by Bill Porter
Having satisfied our curiosity about teapots, we took the next bus back to Yihsing, collected our bags, and boarded a noon bus to Wuhsi. Three thousand years ago, Wuhsi was called Youhsi. You-hsi means “lots-of-tin.” A thousand years later, the town’s tin mines ran out of tin, just as Tingshu was about to run out of purple clay, and the town’s name was changed to Wuhsi, meaning “no-tin.” Tin was important because it made bronze possible. No tin, no bronze. And bronze was something anyone rich or powerful had to have. Ritual implements were all made of bronze, and no ceremony could be conducted without it.
Fishing boats on Taihu Lake
From Yihsing, the road to No Tin skirted Lake Taihu. Depending on the season, Taihu was China’s third or fourth largest freshwater lake, and it supplied most of the water for the canal system that crisscrossed the intersection of Kiangsu and Chekiang provinces. It was also home to thirty varieties of fish, and one of the most beautiful sights in that part of China were the sails of its fishing fleet, which numbered in the hundreds.
As our bus bumped along, we gazed at the lake and the sails and tried to imagine all the rocks just below the surface. In addition to its fish and its fishing boats, the lake was famous for its rocks. The rocks were brought here from different parts of China and placed beneath the water line, then left here for years, until they had been weathered by the action of the waves and the tides. The weathering transformed the rocks into the strangest of shapes, and they have become a mainstay of any traditional Chinese garden. We thought we might see signs of them. But we didn’t see even a ripple.
By the time we reached Wuhsi, it was one o’clock. No doubt Wuhsi had sights worth seeing, but we had come here to see something else, something outside Wuhsi. We stashed our bags at the bus station and asked directions to the village of Machen. Thirty minutes later, we were on a local bus headed in that direction. And thirty minutes after that, we were there. Earlier, we had worried we might not arrive in time. But it was only two o’clock. We had plenty of time. The reason for our countryside excursion was that Machen was the hometown of one of China’s two greatest travelers, and we wanted to pay our respects. The traveler’s name was Hsu Hsia-k’o, and he was born here in 1587.
Unlike the seventh-century monk Hsuan-tsang, who traveled all the way to India and back, Hsu Hsia-k’o did all his traveling inside China. And unlike Hsuan-tsang, who traveled for the sake of the Dharma, Hsu traveled for the sake of mountains. During the course of twenty-six years, he visited every important mountain in China. But he didn’t just travel, he wrote about his travels. And he wrote a lot. Although much of his travel writing was lost, his surviving diaries still contain over 400,000 characters. The diaries that did survive have become the standard by which China’s scenic wonders are still described. People still use his words to describe a waterfall or a rock pinnacle. He immortalized China’s natural world.
Portrait of Hsu Hsia-k’o
When Hsu wasn’t traveling, he lived at his family home in the tiny village of Machen. The village wasn’t much more than a wide place in the road. But there were several stores that sold things like farm equipment and household necessities. We went into one and asked directions. The owner pointed us down a dirt road that led away from the highway and into the countryside. We walked about 300 meters and approached the front gate of a building. A sign said this was the Hsu Hsia-k’o Memorial Hall.
As we walked through the gate and entered the hall, we discovered the depth of our karmic connection with China’s greatest travel writer. The only person there besides ourselves was the director, Liu Cheng-ch’uan. Mister Liu was so surprised to see us, he walked over and started shaking our hands, and he kept shaking our hands, as if we were old friends. The memorial hall didn’t get many visitors, so we thought that was the reason for Mister Liu’s warm reception. Or maybe, we thought, it was because we were foreigners. But that wasn’t it either.
Once he stopped shaking our hands, Mister Liu led us into his office. Then he opened a drawer in his desk and took out several envelopes. They were all stamped. We shrugged. What was this all about? Liu waved them in our faces and said he had just picked them up at the post office. They were first-day-of-issue commemorative envelopes. We looked at the stamp. It showed a picture of Hsu Hsia-k’o wearing his travel clothes and making notes in his travel diary. Then we looked at the postmark. It was dated October 18, 1991. Then we looked at the calendar on the wall in Mister Liu’s office. We were there on October 19, 1991. Then we looked at the envelope again. In addition to a stamp of Hsu Hsia-k’o, there was a photograph of his grave. It turned out 1991was the 350th anniversary of his death. “Omitofo,” we all said in unison.
