South of the Yangtze

by Bill Porter

  He told us if we stayed another day, we could take the monastery bus down the mountain. He said the bus brought pilgrims to the mountain once or twice a week from the provincial capital of Nanchang. Nanchang was where we were headed ourselves, but we decided not to wait for the bus. After we said good-bye to Yi-ch’eng, the guest manager picked up Steve’s pack. It was full of camera gear and was the heaviest of our three packs. Then he led us out of the monastery and down the dirt road that led up the mountain. We had no choice but to follow him.

  While we were walking, we walked past the “hotel” we had seen on the way up and asked the guest manager about it. He said the monastery used it whenever they had a big ceremony. He said that the week before we arrived, they held a ceremony that 1,600 people attended. He said not everyone spent the night there, but several hundred of them did. Even though our room at the monastery didn’t have electricity, we were glad we didn’t stay at the hotel. It looked bleak.

  After walking about two kilometers, the guest manager finally stopped and took off Steve’s pack. He was dripping with sweat, but he had made his point. He was taking us as far as he could. He pointed to a stone path that led off to the side and down through a forest. He said it was the old trail, and it would save us a couple of hours. We bowed in thanks then headed down.

  He was right. If we had walked down the road, it would have taken us at least three hours, but the trail only took an hour. As it finally flattened out at the foot of the mountain, the trail led past a small temple. It was a nunnery, and the abbess saw us coming. She waved for us to follow her inside, and she insisted we stay for lunch. We had missed breakfast and were glad to oblige. It was only ten o’clock, but she and her fellow nuns made us an early lunch of freshly cut bamboo shoots and homemade tofu. Once again, the road gods were smiling on us. After we ate as much as we dared, we said good-bye then followed the road that ran past the nunnery and past the provincial agricultural college out to the highway. Less than a minute after reaching the highway, we were on a bus bound for Nanchang. But it was not like any of the buses we had been on before. Instead of hard benches, it had individual seats. We had never before experienced such luxury on a bus in China.

  For the next two hours, we drove through a landscape of hills terraced with rice and tea. It wasn’t at all boring, but it would have been a lot less interesting if the driver hadn’t stopped to pick up an old lady and her child. Apparently, the old lady had never been on such a high-class bus before either. When she heard how much a ticket cost, she spent the next hour arguing with the conductress about the price. Our vocabularies were increased immeasurably by the epithets that she had probably spent years perfecting. Finally, she ran out of steam and paid the price, and finally we arrived in Nanchang. We got off in the center of town and walked to the nearest hotel. The first one was the five-star Kiangsi Guesthouse, where they wanted 280RMB for a triple. Next door, the three-star Kiangsi Hotel wanted seventy-five, and they didn’t ask to see the scars on our arms.

  9. Nanchang

  Waking up at the Kiangsi Hotel was not the same as waking up at Chenju Temple. Instead of mountains and rice fields and lotus ponds and the stillness of a monastery, we woke up surrounded by the cement and noise of another urban explosion. We were in Nanchang, the capital of Kiangsi. It was our fourth provincial capital: Kuangchou, Changsha, Wuhan, and now Nanchang.

  Painting and poem carved on stone

  Our hotel was on August First Road a block or two from August First Square. August First was the date in 1927 when the Communists launched their armed struggle against the Nationalist government. The previous year, Chiang Kai-shek began his Northern Expedition to wrest control of the country from local warlords. He was given charge of all revolutionary forces, including those controlled by the Communists. When he reached Shanghai the following spring, he decided to eliminate any future contenders for power and massacred thousands of Communists and their supporters. Chou En-lai and other leftist leaders managed to escape and regroup in Nanchang. And on August 1st, they launched their counteroffensive. It took them twenty-two years, but they finally succeeded in giving Chiang and the Nationalists the boot in 1949 and formed the People’s Republic of China.

