“I love the first two weeks of visiting a country and learning a language. The optimism and support locals provide once you can say ‘My Chinese is bad,’ is so uplifting.” – Old Sean
A Fortress To Assail
It’s surprisingly difficult to sit down and write when life is busy.
But it’s far harder to do it when the busy person is also lazy.
Such is the paradox of a sluggish mind, mired in many, many egg tarts. A new bakery just opened below my apartment.
When I’m not eating local pastries, I’ve been ceaseless in motion. For the past month, I’ve visited fishing towns, climbed up Mongolian battlefields while visiting Diaoyu Fortress mountain, checked out copper-water gorges, explored my home-base city, saw the legendary Dazu Rock Carvings, visited flower fields and explored porcelain towns.
It’s been a busy month.
Visiting Hechuan Fishing Town
Naturally, much of this post occurred near Hechuan Fishing Town. This trip was with my friend Destiny. She wisely provided me an English name I could say, since my pronunciation of her Chinese name is too horrendous to listen to.
The village of Hechuan is built to the northwest of Chongqing. It hosts many plazas filled with food stalls, such as brown-sugar-syrup candies. A truly entertaining concoction, Chinese street artists drizzle the sugar into the shape of an animal or mythical creature on a hot plate before binding it to a stick for consumption. I got a glinting butterfly which tasted great.
After we got our snacks, we climbed the mountainside (slowly). Visiting Diaoyu Fortress (Diaoyucheng), where the Southern Song Dynasty famously battled the invading Mongolian armies, was a challenge. Mongols were clearly made from different stuff than me. I could barely make it up as a tourist, let alone as a soldier facing resistance.
The interior of the Diaoyu Fortress is gorgeous, with numerous stone tablets describing the history in Chinese (I needed Destiny to translate for me). The scale, scope and repercussions of that battle are boggling.
I remember reading once that it’s odd how a common trope in time traveler films is avoiding any minor changes to the past, lest there are catastrophic consequences in the future. But inversely, few people in the present think they can have a profound effect on the future of our world.
The war between the Mongols and Song dynasty was epic and almost impossible to fully grasp through a series of stone tablets.
Breathless In Diaoyu Fortress
We spent quite a bit more time wandering around while visiting Diaoyu Fortress and the outer mountain area. There are numerous overlooks which are stunning. When on top, the mountain is surrounded on three sides by rivers, so looking any direction is impressive. The greenery inside the fortress is artfully maintained, making the battlements feel almost like Zen gardens.
However, one of the odder, recurring things that happens in natural settings in China are the bird speakers. These are unassuming little rocks that play the sounds of nature on a loop, theoretically casting the illusion of nature or soothing visitors.
When I brought this up to Destiny, she told me that Chinese people knew “how to construct peace, piece by piece”.
I wish I was that clever when speaking English. When we had seen our fill, we gathered ourselves for the trek back down, leaving Diaoyu Fortress and driving back to Chongqing.
Black Mountain Valley
Aside from Diaoyu Fortress, I’ve made other trips as well. Sometimes, I brought Chinese friends along to help me navigate. Others, I wandered off on my own, hoping for the best.
I’ve randomly delved into buses with questionable destinations, picking my way through the gorgeous countryside of China. These journeys were only completed because I can now speak a whooping six Chinese words in a mangled accent. (Hello – Nǐ hǎo) (Yes – Shì de) (Thank you – Xièxiè) (No- Bù), (I want – Wǒ yào), (Where is this? – Zhè shì nǎlǐ?).
With this intellectual progress spurring my footsteps, I gasped my way up steep, (oh-dear-lord-why-am-I-fat-oh-right-chocolate) slopes to stunningly oriented gorges. These canyons were boarder-line-magical steams carving out swirls and whorls from solid stones within mountains.
I’m of course speaking of the Black Mountain Valley Scenic Area and the Golden Knife Gap.
These dark mountains to the south of Chongqing hold huge waterfalls and deep rushing streams through densely packed jungles. The water color here is unique, a special turquoise blue. The color, I’m told, is caused by copper within the water.
Getting into the valley is challenging, as the staircases are enormously steep and hard on a person’s knees. The lower levels are easier. The cliff-carved trails cross over the streams using wooden boardwalks and Chinese-caligraphy-decorated cables.
