Ruoqiang and the Loulan Beauty

The star of Ruoqiang is the Loulan Beauty, seen here as sculptured relief on the local museum. She was discovered in mummified form in the desert near Ruoqiang, at the site of Loulan, one of the ancient cities of the Tarim Basin, and is estimated to have lived 3800 years ago. Apparently there is argument whether she is Indo-European or Han so the museum displays all mummies together, not wanting to inflame the situation. I think she looks like the goddess Emmy-Lou Harris.

Windswept desert: Monday 16 June 2014, by Ian Neuss

An early start from Dunhuang saw us following the new rail line out of town and a very long climb up a shallow incline to 3,800 m. Arriving there we had coffee and it started to snow!

No-one wanted to linger so off again on the S305 to Lenghu, a town with military police, a prison and little else -- a public service transfer nightmare. We then entered a windswept landscape that had been stripped of all its topsoil, 100 km of hummocks with the occasional gypsum mine. On and on through large dunes, beautifully built by the winds, through rocky wind-smoothed hills, to a large anticline dotted with oil derricks, all working away.

This was a day of 560 km of driving and we were buggered.

We love the unlovable

Everyone in China loves rocks, the bigger and more way out the better. We love them all regardless. They adorn the entrance to every city building and house, usually with a message or two. A permanent reminder, no plastics or artificial monuments here.By Ian Neuss

Editors note: Mr Neuss is a geologist.

Gardens

At the Dujiangyan Irrigaton Project (a UNESCO World Heritage site, built in the 3rd century BC!!), 50 metres from the thronging crowds there is the most peaceful, beautiful gardens, erected in memory of the creators of the project.

By Ian Neuss

Dunhuang and the Mogao Caves. Sunday 15 June 2014

This may be the Big Kahuna of our entire trip. We walked into the very caves that foreign pirate archaeologists such as Aurel Stein (later knighted by the Brits) salivated over after 1900, with the discovery of the cave containing the library of thousands of ancient scrolls. The scrolls had been sealed up for a millennium and included writings in various ancient languages (Sanskrit, Tibetan, Uygur, and Sogdian), on paper, hemp and silk, demonstrating Silk Road connections, and that the Chinese had actually invented printing in the 9th century, way before Gutenberg.

Over 700 caves have been hollowed out of the soft sedimentary rock, dating from the 4th century, as places of meditation, with elaborate sculpture and artwork, and providing evidence of the migration of Buddhism from its origin in India, to China and Tibet.

Fortunately the site is now UNESCO World Heritage listed and under the control of a Chinese archaeological project. So no pictures inside the caves, and controlled access with an English-speaking guide. There is even international cooperation to conserve and catalogue all, including those plundered. The Chinese would like them back of course, but you know the British Museum!

Jiayuguan and the Great Wall of China

No, the Great Wall is not exclusively just outside Beijing. Remember that it consists of about 25,000 km of “wall”. And Jiayuguan, the Jiayu Pass, is at the western end of it.

With a great mountain range, the Qilian Shan, to the south, and a lesser range and the Gobi Desert to the north, the wall ended with a fort at a strategic defensive position for western China on the Silk Route. Its construction started in the 7th century BC and continued for 2000 years.

We also started to pick up the story of the pilfering by 20th century European and American archaeologists, including Aurel Steins priceless contribution to the already impressive collection of plunder in the British Museum. There would be more of that story to come, now that we have reached the desert.

The Dragon Sleeps

Every landform in China is inhabited by dragons. These occasionally rear their backs and spill houses down mountainsides. More people have died from them in China than anywhere else on earth. In 1556, 830,000 died, in 1920, 200,000, in 1976 242,000 and in 1996 in Lijiang, 210. This has produced the extremes in relief we see today. Fortunately we have not witnessed a dragon rearing on this trip. Zhanglteng, prior to AD 132, invented the first seismograph. He placed 8 carved (from stone) dragons in an octagonal pattern with a ball in each mouth. The ball falls out of a mouth of the dragon facing away from the epicentre.

IN

Crazy or courageous?

Clare Pegler is a Brisbane nurse who, in her spare time, rides a bike across continents. We shared a hotel in Zhangye with her group of 24 Canadians and Australians after a day of foul weather. They are camping and hotelling, en route from Shanghai to Istanbul! At least they have a couple of back-up vehicles to carry tents and luggage, but they will still be riding to Urumqi and west next to the Taklamakan Desert to Kashgar, then over the Pamirs through Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Iran and Turkey. We are now planning our first camp of the trip, with less than universal excitement.

