South of the Yangtze

by Bill Porter

  As we got out and started up the trail to the cave, the farmers working the nearby slope stopped to see who would visit such an isolated place. They were harvesting corn, tea, and sweet potatoes. We waved, and they waved back, as we continued up the slope to the cave entrance. The cave faced south, just as I had imagined, toward the course of the sun and the moon. At the entrance, we met the self-appointed caretaker, Mister Yeh. He said he had lived all his life in the village of Yenchien, or Front Cliff. When we asked where that was, he pointed beyond where we had parked. All we could see were two very sad-looking houses. That was all that was left of the village. He said he moved into the cave five years earlier because he liked the quiet. He led us inside to see the shrines someone had set up around the rear walls. The cave was huge and had a high ceiling, and there was lots of bat guano on the dusty rock floor. We lit incense at each of the shrines, just in case one of them “worked.”

  Afterwards, Mister Yeh led us back to the mouth of the cave where he had built a house out of bricks—but only the walls. There was no roof, and no need for one. The cave supplied the roof. He told us to sit down on the benches that flanked the only table in his roofless house, while he started heating water for noodles. We hadn’t had lunch, so we were glad to have something to eat. While he was cooking, he said there used to be a big temple down below where the farmers were harvesting corn. It was gone, and if the Red Guards left something, it wasn’t visible. He said he and the other farmers still dug up temple tiles in the fields.

  The noodles were just what we needed, especially with the addition of some red pepper paste. We thanked Mister Yeh and left some money where we thought he would find it later. We returned to our three-wheeler and drove back to Kuoching. On the way back, I wrote this poem:

  Sitting inside Cold Mountain Cave

  reading Cold Mountain poems

  the sound of hoes turning the earth

  old monk bones feeding the corn

  21. Ningpo

  We had one more city to go: Ningpo. But because we wanted to make a stop on the way, we took the slow bus that took the slow road. We had to go via Fenghua and change buses there. Finally, five hours after leaving Tientai, we arrived in Hsikou.

  Earlier on our trip, we visited the hometown of Mao Tse-tung. Now that our travels were nearing their end, we wanted to have a look at the other end of China’s political spectrum: the hometown of Chiang Kai-shek. Ever since Chiang fled to Taiwan together with several million of his fellow Mainlanders, his hometown hadn’t exactly been a hotbed of tourism. But times had changed. Once Beijing decided to pursue a policy of reconciliation with Taiwan, Hsikou was spruced up and opened to the curious, which included us.

  Tienyiko Garden

  Chiang was born here in 1887 to a family that could trace its local ancestry back twenty-seven generations to the thirteenth century. From the bus station, we walked down the road that led past the ancestral shrine hall once used by all the clans in this area—including the Chiang clan. The shrine hall was rebuilt in 1986, not long after Beijing and Taipei representatives began meeting secretly in Singapore to begin the long road to reconciliation. It was no coincidence that Taipei’s representative in those secret meetings was Chiang Kai-shek’s grandson, Chiang Hsiao-wu.

  The ancestral shrine hall was now a museum. But aside from a beautifully carved sedan chair used to carry brides to their weddings and an exhibition of local handicrafts, there wasn’t much to see. We continued on. Just past the museum was Hsikou’s ornamental Wuling Gate, which marked the entrance into the old part of town. A side path led off to two houses on a rocky promontory overlooking the Shan River. The first house was a replica of the house built here by Chiang Kai-shek in 1924 for his third wife Sung Mei-ling, known to the world as Madame Chiang Kai-shek. Next to her house was another house where Chiang Kai-shek’s eldest son, Chiang Ching-kuo, lived with his Russian wife, following his return from Moscow in 1937. It was ironic that their houses should be next to one another. When he was in Moscow, Chiang Ching-kuo repudiated the anti-leftist road his father took—which also involved divorcing Chiang Ching-kuo’s mother and marrying Sun Yat-sen’s sister-in-law. But the irony didn’t last long. Two years after Chiang Ching-kuo’s return, both his and his stepmother’s houses were blown to smithereens by the Japanese.

