earth where he is worshipped. Unfortunately it was too far for us to see it today.


...Because we were headed to see SHIPS at the maritime museum. There were hundreds of historically accurate models, and I gave Thomas the camera, so I now have a photo of each of them...


The phoenix boat for the empress

Dragon boat for the emperor

The kind of sea faring trade ships which made Fujianese traders famous all over Asia..

A diorama of a fishing village, which Helen liked...

And good old Admiral Zhenghe...the most important sea explorer of China. I have seen some PBS documentaries on him.. His ships were quite advanced, containing features the Europeans didn't use for several hundred more years. His major expeditions in the 1300s took him all over the world, as far as Korea and India and the Red Sea..seeking not conquest but trade. Unfortunately, when he died, the Chinese were broke from financing his navy and turned away from trade by sea to a more isolationist policy -- in that period, Quanzhou's importance began to decline.



Some parts of the museum were a little political .. can you read the sign? See the accompanying video below. This video is Thomas's pick: the display...it animates the battle which freed Taiwan from the Dutch under the leadership of Zheng Cheng Gong or Koxinga (his statue is on Gulanyu in Xiamen and we have climbed it)
...


On our way back through town we stopped to watch some performers. See the video below...

None of the people our friend asked knew exactly the significance, but they were carrying bowls full of burning wood and paper money...for the ancestors maybe? Yesterday was a holiday here called "Qing Ming Jie" which literally means Clear and Bright Festival...but has now been translated as "Tomb Sweeping Day" -- a day to attend to graves, leaving flowers and gifts of food at the altar for the ancestors of the family -- which many traditional Chinese homes have. People also burn "hell money" --paper money for the loved ones to spend in the next world...here is a place selling stacks of yellow paper money...


And even better -- paper clothes and cell phones for the afterlife!

Our last stop was the mountain near the city where there is a famous statue of Lao Tzu, the author of the Tao Te Ching, a deceptively simple book of only 1000 characters but full of meaning and importance to the Chinese, and anyone who reveres philosophical thought, like these two guys.

I recognized so many of the characters of the Tao Te Ching -- but making sense of them was another matter...


At last a celebratory dinner and back on the bus to Xiamen after a full and happy day...
On the way back I got a call from my sister and Michael's mother, who have safely arrived in Beijing and will be in Xiamen in just 3 days, after they see some big sights Beijing first...we are so excited! Michael is going back to Korea to lecture for 4 days, so I will not be blogging during that time, but we'll catch you up when we can...

I recently learned how to use my Sitemeter to find out more about our thousands of visitors, such as where they are from...the Michigan, New York, Colorado, LA and even Birmingham, AL visitors are known to us..but we also have readers from all over Canada, from Germany, Switzerland, France, Mexico, Australia, Singapore, Macau, Indonesia, South Africa, Mexico, even Spain and Portugal...so Helllo out there! The web is certainly an amazing place!

Shanghai: Yuyuan Garden and Xin Tian Di

On the last day of our Shanghai trip, the rain cleared a little. I gave my last lecture in the morning and then Thomas and I were free. A student, Alex [Chinese name unknown], came to pick us up and take us to Yuyuan Garden, a formerly private garden owned by a businessman during the the Qing Dynasty.

On the way there we passed through these streets of an "old" town. Actually they are all recently built. Shanghai has very little old architecture - in fact, most of China has very little except for the temples. Partly this is because so much was built of wood.

It was fun to stroll the streets which were crowded and had a festive atmosphere. Below you see the story of modern China. By the way, the Colonel rules in China. KFC is by far the most popular fast-food. It's better than in the US and the meals are all Chinese adapted, with a lot of spicy coating. [Sorry, somehow I deleted the KFC in Old Town picture. We'll put it into another post.]

The area is one of the major tourist spots in Shanghai - which is a massive city - because there is very little green space in the whole city. Plus there are a lot of foreigners here every day as it is one of the major cities in the world right now. But I am glad we didn't end up here. Way too big and crowded.

Here is Thomas next to the largest pair of scissors we had ever seen. We were thinking of Helen, who has always been to scissors, for better or for worse.

Above you see a shot of the garden park and entrance. It was a typical Chinese garden, so there was no big green space but instead it was filled with a maze of little areas, each tucked around some corner or walkway. Our student said that it was very much based on the book "I Ching" or, the Book of Changes, and ancient and cryptic work.

There were a lot of cemented together stones, called "rockery", as in "be careful on the rockery" or "this way to the rockery". Thomas enjoyed running around and climbing on the stones. After being in the hotel for a few days, and being out only in the rain previously, it was nice to get out and move around.

Here is a shot of our student guide, Alex. He was an interesting guide as he was a little older than the typical graduate student. First he went into the military, then he went to undergraduate. After his BA he worked as a journalist around Hangzhou [a famously beautiful city close to Shanghai in Zhejiang Province]. Now he was in the Masters Program studying applied ethics.