Jiuzhaigou National Park, 7 June 2014

This was a stunning surprise. An alpine forest park, securely protected, but well managed to be accessible by a couple of million visitors a year, and planning for more, with minimal damage. It’s enclosed in two mountain valleys whose streams cascade from lake to lake to meet just above the park entrance. Walkers are kept to boardwalks carefully built for an intimate natural experience, close to water and grasses, pines, birch, and much more, but enabling one of China's more litter-free environments. Ian will explain the chemistry of the lake colours.

Couple of titfers

Ian explains the geology while Rex fiddles with that damn camera at the multi-coloured rocks near Zhangye.

Onto the Silk Road

Zhangye, Gansu Province, Thur 12 June 2014. Over the last 2 days we have travelled up the southern green corridor of the Silk Road, from Xining to Zhangye, crossing the Datong Shan and the Qilian Shan, mountain ranges that took us over 3 passes between 3600 and 3800 m altitude. To add to the atmospherics of unmelted snow on the streams and northern slopes, it started to rain as we left, and just got heavier. The Dodge and Whippet crews earned their hot showers those nights.

The buddhist grottos at Matisi Se (constructed between 317-420 AD) and Zhangye's great reclining Buddha and its surrounding wooden temple, over 1000 years old, remind us of the role of the Silk Road in bringing Buddhism from India to China over centuries. In the last 7 weeks we have crossed the seaward flowing Mekong, Yangstse and Yellow river systems and have now reached those systems that flow north, through rich, fertile plains, before petering out in desert. This will be the pattern through the Central Asian Silk Road route.

Dear Mary this China’s a wonderful sight …

Oh there’s people here workin’ by day and by night
They DO plant potatoes, and barley and wheat,
And there’s gangs of them diggin’ for gold in the street

Everywhere we go there is construction, whether it’s new buildings, roads or rail-lines, or renovations of the same. If I ever get a hotel room without a building site outside my window I will miss it. In Xining this tower block is creeping up beside me. Most of the workforce goes home at the end of the day but there is still hammering and welding after 11 pm by floodlight. At least these blokes wear hard hats and boots, unlike many seen so far. A block away there is a massive hole where once were 2 blocks of street. It’s all private investment, even a lot of the roadwork, building more toll roads.

Down in the town of Langmusi, a tourist attraction for its Buddhist monastery, I photographed this team working in the rain. Note that 5 women run the cement mixer, shovelling then passing buckets of sand, gravel, cement and water, while the blokes stand around until another barrow is ready to hoist to the roof. Some values are global.

As Ian has pointed out earlier, there is no shortage of raw materials. The rivers are trawled for gravel, the hills are full of limestone, and labour, apparently, is cheap. I wonder if the women get equal pay.

Mountain Cattlemen

At $AU2000 each (more if you hit one on the road), these yaks represent real wealth. The pastures here go on for miles, over flat, marshy, treeless countryside. This is the edge of the Tibetan Plateau at 3,500m altitude. It’s the first land we have seen where every inch of topsoil is not being cultivated. I guess summer is too short to grow anything other than grass.

As we drove through on this summer day the Tibetan prayer flags were blowing out straight, rain was sweeping across, I put the temperature at about 8C, although the non-Victorians swore it was sub-zero, and the vintage cars are not water or wind proof. As you can see by the pics, the locals, descended from Tibetans, have adapted and are tough. It’s easy to imagine how the Tibetans have given the Chinese so much trouble, and beaten them, in centuries past.

Summer grazing camp.

Compound

Red Army Village, Anshun, Shimian County, Sichuan

Shimian is a town strung out along both banks of the Dadu River, in a typical mountain valley. It looks like a mining town and could have been in any mining area of the world. I almost expected to hear banjos.

Just south of Shimian is a village with a bit of a difference. As the site of a famous, and difficult, river crossing by the Red Army in retreat from the Kuomintang in 1935, during the Long March, it had been a Chinese tourist attraction. Eventually, in the 1980s, the village was renovated with a combination of traditional wooden buildings and new housing and memorial hall, around various historic points such as a house that Mao had lived/stayed in, a machine gun post, the site of the river “ferry”, the Red Army Command building, museum and monument.

The museums photos include this one of (top row) Mao, General Chu Teh, unkown, and Chou en Lai.

Horace's Hip Replacement

The previous post told of the mercy dash to Chengdu to try to find a replacement wheel bearing for the Dodge. Ian takes up the story.