  Right across the street from our hotel was the Memorial Hall to the Martyrs of the Revolution. After breakfast, we poked our heads inside, but we weren’t familiar with the names, and there weren’t any explanations in English. It was a period we knew almost nothing about. Our ignorance was in part due to our anti-Communist upbringing. America had its own Cultural Revolution. It was called the McCarthy Era, when people who were suspected of having leftist sympathies were fired from their jobs and even put in prison. I can still remember the maps in school with China and Russia colored red, and our teachers telling us that Communism was taking over the world and that this was something bad. In fact, that’s still what they say about Communism. Private wealth good. Sharing bad. So naturally, we never learned about what was going on in China.

  A few blocks away, we also visited the Nanchang Uprising Memorial Hall. It was located in the same building used by the rebels for their headquarters. They didn’t use it long. They were driven out of Nanchang by Nationalist forces three days later. Once again, all the displays and explanations were in Chinese about a period of history we knew nothing about. It just as well could have been about the Middle Ages. We continued walking down the same street until it ended at the banks of the Kan River.

  Nanchang’s August First Monument

  Rising a few blocks to the north was the towering structure of the Tengwangke, the third of ancient China’s three famous towers. We had already seen the other two. This one was first built in 653, more than four hundred years after the other two. It was built by the Prince of T’eng—hence its name: the Tower of Prince T’eng. It had been destroyed and rebuilt many times and had spent the last hundred years in ruins until 1989, when it once more rose from the rubble. Like Yellow Crane Tower in Wuhan, it too was rebuilt out of cement, which was just as well. It would have taken a whole forest to recreate this fifty-seven-meter-high monument to ostentation.

  As we looked at the tower, we thought about whether we wanted to climb its stairs. We had already climbed Wuhan’s Yellow Crane Tower for a view of that city’s smokestacks. We decided one forgettable urban panorama was enough. Obviously, we weren’t really tourists. We walked past the tower and a few blocks later stopped to inquire at the Harbor Terminal about the possibility of leaving Nanchang by boat.

  Just as the Hsiang River defines the landscape of Hunan, the Kan River defines Kiangsi. After its wide waters pass Nanchang, they empty into Poyang Lake then into the Yangtze. We had already visited the spot where the two waters met but didn’t merge. There was another river that emptied into Poyang Lake, and there was a boat that left Nanchang and traveled up the other river to our next destination, which was China’s porcelain capital of Chingtechen. We scanned the list of departures listed above the ticket window. Sure enough, there was a boat scheduled to leave the next day. For centuries, the bulk of Chingtechen’s porcelain had been transported by boat via Poyang Lake into the Yangtze then to the rest of China. This was true of all ancient porcelain centers in China. Rivers were smooth. Roads were not. Unfortunately, Kiangsi turned out to be in the midst of a three-year drought, and it was late fall. The woman selling tickets told us to come back next summer, and to pray for rain.

  Since a boat was out of the question, we flagged down a taxi and went to the train station and bought tickets for the eleven o’clock night train to Chingtechen. That left us with the rest of the day and only one place we wanted to visit. Kiangsi had never numbered among China’s wealthier provinces, but its native sons included many of the country’s leading artists, writers, and intellectuals. The man we were interested in was Chu Ta (1626–1705), better known by his sobriquet: Pa-ta Shan-jen. He was born in Nanchang into a distant line of the imperial family. He was a descendant of Chu Ch’uan, the Prince of Ning, who entertained delusions t
hat he was the rightful heir to the Ming throne and died for acting on such delusions.

  When Chu Ta was in his twenties, China was overrun by the Manchus, and Nanchang was starved into submission. The Ming dynasty came to an end, and the Ch’ing dynasty began. Chu Ta, however, refused to serve the new rulers and became a Buddhist monk. But instead of meditating or chanting scriptures, he devoted himself to painting, calligraphy, and seal carving. His monk’s robe was just a cover. Instead of giving up his wealth, he used it to build a retreat in Nanchang’s southern suburbs on a site occupied by Taoist temples for more than 2,000 years. To Taoists it was known as Tienningkuan, or Tienning Observatory, after their interest in observing the movements of celestial phenomena as having a possible bearing on movements within the body. Chu Ta changed the name to Chingyunpu, or Blue Cloud Garden.