  Another fifty meters down the road was the Chiang ancestral home. It, too, had been rebuilt by the Communist government as part of its effort to mend fences with the Nationalists on Taiwan. If the restoration was anything like the original, it served to emphasize the difference between Chiang’s upbringing and that of Mao. They were clearly from different classes. Another fifty meters past the old family home was the building where Chiang was born. He was born on the second floor. The first floor was where his father and grandfather carried on the salt business that financed Chiang’s education and early political career.

  Madame Chiang Kai-shek’s house on the Shan River

  More interesting than the dwellings associated with the Chiang family were the adjacent alleys. Hsikou was a town where people still engaged in country crafts, some of which we saw in the Hsikou Museum. But that was about it. We had seen what we came to see and walked back to the bus station. After reclaiming our bags, we waited for the next bus to Ningpo and had some noodles while we waited. An hour later, we were off, and an hour later we were in downtown Ningpo.

  Although Ningpo is now overshadowed by Shanghai, in ancient times it was the major port in East China, while Shanghai was just a small fishing village. Ningpo was where junks from Southeast Asia unloaded their cargoes for transshipment by smaller boats capable of navigating the shallower waters of Hangchou Bay and the Yangtze. Shipping was in the city’s blood, and it wasn’t a surprise that the world’s leading shipping tycoon of the previous few decades was a native of Ningpo, namely Sir Y.K. Pao.

  But we arrived by bus, not boat. And we arrived late in the day and in need of a hotel. Most of the hotels that accepted foreigners were located just north of the bus station, so we didn’t have far to walk. We tried several of the nicer ones but were put off by their high prices—which averaged over 250RMB, or $50 a night. Finally, we managed to pry loose a room at the Seaman’s Hotel, where a whole suite cost a modest 100RMB. We told the desk clerk we were seamen, and he didn’t ask to see our papers. I’m guessing they didn’t have many guests.

  Since the sun was going down, as soon as we dropped our bags in our room, we thought we would have dinner and go to bed early. We were tired and decided to try the hotel restaurant. Eating in hotel restaurants was always a gamble, but this time we hit the jackpot. First, there were fish fillets wrapped in seaweed and deep-fried in batter. Then there was goose liver sausage soaked in anise and Shaohsing wine, then steamed and fried and cut into slices. And it all went down very nicely with half a dozen ice-cold Ningpo beers.

  Putting an end to the day early for a change gave us a chance to wash our clothes and catch up on our journals. The next morning, we were ready to see the sights. And they began just a few blocks north of our hotel. Our first stop was the Tienyiko, the Pavilion of Heavenly Oneness. We had already seen a few gardens in Suchou, and we thought they were nice. But they were also tourist sites. The garden that surrounded Ningpo’s Tienyiko immediately became our favorite. We found ourselves practically alone. Maybe it was because the Tienyiko wasn’t known for its garden. Its principal claim to fame was its library, which was begun by an official in the sixteenth century. The official built a building to house his collection of books. And of course the building had to have a couple of ponds and pavilions. Before long, the place put the gardens of Suchou to shame. Still, nobody talked about the Tienyiko’s wonderful layout and architecture. They talked about its books.

  At one time, the collection surpassed 70,000 volumes, many of which were rare editions that had been out of print for centuries. In fact, when the Ch’ing dynasty court decided to produce its monumental set of 3,500 standardized literary works—the Ssukuchuanshu—it based its
arrangement upon the system developed at the Tienyiko Library. The court also called on the Tienyiko to supply a number of missing titles. Over the years, the library’s collection had dwindled, especially in recent years. Still, it was a rare chance to see some of the oldest printed books in the world, and in such a beautiful setting. Naturally, we lingered. Other than the Tienyiko, there wasn’t anything else we wanted to see in Ningpo. But there were other sights. The other sights, though, were farther afield, east and west of the city.