Mister Liu said he would be honored if we would accept the envelopes, and he wrote our names on them in the space for addressees. It was like receiving a personal letter from Hsu Hsia-k’o: “Hope you’re well, Bill. You wouldn’t believe how beautiful it is here at the summit of Huangshan. Hope you can come yourself someday. But don’t tell anyone. I would hate to see this mountain overrun.” A finer gift would be hard to imagine for travelers like ourselves. Meanwhile, I reached into my bag and showed Mister Liu my copies of Hsu’s travel diaries. We relied on them when we visited Hengshan and Lushan and Huangshan. The temples and pavilions had changed, but the paths were still the same.
After we recovered from the surprise of such serendipity, we put the commemorative envelopes in our bags, and Mister Liu showed us around the memorial hall. It included maps of Hsu’s journeys and photographs of the mountains he visited taken by modern travelers. And, of course, there were excerpts from his travel diaries. There wasn’t a lot to see, but we were easily satisfied. It was a special day, and we were there, and that was good enough.
Mister Liu then escorted us back outside and a hundred meters down the road to another hall. The second hall was filled with Hsu’s own calligraphy along with that of his ancestors and his descendants. Although he wasn’t wealthy, Hsu represented the 17th generation of an illustrious family, a family that was still flourishing. Mister Liu said members of the family’s 26th and 27th generations still lived in the area. There was also a portrait of Hsu based on an inscription that described him as “dark-skinned, buck-toothed and six-feet tall”—the very image of an ancient man of the Way.
Hsu was born here in 1586 and died here in 1641, 350 years and a day before our visit. The cause of his death was lacquer poisoning, which he contracted during his travels in the jungles of southwest China. Once, when I was hiking in the Chungnan Mountains south of Sian, I saw a man suffering from lacquer poisoning. His head was swollen to twice its normal size. Simply coming into contact with the sap of the lacquer tree was enough.
Mister Liu then led us outside to a garden courtyard at the far end of which was Hsu’s grave. We didn’t have any whiskey with us or we would have offered him some. Instead, we bowed in front of his grave and thanked him for showing us the path. We often felt as if we were following in his footsteps. Before we left, Mister Liu pointed to several dead trees in the courtyard and the faint line of mud halfway up Hsu’s tombstone. He said it was the high-water line from a recent flood that had inundated the area a few months earlier. The Yangtze was less than twenty kilometers to the north, and this was, after all, the Yangtze Delta Floodplain.
Hsu Hsia-k’o’s grave
It was with reluctance that we finally said good-bye to Mister Liu and thanked him for the first-day-of-issue envelopes. I still have mine at home. I use it as a bookmark in my copy of Hsu Hsia-k’o’s Travel Diaries. Every time I open the book, I think of Mister Liu and hope he’s well.
By the time we returned to Wuhsi, the sun was thinking of going down. We reclaimed our bags at the bus station and looked for a hotel to spend the night. We didn’t see anything near the bus station and asked a taxi driver to take us to a hotel by the lake. Why not, we thought, spend the night next to Taihu? The driver delivered us to the Hupin Hotel. It was a really nice hotel and in a beautiful setting, right on the shore o
f Lake Taihu. We weren’t sure we could afford it, but a room with three beds was only 130RMB. Unlike the previous night, we didn’t have to stretch out below the stairs. They had plenty of rooms. Ours even had a view of the lake. We also dined in the hotel restaurant for a change. It was just as good as the dinner we had at the Maple Hotel in Changsha. Among the dishes we had that were sufficiently memorable to note in our journals were several for which the city was rightfully famous: fried gluten, Wuhsi-style pork ribs, and deep-fried white bait.
Early morning Changshu skyline
After dinner, we walked out to the lakeshore. The hotel was located on an arm of the lake that formed Wuhsi’s harbor. Even though the sun was down, there were still a few boats coming back after a day of fishing or rock harvesting. In the distance, we could see the small rise of Turtlehead Island. There was a pier in front of the hotel where boats departed for tours of the lake. But it was too late for a tour, and we just sat down on the hotel’s grass lawn and enjoyed the view. We were living large again. Unfortunately, we weren’t really vacationing, and one night was all we stayed.