  From the train station, it was a ten-kilometer bus ride. It was a slow ride, but we had nothing but time. We got off on Chingyunpu Road, and there it was. It was easy to spot, with its long white walls completely surrounded by ponds. It looked like an island. In fact, it was an island. As we walked across the bridge and through the front gate, we couldn’t help wonder how a place of such delicate beauty had survived in a city of such unrelieved ugliness.

  Since Pa-ta Shan-jen lived here, his former residence had become a memorial hall. The hall, which was actually a series of wings and courtyards and corridors, was located at the rear of the grounds. It looked like similar memorial halls we had seen. But what surprised us was that it had several dozen of his paintings—originals according to the caretakers, unlike the Ch’i Pai-shih Memorial Hall. There was also a store that sold a surprisingly good imitation of his painting of a kingfisher on a lotus for only 100RMB, or $20. Finn bought a copy of the painting, and I bought a copy of Pa-ta Shan-jen’s collected poems.

  Pa-ta Shan-jen

  The poems were collected from the inscriptions he wrote on his paintings. This was a unique characteristic of Chinese art, and invariably annoyed Westerners who preferred paintings to be simply paintings. But Chinese painting was much more personal than Western art. A painting was often a gift. And a gift requires a message. What better message than a poem? I opened the book at random, and there was one titled “Written on Kingfishers and Lotuses”: “I’ve heard the wings of a kingfisher pair / grow longer when they fly home / how then do mindless clouds / float above lotuses day after day. .”

  Few Chinese painters painted with such a free and fun-loving brush as Pa-ta Shan-jen. Anyone who sees his paintings for the first time can’t help but be captivated. The nicest part of Blue Cloud Garden, though, wasn’t its collection of paintings in the memorial hall or its store, but its garden wall. We had never seen anything quite like it. The wall undulated through the eastern part of the garden along a covered walkway for about forty meters. It was a wall with a dozen differently shaped windows that looked onto the surrounding ponds and rice fields. And on both sides of the wall were Pa-ta Shan-jen’s paintings and poems carved into stone. It was a wonderful way to view his work, much better than turning the pages of a book.

  We lingered there all afternoon in Pa-ta Shan-jen’s old garden. It was impossible to leave. We were practically the only visitors, except for a few couples who came to be alone. There was also a teahouse, and once we had seen what there was to see, we sat down and ordered a pot of Iron Goddess. It was the perfect place to catch up on our journals. We tried to write every day. Our memories were bad, and every day we saw so much. After the first pot lost its flavor, we ordered a second pot. We were in no hurry. Our train didn’t leave until nearly midnight, and we stayed until the caretaker said it was time to close. On our way out, we stopped to pay our respects at Pa-ta Shan-jen’s grave. The tomb was in the corner of the garden flanked by two 400-year-old camphor trees that were just getting started when Pa-ta Shan-jen moved here rather than serve a government he didn’t respect.

  Pa-ta Shan-jen’s grave

  If we had been a little more ambitious, we might have also visited the grave of one of China’s greatest writers. His name was T’ang Hsien-tsu (1550–1616). The Chinese like to call him their Shakespeare, and the comparison isn’t misplaced. When it comes to drama, T’ang was the best. His seventeenth-century novel Peony Pavilion is still considered one of the great works of Chinese literature. He spent most of his life in his hometown of Linchuan, and he was buried there. Linchuan is only a hundred kilometers southeast of Nanchang, but we didn’t want to spend half the day on the road—which is what it would have taken to go there and back. We were satisfied we made the right decision to drink tea instead.

  From Pa-ta Shan-jen’s memorial hall, we walked back to the main road and took the next bus back to our hotel, where we had left our bags with the concierge earlier that morning. We still had time on our hands, and we hadn’t eaten all day, so we walked across the street and ordered dinner at one of the stalls that took over the sidewalk when the sun went down.

