South of the Yangtze

by Bill Porter

  In addition to blessing us with a hotel room and a memorable dinner, another sign that the road gods were watching over us was the presence of a bus terminus just beyond the hotel driveway. A few minutes after walking down to where buses turned around, we boarded number five. Twenty minutes later, we got off where all the students got off: at Hunan University. The academy was next to the campus, just behind the huge statue of Chairman Mao.

  Ever since it was first built a thousand years ago, Yuehlu Academy was the major center of learning in the province. This was where the sons of the Hunan elite came to study. At the beginning of the twentieth century, their sons were still studying here, and it became, for a time, Hunan University. That was how most universities in China began, in the halls of Confucian academies. In the case of Hunan University, it was established in 1926. But with the development of a middle class and the need for knowledge beyond the classical education of the past, the academy wasn’t big enough to contain all the students or the departments of a modern university. Hence, Hunan University was built next door.

  The academy itself had been rebuilt many times, most recently in 1981, but it no longer functioned as a place of learning. It was a museum to the system of higher education that prevailed in the past. And it was in perfect condition. As we approached, we were greeted by two phrases that flanked the main entrance: “Men of talent in the land of Ch’u / this is where they bloom .” The land of Ch’u was an old name for the region that included Hunan and Hupei provinces.

  Inside on one of the walls was a list of eighteen rules all students were expected to follow: “think always of your parents / in all things avoid excess / let what you eat and wear be simple / act only with decorum. . .” etc. Over the entrance of the main hall were four huge characters in the calligraphy of the great neo-Confucian philosopher Chu Hsi (1130–1200), who taught here two hundred years after the academy was built. His admonition reminded students to be “loyal, filial, honest, and frugal .”

  As we walked through the halls once used for instruction and the halls devoted to honoring the great Confucian sages of the past, we agreed that we would never have survived the rigor that would have been expected of us had we enrolled there. China was, after all, where bureaucracy was invented. And such academies were focused on preparing young men to fill its ranks. Serving in such a capacity required talents we didn’t have and training we could never have endured. We were round pegs in a square world, or maybe it was vice versa. Yes, I would say it was vice versa. The academy was a beautiful place, but it was not for us. We turned our attention to the mountain after which it was named.

  Since the day was young, we thought we would go for a hike and followed the trail that began just to the left of the academy. It was a trail of huge stone steps and sufficiently wide that we were able to walk side-by-side, which never happened in cities or towns. After only a few minutes, we paused to catch our breaths at Aiwan Pavilion. We weren’t in a hurry, and the pavilion seemed like a good place to stop. Surrounded by towering trees, lush foliage, and a lily-filled pond, it begged us to relax, and that was what we did. This was also where Mao used to relax and where he talked with his fellow students when he was studying in Changsha in the aftermath of the revolution that ended the Ch’ing dynasty. One revolution down. One more to go. The place still remembered him. In fact, the plaque announcing this as Aiwan Pavilion was written by him.

  Once we had caught our breaths, we continued up the trail past Lushan Temple, which was still a functioning Buddhist monastery. We paused to catch our breaths again at the graves of Huang Hsing and Tsai Eh. Huang and Tsai were both from Changsha and played key roles in the revolution that brought the Ch’ing dynasty to an end.

  When the Republic they helped established in 1912 was overthrown by Yuan Shi-k’ai, who proclaimed himself emperor of a new dynasty, Huang traveled to America and raised funds for an army, and Tsai led the army Huang funded. Tsai Eh’s military successes quickly put an end to Yuan Shih-k’ai’s short-lived interregnum and led to the reestablishment of the Republic in 1916. But no sooner had Huang and Tsai succeeded in overthrowing the overthrower and in reestablishing the Republic than they died, within days of each other. Their bodies were buried on Yuehlushan in a state funeral attended by hundreds of dignitaries and thousands of mourners. Mao Tse-tung, P’eng Te-huai, and Liu Shao-ch’i were not the only revolutionaries from Hunan, and I’ve always wondered if there wasn’t something in the food. Maybe it was the red peppers. Wherever we traveled in Hunan, we saw piles of them on sidewalks and on roadsides. Revolutionary peppers.

