Wheat-dogg's World

JISHOU, HUNAN — I met the Buddha on Sunday, 1.5 kilometers above sea level. He seems well, and is not lacking for company.

The Buddha sits among a coterie of lesser buddhas in a rebuilt temple at the summit of Tianmen Mountain near Zhangjiajie, on the site of a much older temple dating back to the Tang Dynasty (618-907). My visit there was one of the highlights of a quick, impromptu trip to Zhangjiajie this weekend.

The occasion for trip, despite less than encouraging weather, was to meet the new foreign teacher at the Zhangjiajie airport Saturday evening. David, my liaison officer, asked if I wanted to accompany one of his interns, Christopher, on the trip. I said, sure, thinking anything has to better than sitting in my flat on a cool, damp weekend.

We caught a morning train, and arrived at the university’s Zhangjiajie campus hotel around 1 pm, parked our bags, and took a short, wet walking tour of the campus. Christopher has friends on this campus, and I have a friend and former colleague who teaches there, so we spent some time organizing our stay.

The new teacher from the UK was supposed to arrive at 8 pm, but Connie (my friend) invited me to dinner. So, Christopher and I decided he would go to the airport alone. As it turns out, for me, it was the right decision. The teacher did not make the evening flight, so Christopher didn’t go and instead hung out with his friends while I visited with Connie and her family.

The food was delicious, but I felt guilty that I could not eat very much. I woke up Saturday with an upset stomach, which plagued me the entire weekend. So my appetite was off, to say the least.

After dinner, Connie’s husband and his colleague had to return to work for some overtime (until midnight, as it turned out.) So, Connie gave me a quick tour of Zhangjiajie’s bustling downtown.

My students in Jishou misinformed me. They had given me the impression that Zhangjiajie had no shops, no restaurants and no karaoke clubs, and that Zhangjiajie students came to Jishou for entertainment. Maybe they do, but the part of the city I saw was certainly no sleepy backwater. I figure my students meant the area around the campus is devoid of entertainment and shopping opportunities, which is true to a large extent.

Anyway, we walked in the rain, looking at shops and popping into a local hypermarket, while Connie told me about the museums and other cultural sites of her hometown.

Zhangjiajie is a city of about 1.5 million people. Until the late 1990s, it was known as Dayong (Google Maps still lists it that way), a sleepier and less well known town. The creation of a national park, Wulingyuan, nearby changed all that; the park acquired the name of a small village, Zhangjiajie, within its borders. By extension, that name eventually replaced Dayong as the name of the city.

Now, Zhangjiajie is a busy tourist town that attracts 6 million visitors — mostly Chinese, Koreans and Japanese, so far — annually. They visit the scenic forest, Tianmen Mountain, local museums and several other natural and cultural sites all within short trips of the city. Express trains and a new airport bring people in from the larger cities to the east and south.

To see all of those sites in a weekend is impossible. We hoped that the rain would let up enough for me to at least take the cable car ride up to the top of Tianmen Mountain, which overlooks the city. By Sunday afternoon, it had.

Sunday morning, while we waited for the clouds to lift, Connie took me to the Xiahuashanguan Museum, which features the art and culture of her people, the Tujia.

China has 55 officially recognized ethnic minorities. The Tujia number about 8 million. They have inhabited this part of China (the Wuling Mountain Range) for millenia, and have cultivated special arts and crafts known through the country, including sandstone painting, weaving, embroidery, intricate woodcarvings, courtship songs, and dances. Many of these traditions have been revived with the creation of the national park.

As the museum is privately run, I did not feel it appropriate to take photos. Their cross-stitch embroidery is dumbfounding in its intricacy; I doubt photos would really convey the craftsmanship anyway.

I have a vague notion from my childhood endeavors how time consuming wood carving. Imagine carving an entire bed. The “dripping-water bed” is a poetic name for a married couple’s first (and probably only) bed. Artisans make these matrimonial “beds of a thousand labors” from wood, carving intricate designs all around the borders of the “entrance” to the bed. Connie said her grandmother had one, which left a lasting impression on Connie when she slept in it as a child.

Similar efforts go into the making of the bride’s sedan chair, in which she arrives at her wedding concealed from view. The museum has two antique bride’s chairs, but apparently also has replicas available for modern Tujia to rent for a traditional wedding.