  The trouble with ordering food on a sidewalk is that there isn’t usually a menu. And we were feeling so good, we ordered without asking the price. It’s a mistake I keep making no matter how many times I’ve traveled in China. But on this occasion we were distracted by a prostitute who sat down at our table and joined us for a beer. After dinner, when we asked for the bill, it turned out to be more than twice what it should have been. We should have chastised ourselves for forgetting to ask the prices, but on this occasion we decided to try something different. We refused to pay and told the owner that she should call the police. We got up to leave and told her that when the police came we would be in the bar across the street. Of course we were bluffing. And of course it was our fault for not asking the price in the first place. But we still had several hours to kill, and we thought we might as well experiment with the boundaries of negotiation. It was a unique situation, but it didn’t last nearly as long as we had hoped. The owner immediately settled for half of what she had asked, and we even parted on friendly terms, promising to return on our next visit to the dubious destination of Nanchang.

  But we weren’t bluffing about visiting the bar across the street. We hadn’t had any whiskey since we began our trip, so we decided to splurge. We walked into the lobby of the five-star Kiangsi Guesthouse, then into the hotel bar and bought each other shots. It was only Red Label, but we felt rich. Finally, we walked back to our hotel and collected our bags, and hauled ourselves to the train station. Since we had soft sleeper tickets, we were entitled to hang out in the VIP lounge, which we did until the express came and carried us through the night and dropped us off in Chingtechen at six o’clock the next morning. It was too early to do any sightseeing, and we were too tired anyway. We indulged ourselves by checking into the Chingtechen Guesthouse, where a triple cost an incredible 200RMB, or $40. Somehow we didn’t mind. We felt we deserved a break. We went up to our room and went back to sleep. In fact, we spent the whole morning in bed. We felt as if we had finally discovered the proper way to travel.

  10. Porcelain & Ink

  It was almost noon when we woke up. Since we were in Chingtechen, the porcelain capital of China—if not the world—and only had the afternoon to see the sights, we asked the clerk at the front desk about hiring a guide. He directed us to the hotel’s travel service, and five minutes later we not only had a guide, we had a van. The combination wasn’t cheap, at 150RMB for a half-day tour, but we were feeling very self-indulgent after our morning nap. Only the unemployed and self-indulgent can take a morning nap.

  Preparing clay for throwing

  In America, we call porcelain “china.” And we don’t use it for everyday meals. Assuming we have any, we only take it out for special occasions. Obviously, it’s called “china” because it comes from China. And if it comes from China, the chances are it comes from Chingtechen. The potters and kilns of Chingtechen have been producing porcelain since the third century. Back then, though, it wasn’t so highly prized. Utensils made of bronze or jade were preferred at court. In fact, when it
first appeared, porcelain was called “imitation jade.”

  Despite its poor-man’s-jade beginnings, porcelain was soon seen as capable of a much greater range of colors and designs, and it was far easier to produce than utensils made of bronze or jade. By the seventh century, porcelain, or tz’u-ch’i, as the Chinese call it, began appearing at court, and by the eleventh century, one Sung dynasty emperor ordered that he would use nothing except Chingtechen porcelain. As it happened, that Sung emperor’s reign title was Ching-te, and all the porcelain produced for use at his court was stamped on the bottom with those words. Hence, the town that had previously been known as Hsinping and later Changnan became known as Chingtechen, or Chingte Township.

  Once we finished lunch, we began our tour with a visit to the site of Chingtechen’s most famous Sung kiln. It was four kilometers east of town and was called Hutien. This is where China’s ubiquitous blue-and-white ware, the ware that became known in the West as “china,” was first produced. The Istanbul Museum has a collection of blue-and-white ware from the Hutien kiln dating back to the thirteenth century. That was when Genghis Khan and his successors ruled all of Asia, including China and Turkey, and the Mongols preferred Chingtechen’s blue-and-white ware. Prior to that, the Hutien kiln was better known for its ivory-white and pale-blue glazes, which the Chinese preferred to the more ostentatious blue-and-white. But a customer is a customer. And the customer is always right, especially if the customer is Genghis Khan.