  After pausing to pay our respects to Huang and Tsai, we continued on a bit farther to a place where the trail seemed to end and where we had a grand view of the Hsiang River as it flowed northward toward the Yangtze. Beyond the Hsiang to the east, all of Changsha was spread out. It looked like it was waiting for us, and we weren’t about to disappoint it. We walked back down the trail, and beneath the outstretched arm of Chairman Mao’s statue we caught the number five back to the terminus near our hotel, then the number three across the Hsiang and into the heart of the city. We got off at Martyrs’ Park, where the province’s other revolutionaries were honored. But we weren’t there to see the park. We walked north a few blocks to the entrance of the Hunan Provincial Museum.

  I have since heard that the museum is now worth visiting, but we were there in 1991. We poked our heads inside but didn’t spend more than half an hour. Besides, the reason we were there wasn’t to visit the museum’s main collection but to see the artifacts in the building next door that were unearthed from three Han dynasty tombs in a Changsha suburb.

  The tombs were discovered by farmers in 1972 in the village of Mawangtui, a mere four kilometers east of the museum. The tombs were those of a local marquis, his wife, and their son, all of whom died 2,200 years ago. Earthquakes and water seepage had disturbed the clay that covered the tombs that contained the marquis and his son, but the tomb that contained the marquis’s wife was more fortunate. It turns out that the ancient Chinese perfected a method of burying people that would have made the ancient Egyptians envious. They sealed a tomb with a special clay that prevented air from getting inside. But before sealing the tomb, they placed something inside the tomb that decomposed and created a gas that preserved the body of the deceased as if they had just died. Of course, the gas escaped when tombs were opened, and archaeologists have remained in the dark as to the nature of this gas.

  When farmers first discovered the tombs at Mawangtui, they noticed this gas escaping through a small hole. Once researchers at the provincial museum heard about the discovery, they rushed to the site to protect it from further damage. One of the researchers was Kao Chih-hsi. When he saw the escaping gas, he tried to plug the hole and rode his bicycle back to town as fast as he could. He spent the next day pedaling all over Changsha looking for equipment to sample the gas. But this was the middle of the Cultural Revolution, and people were more interested in preserving their own positions than in helping solve secrets of China’s feudal past. It took two days for Kao to obtain the necessary equipment. By the time he pedaled back to the site, the gas was gone, and its secret has remained a mystery.

  Mawangtui Museum curator Kao Chih-hsi

  Although the gas was gone, the body it helped to preserve was intact. Unfortunately, as soon as it came into contact with air, it began to deteriorate. Having failed to discover the mystery of the gas, Kao didn’t want to lose the body too. Again, his attempts to do so were rebuffed by the authorities in Changsha. Finally, the director of the Shanghai Museum came to his aid and arranged to have a hermetically-sealed chamber constructed. The chamber worked, and the wife’s skin has remained fresh to this day, even if it does look a bit ghastly. We joined other visitors in looking down at her remains. As to what killed her, researchers concluded she died from a heart attack brought on by choking on melon seeds. Melon seeds. Deadly melon seeds.

  After spending 2,200 years in the ground, her body’s condition was tru
ly amazing. But even more amazing were the other contents of the tombs. First, there was the silk. In addition to the fabric used to wrap the wife’s body, there were sixty-three bolts woven with the most intricate of patterns, and it was all in perfect condition. There was also a silk gown that weighed a mere forty-nine grams, or less than two ounces. It looked about as heavy as a pair of dragonfly wings.

  The tombs also contained books, books copied on silk. And they weren’t just any books. These were books meant to accompany the marquis and his family into the afterlife. In short, they were their favorite books. First, there were two complete copies of the most revered of all Taoist texts, the Taoteching. They are still the two earliest complete copies of Lao-tzu’s famous text ever found, a text that he wrote a mere three hundred years earlier around 500 BC. Second, one of the copies was prefaced by four lost chapters of the Classic of the Yellow Emperor, China’s earliest known medical treatise. A number of other texts were also found in the tombs, including the earliest known book on astronomy. Among this last book’s remarkable contents were figures on the periodic motions of the planets that differed less than one-hundredth of one percent from modern estimates.