However, even these daring feats of engineering cannot extend through the entire canyon. There are parts that must be crossed using boats which drift up and down through dark, craggy caves.
Within Chongqing
Back in Chongqing, I joined my friends for photo opportunities in places such as the Upside Down House on Foreigners Street. It’s one of those optical illusion houses where everything is cemented to the ceiling, giving the faint-hearted severe vertigo.
On many nights, I made sure to visit the local expat bar, a upper-story venue owned by an American named Q. My company had several celebrations there, one which involved some Latin dancing I’d rather not recall.
On another occasion, I went exploring the riverside. I visited old WWII closed-off bunker-caves with another expat named Ray. Ray, his fiancé and dog escorted me into numerous shallow tunnels, partially blocked off by tepid, rusted warning signs. Apparently, Chongqing had converted its many underground tunnels into bomb-defenses during the Japanese invasion of WWII.
Dazu Rock Carvings
During another day trip out of Chongqing, I found further adventures near the astounding rock carvings of Baodingshan, located to the West. The Baodingshan Rock Carvings are a Buddhist pilgrimage site, also known as the Dazu Rock Carving Museum. These ancient Buddhist carvings are amazingly intricate and still have the deep hues of paint attached to their visages. The structures are especially unique and well-sheltered since they’re tucked beneath a rocky overhang, protecting them from the worst of the elements.
The beauty and colors of these figures is impossible to overstate. They look like a madhouse fever-dream of heaven and hell fighting one another in a pure autumn.
Getting to Baodingshan was a little challenging required a fair bit of driving before navigating through throngs of tourists. Like most tourist places in China, there were candy shops, red lanterns and a few security guards.
Flower Field Tour
My company also opted to provide a weekend off, where we went to as a group to Chongqing Banan Flower Field or the Chongqing Flowers World. The flower fields are incredible, massive rows of colored blossoms extending to the very horizons. There are also strange plastic slopes covered in AstroTurf, used as slides for pieces of cardboard.
I skipped and frolicked through the flower tunnels and lavender mazes, joining my coworkers in a magical field of allergies.
Though a lot of us were sneezing, it did smell amazing. We also visited several Chinese waterside villages. Waterside villages in China are strange. They’re artfully made towns that don’t actually have a living population. They’re specifically designed to bring in tourists, sort of like an amuseument park dressed up to look like ancient China.
I don’t know the name of the village we visited, but it was fairly interesting.
Porcelain Village
The day after our employee retreat, I raided a local Starbucks before attending three Chinese birthday parties. My students were thrilled to show my the toys they got and a very pungent Durian Fruit Cake we all enjoyed. (I like the durian flavor fine, but I find the smell hard to justify.)
The day after, I was summoned out to another barbeque with several expats, including Ray. We hung out near the riverside, tossing odd Chinese sausages onto a grill while speculating what they were actually made of.
Since work ended early the following day, I made a point of visiting Ciqikou City (Porcelain Village). Ciqikou City was an ancient district and city which stayed operation for centuries. The people were famous for producing porcelain creations making it a very rich and ornate town. The town is situated across three mountains, their orientations providing perfect Fengshui to the region.
Ciqikou City is a popular micro-tourism center, so it’s very easy to get hemmed in by foreigners and Chinese citizens alike. Jam-packed lower streets can be somewhat avoided by following the steep mountain stairs. The temples located at the top of each mountain are incredible, the oldest serving as a 1,500 year old Buddhist overlook. Crowds are almost nonexistent here, if anyone wants some peace.
In the lower areas of Ciqikou City, I passed food shops, tea stalls, porcelain gift shops and small areas dedicated toward heritage preservation. My favorite sight, however, were several skilled locals playing Chinese Erhus. An Erhu is a thin, box-stringed instrument which makes a complex twanging sound.
Rest at Last
Finally, after an absolutely frantic month of work and tourism, I’ve had the chance to sit down and write. Chongqing is too vast for me to ever full explore or appreciate. I know in my heart of hearts I’ll never see all this city has to offer.
But that won’t stop me from the attempt.
On that note, best regards and excellent trails,
Old Sean
Written April 7th, 2017
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