The next morning, we bid farewell to the town with no tin and caught an early morning bus to Changshu. It was only forty-four kilometers to the east, and we were there before nine. After depositing our bags at the bus station as usual, we took two rickshaws to see a few sights—the three of us couldn’t fit in one. Changshu wasn’t a major tourist destination, and rickshaws were still the major form of public transportation in the city, other than buses, of course.
Our destination was a mountain on the western edge of the city. It was called Yushan. It wasn’t a big mountain, but we weren’t really interested in the mountain. We asked our rickshaw drivers to take us to the mountain’s southeast corner. We thought we would begin the day by visiting the graves of the city’s two most famous residents.
The first belonged to Yen Tzu-you, and it was right next to the road. Yen Tzu-you was born in Changshu, but he left when he was young to study with Confucius. He ended up becoming one of Confucius’s favorite students and was, in fact, the only southerner among the Master’s inner circle. When later Confucians developed their pantheon of heroes, he was numbered among the Master’s ten most prominent disciples. After Confucius died, Master Yen, as he became known, returned to Changshu and was instrumental in spreading his master’s teachings in this part of China. He was buried here in 443 BC. Most people don’t realize that while the history of China goes back 5,000 years, Chinese culture didn’t reach this region until the first millennium BC. And it was people like Master Yen who brought it here.
After paying our respects at Master Yen’s grave, we followed the trail behind it that led up the mountain and through a series of stone arches. Two hundred meters later, we reached the grave of Chung Yung. Chung Yung was the second son of the ruler of the state of Chou, which was centered around the modern city of Sian. When the king decided to bypass his two older sons and turn over his throne to his youngest son’s son, Chung Yung and his elder brother took this as a sign of their father’s displeasure and left. And they didn’t just move to the suburbs. It was as if they were exiled. While Chung Yung’s nephew went on to found the Chou dynasty, Chung Yung led a thousand of his retainers over a thousand kilometers to the Yangtze Delta and settled near Changshu.
Archway leading to grave of Confucius’s disciple
This was around 1100 BC, when the Yangtze Delta was inhabited by ethnic groups other than Han Chinese. Chung Yung and his followers introduced Han culture to the region, and the region has been a center of Han culture ever since. Along with writing and technical skills, Chung Yung also introduced agriculture, and the region became one of the wealthiest areas in ancient China. When he died, Chung Yung was buried on Yushan. In fact, the mountain’s name came from the first part of another name by which he was known, Yu-chung.
In addition to its two famous graves, the mountain was dotted with terraces and pavilions, and groups of old men were sitting beneath the pavilions drinking tea or practicing their ch’i-kung exercises on the terraces—the two favorite morning rituals of old men in China. After wandering around the mountain for a while, we walked back down to Master Yen’s grave and hired another pair of rickshaws to take us farther along the road skirting the eastern flank of the mountain.
At one point, the driver whose rickshaw was carrying me and Finn began panting so heavily, we thought he was going to have a heart attack. We got out and started walking, but he insisted we climb back in. Somehow he managed to pedal us to our final destination: Hsingfu Temple. We thanked him for his effort and paid him three times what he asked, which was 10RMB instead of 3RMB.
Hsingfu Temple had been one of the most famous Buddhist temples south of the Yangtze, ever since it was built 1,400 years ago. Although it had been home to many famous monks, it was no longer a monastery. Like many monasteries, it was now administered as a tourist site by the officials in charge of cultural affairs. On the side road leading to its front gate, we passed a cemetery containing the graves of some of its famous monks of the past. At least the man in charge of the temple said they were famous. I didn’t recognize any of their names. Their nicknames, though, were colorful enough: Yen-ch’eng, “subduer of tigers”; Ch’ang-ta, “conqueror of dragons”; Huai-shu, “the patched robe monk who faces the sun”; and Wu-en, “reader of sutras in the moonlight.” But no one at the temple had ever heard of the monk who led us here.