  We decided to begin with the west. Since we were saving so much money on our room, we indulged in a taxi. We asked the driver to take us to the Liangchu Cemetery, which was where China’s Romeo and Juliet were buried. It was only ten kilometers away, and we were there in twenty minutes.

  The boy’s name was Liang Shan-po, and the girl’s name was Chu Ying-t’ai. They were buried here 1,600 years ago, back when the Huns were sacking Rome. Chu Ying-t’ai had a lot in common with Shaohsing’s revolutionary heroine, Ch’iu Chin. Bored with conventional life, Chu dressed up as a man and traveled from Ningpo to Hangchou to study. On her way, she met Liang Shan-po, who was also traveling to Hangchou to study. The two agreed to attend classes together, and they studied together for three years. Chu Ying-t’ai, however, maintained her male disguise, and Liang Shan-po had no idea his closest friend was a woman.

  After three years, Chu was finally called back home by her parents, and her parting with Liang remains a favorite scene of Chinese drama, as she tries but fails to convey the true nature of her feelings for her fellow classmate. It wasn’t until several years later, when Liang visited Chu in Ningpo, that he discovered she was a woman. When he did, he immediately proposed marriage. But he was too late. Her parents had betrothed her to another. Liang died of a broken heart and was buried where we were standing. Not long after that, Chu was on her way to be married, when she passed by Liang’s grave. She stopped the bearers carrying her sedan chair. She ran to Liang’s grave and asked the gods to open the grave so that she could join him in death. The gods granted her wish. The tomb opened, then closed around her. Then it reopened, and two butterflies flew out. We were suckers for such stories. But it was too late in the year for butterflies, and after paying our respects we headed back to Ningpo.

  As we returned to the city, we told our driver to keep going. Once again, we didn’t have to go far. Twenty kilometers east of Ningpo, we pulled into the parking lot of Ayuwang Temple. Since we weren’t sure how long we were going to spend there, we paid our driver and figured we would deal with our transportation needs when we were done.

  The a-yu in Ayuwang was the ancient Chinese transliteration of Ashoka, the name of the king who ruled India in the third century BC. After uniting India in a series of bloody military campaigns, King Ashoka was converted to Buddhism. As a demonstration of his new faith, he ordered his officials to erect stupas throughout his kingdom, each containing a relic of the religion’s founder, Shakyamuni Buddha. In the course of the following centuries, most of Ashoka’s stupas were destroyed or forgotten when the subcontinent was swept by a series of foreign invaders. But around the end of the third century ad, the contents of one of the stupas was brought to China by ship, and the port of Ningpo was as far as it got. A propitious place was chosen east of the city, and a pagoda was erected to house the relic.

  99-year-old monk at Ayuwang Temple

  A temple soon grew up around the pagoda, and the Buddha’s relic was later moved inside the temple for safekeeping. Somehow, the temple has managed to hold onto its precious treasure, and hundreds of pilgrims still come here every day to view the relic in its jewel-studded crystal case. We entered the shrine hall to see for ourselves and lit some incense along with the other pilgrims. Behind the crystal case, there was also a reclining statue of the Buddha covered in gold silk representing Shakyamuni as he entered Nirvana. Following his Nirvana, his body was cremated, and his bone chips and ashes were divided among eight kingdoms. Two hundred years later, King Ashoka further divided those remains, and as luck would have it, a piece of the Buddha’s skull made it to Ningpo’s Ayuwang Temple. It was a beautiful temple in a beautiful setting. Even the modern two-story hotel next door somehow blended in. The hotel provided pilgrims with a place to spend the night.

  As we stood there before the piece of the Buddha’s skull with our fellow pilgrims, I was reminded of an incident in chapter five of the Diamond Sutra where the Buddha decides to test the understanding of one of his disciples. He asks Subhuti, “Can you see the Buddha’s bodily form?” And Subhuti answers, “No, World-Honored One, the Buddha’s bodily form cannot be seen, because, as the Buddha has taught, bodily form is not bodily form.” To which the Buddha adds, “Since whatever has form is empty, when you see a form as having no form you see the Buddha.” And so we paid our respects before the formless body of the Buddha.