We thought that this big dragon head was rather dramatic. Below is the stage for the family's private performances of music or opera.It was very well done and the detail work was very sharp. Because the garden gets so much tourist traffic they could obviously spend a good deal of money on repairs.

After we left Yuyuan Garden we went to a nearby neighborhood called Xin Tian Di. The buildings in it were formerly housing for poor people, but the area had been massively gentrified and now it was one of the trendy spots for foreign ex-pats and young Shanghai professionals.

The contrast with modern Shanghai doesn't look too bad here.

Below is the building in which the communist party began, back in the day. One of the inner rooms held the first meeting where Mao and Zhou Enlai, etc., all did their thing. I wouldn't have noticed but the poster behind the tree has a picture of Zhou Enlai in a business suit and I thought that it was an advertisement cropping his image for some recent product - which would have been shocking. But no, just a picture of him back in the day in a Shanghai suit.

We ended with a stop in a pub. We actually hadn't eaten much all day and it was about 4 or 5 already. So Thomas got a burger and fries in a nice German themed beer pub with a lot of dark wood and brass.

On the whole, it was a busy but good trip. I promise not to blog about Shanghai anymore!

Shanghai Museum and the Bund

Last Saturday during our Shanghai adventure we went out to see the city with a couple of students. They asked us what we wanted to see and we thought that the Bund area would be essential because it is such a symbol of Shanghai. But it was cold and rainy, so first we went to the Shanghai Museum. Here is a shot of the exterior.

Unfortunately, this was the first weekend in the Museum's history since it switched to free admission. So we waited in line out in the rain with a few hundred people for about a half hour to get in. It was really a lovely museum. Many of the pictures that I took didn't come out well, but the quality of the pieces was very high.

The quality was high in two senses. The pieces were very well preserved, unlike some of the artifacts you often see that are usually quite worn down or damaged. But even more, almost all the items had an intriguing quality that separated them from many ordinary museum pieces. Facial expressions were very captivating, as you can see on the musicians above and this supernatural beast below.

A special attraction is the "oracle bone" that you see below. Ann had a read a book about China before we arrived that discussed both ancient and contemporary China through the discovery of oracle bones. I think that was the title of the book in fact.

They were discovered in the 20th century and gave proof to the early civilization of China that until then had only been legendary. The bones have characters carved into them and they are the earliest (I think) record of Chinese characters.

Unfortunately, you can't see the characters in the photograph. In fact, you have to look pretty hard to see most of them on the bone. They only display one at a time. Below, you see a print of the bone with the characters. I was fascinated, and was sorry that Ann couldn't get to see it.

The oracle bone was in a gallery devoted to calligraphy. Below is a more typical scroll. I think it was from the Ming Dynasty (so, about 500 or more years ago). Of course, there were artifacts throughout the museum from all the different periods including pottery from 10,000 years ago.

We were very tired, so although the museum is not large, we decided to see just one more gallery and we let Thomas pick which one. He wanted to see the seal gallery with ancient and modern seals or stamps. These are very common in China and it is also common to have a seal made for yourself when you travel in China. They carve characters for your name in about 5 minutes.

Here is a series of photos in which you can see the size of the seal behind Thomas.

And then notice that it has a magnifying glass in front and a mirror underneath to inspect the design more closely.

And here, by taking a photo through the magnifying glass, you can just make out that it is filled with characters. Thomas liked this one the most. In the museum, you can really see the characters much more clearly through the glass and we were amazed at the precision necessary to make these tiny but detailed characters.

After the museum we went out to lunch for some local Shanghai dishes. As I mentioned last post, the food is very sweet. There were also a lot of dumplings. Below are the students who took us out. As you might guess, they are a couple.

Sun Ning, the boy, is in the second year of his Masters Program and next year will write his thesis on George Santayana's philosophy. He plans to go to the US for graduate school and we discussed different schools he might apply to. Chen Xing, the girl, is also a Masters student who will write her thesis on John Dewey's educational philosophy. So, you see I finally landed in the American philosophy zone of China. By the way, in China, all Masters programs in philosophy take 3 years, and all doctoral programs take another 3 years. It's a pretty strict timetable and a very different system from the US.

After lunch we walked down into the Bund area by the harbor. The Bund is a fairly sizable strip of western buildings built in the early 20th century when Shanghai was a major western concession. But it was so rainy and foggy that it was a little disappointing. As you look across the harbor you can see the famous Pearl tower just disappearing into the fog.

But it was still a worthwhile trip with interesting sites. The walkways were packed even though it was a cold and rainy Saturday in March. We were a little surprised at how many beggars there were, and very young ones and very aggressive ones as well.

Here we are in Shanghai!

We were glad to go back to our hotel after this. Thomas had a blister on his foot that then got soaked in the rain and I wasn't feeling very peppy myself.