He was born in Changshu in 1272, and he lived at Hsingfu Temple when he first became a monk. His Buddhist name was Ch’ing-kung, but he was better known as Shih-wu, or Stonehouse, after a cave not far from the temple where he used to meditate. Eventually Stonehouse moved to a mountain south of Lake Taihu and spent most of his remaining years in a hut at its summit. He also wrote poems, and he wrote this preface for them:
Here in the woods I have lots of time. When I don’t spend it sleeping, I enjoy composing poems. But with paper and ink so scarce, I haven’t written them down. Now some Zen monks have asked me to record what I find of interest on this mountain. I’ve sat here quietly and let my brush fly. Suddenly this volume is full. I close it and send it back down with the admonition not to try singing these poems. Only if you sit on them will they do you any good.
The reason we were looking for him was that a number of years ago, I published English translations of his Mountain Poems, like this one, #36:
I was a Zen monk who didn’t know Zen
so I chose the woods for the years I had left
a robe made of patches over my body
a belt of bamboo around my waist
mountains and streams explain Bodhidharma’s meaning
flower smiles and bird songs reveal the hidden key
sometimes I sit on a flat-topped rock
late cloudless nights once a month
Even if it wasn’t nighttime, that seemed like a good idea. We walked out of the monastery and found an unoccupied pavilion. It wasn’t a flat-topped rock, but it looked like a good place to sit down. And so we did. We spent the rest of the morning just sitting there listening to the birds and enjoying the flower-scented mountain air. This was some kind of vacation.
16. Suchou
Our next stop was Suchou, surely one of the finest places in China to spend a few days, if not weeks. From Changshu, it only took a little over an hour to get there by bus. It wasn’t even noon when we checked into the cheap wing of the Nanlin Hotel, where a room with three beds went for 60RMB, or $12. For Suchou, that was a great deal. Most of the other hotels for foreigners were in the same area, and their prices were also for foreigners.
Suchou silk factory
Since it was still too early to put an end to the day, we strolled down the street. We didn’t go far. Suchou is famous for its gardens, and one of the nicest was a few short blocks from our hotel. It was first laid out in the twelfth century then abandoned for 600 years. When it was restored in the eighteenth century, people referred to it as Wangssu Garden after the name o
f a nearby alley. But at some point someone changed the name to Wangshih Garden, or Master of Nets Garden. The pronunciation in the Suchou dialect was the same, but the fishing image was more poetic than the alley’s name, and it fit with the garden’s original name, which was Yuyin (Fisherman Recluse) Garden. At least, that was the story the woman who guided us through the garden told us.
It was the smallest public garden in Suchou, but it was one of the city’s best. Despite its relatively small size at just over an acre, the views created by the designer were constantly changing. Every few feet there was another delightful combination of water and plants and rocks and architecture. We could have spent the rest of the day there, but we decided to go back to our hotel, take a nap, and return after dinner. At night the garden looked just as lovely, but there were musicians. Each of the garden’s pavilions featured someone playing a different classical instrument or singing a different song form. Not many people realize that Suchou is just as famous for its traditional music as it is for its gardens. We stayed until the garden closed at nine o’clock, but we weren’t done for the night. There was a moon outside, and our hotel had a small hill. We bought a few bottles of beer and watched the late-night performance of the moon and the clouds.
The next morning we left to see a few more sights, but we didn’t get far before we discovered that Suchou was a different kind of Chinese city. There was a bakery just outside the hotel front gate, and it sold croissants—fresh croissants, baked that morning. We had never had a croissant in China, not even a stale one, much less a fresh one. But Suchou was that kind of city. For all its traditional culture, it was cosmopolitan. And so we ventured into the day with croissants in hand and a plan. We decided to visit the western part of town and to go there by boat. The Chinese like to call Suchou the Venice of Asia, and it has enough canals and bridges crisscrossing the city to merit the title, thirty-five kilometers of canals and 168 bridges. We told a boatman waiting for fares in a nearby canal to take us to Liuyuan Garden. Thirty minutes later, we were there. Of course, there are better gardens in Suchou, but they are all on the tour group itinerary, and we like to avoid crowds. So we opted for two of the less visited and were glad we did.