  In addition to the philosophical, medical, and astronomical works, the tombs also contained maps. One of them was a remarkably accurate topographic map of most of South China, from Changsha all the way to Kuangchou, where we began our trip. There was also a silk painting of a system of exercises designed to promote health, similar to those later developed into Taichichuan. Finally, there were paintings depicting the whole gamut of Chinese mythology, including the heavenly realm, the human realm, and the world of spirits. And, wonder of wonders, the museum’s labels were also in English for people like us. One Chinese visitor at the museum told us it was his fifth visit. There was so much to see, we could have spent days. But museums can be exhausting, and after two hours we called it quits. Our eyes were glazed over.

  We walked back outside and found a place to have some noodles, and wondered what else we should see in Changsha. We had the whole afternoon. Instead of more relics of the city’s past, we decided on Chutzuchou (Orange Tree Island). Chutzuchou was in the middle of the Hsiang River, and the only way to reach it was to take a bus that crossed the same bridge we crossed earlier. Halfway across, however, the bus exited the bridge and drove south through the middle of the island. Chutzuchou was basically an extremely long sandbar, five kilometers long and less than two hundred meters wide. As its name suggested, it was once famous for its orange trees, and we passed thousands as we drove toward the upriver end of the island.

  There were a number of small villages on the island, and our bus was filled with villagers heading back home after a morning in town. It was slow going, but finally we reached the end of the line. The driver told us buses departed every hour or so. As far as we were concerned, that was perfect. We were in no hurry. There was a small park and a sandy beach at the end of the island. The place was doubtlessly packed in summer, but we were here in early October and found ourselves nearly alone. Just us and a couple of fishermen and their small skiffs.

  We sat down on the sand and for the next two hours did nothing at all—well, we did catch up on our journals, but it seemed like nothing at all. At some point, one of the fishermen came over to where we were lounging and offered to take us out on the river. He said we could go fishing. But we weren’t interested in fishing. We were busy doing nothing, just staring at the Hsiang’s passing current and the distant peaks of Hengshan and writing in our journals. We weren’t the only ones who sat here doing just that. Tu Fu (712–770) came here the year he died. It was his second spring in a row in Changsha, and as he lay ill inside the small boat that served as his home, he wrote “Written on My Boat When Swallows Come”:

  A traveler in Hunan in the middle of spring

  two years now I’ve watched swallows carrying mud

  in my garden back home we were friends

  here they regard me from a distance

  the poor things nesting wherever they can

  no different from this homeless life of mine

  they chirp from the mast then fly off

  while my handkerchief only gets damper

  The boats pulled up on the shore where we were sitting were sanpans. They were called sanpans because their hulls were originally made of three (san) boards (pan), one for the bottom and two for the sides. I’m guessing Tu Fu’s boat was bigger, probably a five-board wupan with a mast and a covered shelter.

  Tu Fu lived at the height of the golden age of Chinese poetry. In fact, he was the height. He was born in the hills east of the eastern capital of Loyang, but he spent most of his life in the hills south of the western capital of Ch’ang-an. Despite his fame as a poet, he held only a few minor posts and fell out of favor during the aftermath of the An Lu-shan Rebellion (755–759), when both capitals lay in ruins and bandits roamed the countryside. After lying low with his family in Szechuan and later in the Yangtze Gorges, he sailed his little boat down the Yangtze and spent his last two years following the Hsiang River upstream, past Changsha and Hsiangtan, and even as far as Hengyang. On his way back downstream, he died near the town of Yuehyang just south of where the Hsiang joins the Yangtze. He was fifty-nine, and the first frost had already fallen. This is how he ended one of his last poems:

  For ten-thousand miles on earth and in heaven

  I can’t find a place of my own

  my wife and children are still with me

  whenever I see them I sigh

  the country is a wasteland of weeds

  my friends and neighbors are gone

  where is the way back home

  my tears fall on the banks of the Hsiang

  It was hard to imagine: China’s greatest poet, adrift, in his little boat with his wife and children, a thousand miles from home, going from one moorage to the next. Earlier, when we were at the Hunan Museum that afternoon, I asked several officials who worked there about the location of Tu Fu’s grave. I also asked at the travel service in our hotel that morning. All I got were blank stares. No one I asked had heard of his grave, much less knew where it was. We wouldn’t have tried to find it ourselves, but I had an old map of the province, and Tu Fu’s grave was a small dot on it, a dot about a hundred kilometers northeast of Changsha. It looked like it was in the middle of nowhere. But nowhere had never stopped us before.

  5. Poets

  The next morning, after checking out of our beloved Maple Hotel, we took a taxi to the main bus station. The closest town to the dot on my map was Anting. From Changsha, there were two buses a day, one at 7:30 and another at 1:30. We were in luck. We arrived just minutes before the 7:30 left. We even got seats. Three hours later, we were there, in Anting, or as the bus driver called it: Kuantang.

  Ch’u Yuan Shrine relief

  As the bus continued on, we found ourselves standing at the edge of a very crowded street. It was market day. But while we were standing there wondering what to do next, people stopped buying and selling whatever it was they were buying and selling. The word wai-kuo-jen, or “foreigner,” spread through the crowd like a fire across the prairie. Suddenly we were more interesting than market day.

  When the crowd around us became sufficiently large, I announced to no one in particular that we were looking for Tu Fu’s grave. Blank looks all around. Was my map wrong? Word spread, though, and before long a man worked his way through the crowd and said he knew where the grave was located and for 30RMB, or six bucks, he would take us there on his tractor. The price was a little steep for a ride on a tractor, but Tu Fu rated as much respect as we could muster, and we agreed.

  From Kuantang, or Anting—take your pick—we headed west on the highway that led to Pingchiang. After about three kilometers, we turned south onto a dirt road. Actually, it wasn’t a road. It was a pair of ruts, and we followed them south another four or five kilometers through rice fields and across hills planted with tea bushes and tea-oil trees (Camellia oleifera). Actually, we w
eren’t on the farmer’s tractor. We were standing in the carryall he was pulling behind his tractor.

  It was a rough road and our hands hurt from trying to hang onto the metal railing. Finally, after about twenty minutes of careening along, the farmer pulled into a flat grassy area next to a long white wall. He said we were here. We didn’t know what to expect, but we were expecting something different. The shrine built in honor of Tu Fu centuries ago had become the local elementary school. As our tractor pulled up outside the entrance, the principal came outside to see what a tractor was doing there. We waved, and he waved back. When we got off and explained the purpose of our visit, he led us inside. There was a portrait of Tu Fu off to one side. But over the entryway in the place of honor were portraits of Marx, Lenin, Mao, and Stalin. Even at his own grave, Tu Fu got second billing. The portrait of Stalin was especially noteworthy, as this was 1991. Mao denounced the Russian version of Communism in 1961, and relations between the two countries weren’t normalized again until 1989, only two years before we walked past Stalin’s portrait. Either word traveled very slowly in the Hunan countryside, or it traveled very quickly.

  Tu Fu’s grave

  After passing beneath the heroes of Communism, we followed the principal down several corridors past the third- then the fourth-grade classrooms. At the end of one of the corridors, he unlocked a gate that led to a weed-filled enclosure. At the back of the walled-in enclosure was Tu Fu’s grave: his grass-covered mound was surrounded by a wall of stones, and there was a stone tablet in front with his name on it. Among the weeds, we spotted a marijuana plant but made no attempt to harvest its buds. While we were standing there, the whole school—students and teachers—came out to watch us. Apparently, our presence was too disruptive to try to maintain order. We paid our respects as best we could with the traditional three bows, then thanked the principal and returned to our tractor. By the time we left, it was noon, when the children normally went home for lunch. As our tractor pulled away, more than a hundred children chased our carryall. Several of them even managed to grab hold of the railing and climb inside. As we passed their houses, one by one they jumped off, then stood there waving until we disappeared.