  Afterwards, we continued meandering through the temple’s labyrinth of shrine halls and courtyards, and in one of the courtyards, we met Master Heng-yueh. He was wearing the red and yellow robes of a senior monk and was surrounded by a group of disciples. He also had a long, white beard. As soon as he saw us, he walked over and grabbed our arms. He said our beards were longer than his, and he wanted a photo with me and Finn. One of his disciples tried to sneak into the shot, but Heng-yueh shoved him away. Afterwards, he excused himself for not being able to shove his disciple harder. He said he felt weak ever since he celebrated his 99th birthday. Then he went over and gave the same disciple another shove, and both of them burst out laughing.

  Tientung Temple

  After the two monks left, we put our cameras away and walked over to the vegetarian restaurant the temple operated for visitors. It was the standard menu of dishes made from soy and wheat gluten products and flavored to taste like meat. It was simple fare, but it was good. Afterwards, we walked back out to the highway. Instead of returning to Ningpo, we walked a hundred meters down the highway to the side road that led to Tientung Temple. There was a bus stop, and thirty minutes later, we were on a bus.

  Interior corridor of Tientung Temple

  The road wound up into the mountains and at some point passed a pagoda. When we asked one of our fellow passengers about the pagoda, he said it was built in the T’ang dynasty and contained the bones of a large snake. The snake terrorized villagers in the area until it died after eating some steamed buns that turned out to be cobblestones metamorphosed by the magic powers of a monk who lived at Tientung Temple. An hour after we got on the bus, it dropped us off at the entrance of a pine-lined roadway that led to the temple. Fifteen minutes later, we were at the temple’s front steps.

  Tientung Temple was first built around 300 ad, about the same time as Ayuwang Temple. But while Ayuwang was built for Buddhist pilgrims, Tientung was built for monks who wanted to concentrate on their meditation practice. In fact, it was once one of the five most famous Zen monasteries in China and at one time was home to several thousand monks.

  We had already visited Chenju Temple on Yunchushan. But during its heyday, Tientung was even more famous among Zen practitioners, as it was where many of Japan’s famous Zen masters studied when they came to China, monks such as Dogen. The monastery was surrounded by pine-covered slopes on three sides, and the buildings were in superb condition, despite their age.

  Somehow, we managed to find our way through the labyrinth of corridors to the rear of the complex where they still had a wonderful set of stone carvings of the eighteen Buddhist worthies known as arhats. We had never seen a set made of stone before. Usually they were wood or clay. We lit some incense, then headed back out. We were on our own this time. There was no Eccentric Buddha to guide us around. There were over a hundred monks in residence at Tientung, and most of the monastery was off-limits. Once we saw what we could, we walked back down the tree-lined road that brought us there and caught the last bus of the day back to Ningpo. Our trip was almost over. We were down to our last day.

  22. Putuoshan

  We got up at six the
next morning and were at the Ningpo ship terminal by seven. We had tickets for the 7:30 to Putuoshan. We had already visited Chiuhuashan, the home of Ti-tsang, the Bodhisattva of Great Vows. Putuoshan was the island home of Kuan-yin, the Bodhisattva of Great Compassion. Of all the destinations of pilgrims in China, Putuoshan was by far the most popular, and our ship was packed.

  Taking a break on Putuoshan

  As we pulled out of the harbor, our fellow passengers lined the railings. For the first hour, we cruised down the Yung River past hundreds of factories and piers. Finally, the river carried us past the protective breakwater and out into the East China Sea. A roller coaster of waves suddenly jolted us out of our daydreams. Within minutes, half the people on board were hanging over the railing vomiting. We would have joined them, but we hadn’t had enough time for breakfast. At least the vomiting didn’t last long. After about ten minutes of riding the waves, our boat turned east and entered an inside passage where the water was calmer. We were sailing through the Choushan Archipelago.