Sandstone painting, a newer artform, is somewhat of a misnomer. Created by a Zhangjiajie native, the artists combine pulverized sandstone with natural pigments and other natural materials to create unique, vividly colored and textured images of local scenery and village life. Here’s an example:

Around 2:30, we headed for the cableway terminus, just a few blocks from the train station. Connie called on two students to accompany up to the mountain, while she minded my bag and bought my train ticket home. [Christopher, I will note, was still at the hotel, bored silly, watching TV, and awaiting some news of the new teacher's arrival.]

The Tianmen Cableway is the longest in the world, at 7.5 km (about 4.7 miles). It carries visitors from the city to a point on the mountain 1.3 km — about 4,300 feet — up, where they can disembark and explore the mountaintop park on foot. Another cableway (really a chairlift) takes visitors another 200 meters up to the temple.

This multilingual site has a map of the cableway and the mountain forest park. Scroll down to the bottom of the page to trace our route.

Tianmen Mountain has much spiritual significance. The temple at the summit has been a center of Buddhism for western Hunan for 1400 years. Earlier than that, in the year 263, part of the mountain’s cliffs suddenly gave way, creating a keyhole, called Tianmen Cave; local people called it a gateway to heaven and it became an ancient tourist attraction. (Chinese unicorns are also reputed to live in the forests surrounding the mountain, but they are hard to spot even in clear weather.)

I took digital photos on the way up, but they offer a poor representation of the actual sights. Imagine if you will sitting in a glassed-in cablecar that seems to float above the buildings of the city, over the craggy terrains, the lush forests, and the switchback road (it has 99 turns and is said to resemble a dragon’s ascent) leading to the summit. Meanwhile, you apparently inch ever so slowly toward the mountain, its peak rimmed with low clouds.

The ride on the chairlift was even more vivid, as we actually passed through the chilly clouds on the way to the temple. Down below us, somewhere in the mist, were some Tujia women singing a courtship song for some other tourists. It had an ethereal quality that reminded me of scenes from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon without Chow Yun Fat and Michelle Yeoh jumping from tree branch to tree branch. We waved at the people on the chairs heading down. The majority were Koreans, as it turned out.

The temple here was rebuilt according to the style typical of the Qing Dynasty four centuries ago. The first station is the south-facing gateway, where two ferocious looking figures stand to protect the Buddha. After that, there is a huge courtyard, flanked by two smaller buildings. The Buddha sits in the largest building on the grounds, directly opposite the gateway.

It is traditional to clasp one’s hands in front of your chest and bow three times before entering. In the middle of the temple, the golden Buddha and his two golden bodhisattvas (disciples) sit crosslegged looking serenely to the south. Each is about 15 feet tall. Small stools were placed in front of them for Buddhists wanting to pray.

Along the east and west walls are 18 statues representing the 18 luohans (supernatural beings with specific abilities), including happiness (the familiar laughing Buddha), scholarship, artistry, and so on. On the north side of the temple is the goddess of mercy, Guan Yin, whom many Chinese regard as important as the Buddha himself, and two other guardians astride an elephant and a tiger.

On our way out, we saw a group of men carrying a huge bronze cauldron up the narrow stone steps to the main courtyard. The thing must have weighed close to a half-ton, judging from the grunts and groans of the ten porters struggling with it. It provided a brief glimpse into the time and effort it would have taken to build a such a huge temple complex centuries ago.

At this point, we really had to hustle. My train would leave at 6, and it was already past 4:30. The students wanted me to walk (“Quickly, we must hurry!”) the “plank road,” a stone walkway skirting the top of the mountain. While the views were spectacular, I really had to catch the train, so I suggested I come back another time to savor the experience.

I made it to the train just in time, as it was boarding. Connie talked her way past the security guards to lead me to the platform, and even boarded briefly to make sure I had good company in carriage 7, seat 51. My seatmates were all coincidentally Jishou University students, returning from celebrating a friend’s birthday. Two of them chatted with me in English to the admiring glances of several onlookers. Just before the train pulled from the station, Christopher breathlessly appeared, having gained permission from his boss to abandon meeting the new teacher for now.

So, from a sow’s ear, a silk purse. All things considered, I had a pretty damn good weekend.