At Chengdu we found a neighbourhood specialising in car parts; people working in shops and the spaces between them, with motor bikes delivering anything that could be carried on a bike. The first question we were asked was what car it was off, and a truthful reply just got a shake of the head, so we had to try another tack and try to find a bearing shop. After a few attempts a young girl took the sample and went off in the rain. She reappeared 10 minutes later with a sample that was the closest she could find. It would do for $10. We were informed that if the shop in the next row did not have a suitable bearing no-one in Chengdu would. We returned in the rain the next day and found the shop open and after much discussion and a few phone calls she decided that nothing of similar size was around. Next suited one would require shims. Off to try to find something suitable in the nearby tool shop. Bought some thin copper sheeting and two large feeler gauges that could be used, all cheap.

Back up the hill to Maoxian and put in the shims and then the new bearings on top of wrapped copper sheeting with copious amounts of grease. Five days later it’s still working. Spares are due in tomorrow, here in Xining.

Maoxian Tuesday 3 June 2014-06-03

An early start from Dujiangyan got us onto the 213 motorway, heading north for Songpan, about 250 km away. We hadn’t noticed, however, that the Dodge had been hiding its pique at the press coverage accorded the Whippet, what with a radiator and a wheel being flown in from Perth, attracting excess baggage costs of $US30 per kilo. Horace does a lot of photographic work, what with the new paint job and all, but Stanley’s array of medical conditions had been racking up blog column inches, so Horace decided to jack up.

A wobbly wheel bearing just got worse and at Mao Xian, about 100 km up the road, he just struggled into a parking lot and stopped. That was it. Wheel off, bearings revealed, had it.

The Toyota to the rescue. Ian, Gerry and Andy are now on a mercy dash about 170 km back to the big smoggy city of Chengdu, a place that Ian swore he would avoid, to try to find replacement bearings. Bill, Pete, Rex and I are slumming in probably the best hotel of the whole trip, at $AUS50 a night, twin share, here in Mao Xian.

Mao Xian is the centre of the Qiang national minority, a people from the region of north west Sichuan, bordering Tibet, the area worst affected by the 2008 earthquake. They have their own colourful dress, as well as their own cuisine. This beautiful lady was happy to put down her knitting and pose for this photo. We’ll try the cuisine this evening.

PANDAS!

We had a magic day at the Panda Research Centre at the Bifengxia Park near Ya'an. Have a look at some of Rex' camera work HERE

Driving in China

Driving in China is fun. Mostly the traffic moves at an appropriate speed for the conditions, drivers are practically considerate, and it works. Motorways are great and well sign-posted in English, although ALL traffic is fascinated with the vintage cars. Ninety nine percent of cars will slow down for photos, ignoring other traffic, usually blaring trucks or buses behind them. All drivers and passengers return our waves and most give the thumbs up to the cars.

We have only seen the results of three accidents so far, two quite minor, and the other a mug driver in a new Prado on a windy mountain road who had previously stopped and swaggered around to take a few pics of the vintage cars. We saw him halfway down the mountain upside down across the safety barrier.

In cities, when your light goes green you go ahead, but watch out because it doesn’t mean everyone else stops. At home you may be used to watching the front, and the lanes beside you, and whether you have a truck up your rear. However here you must also watch for the car making a U-turn in front of you, coming in from a side street, turning left from the right lane or vice versa, turning right against the lights (it’s legal), or just driving diagonally across your lanes in the wrong direction because it’s the shortest way to where they’re going. Roundabouts sometimes involve a short cut against the traffic, but they still work. Scooters, motorbikes, bicycles, tuk-tuks and trishaws will use the “slow lane” to go in the opposite direction to the traffic. There are also some who just come at you in the wrong lane because another car has impeded their progress in their own lane. These will usually be BMW X5s or Porsche Cayennes (well Chinese children have to get to school somehow).

Pedestrian crossings seem to be areas to herd pedestrians into more convenient killing grounds. Cars don’t stop at them. Pedestrians do. I played traffic policeman at one crossing, holding up a would-be zebra-runner, wagging my finger at him. He stopped and laughed. Universally cheerful people, and no sign of road-rage anywhere. Yet.

I can't get these rocks out of my head, by I Neuss

Any country that reveres rocks must be very cultured, and China does. While India pushes them up at the rate of 2 inches a year the Chinese are trying to use them at a similar rate for everything. Because they are composed of massive limestone beds in their various forms they make for interesting and beautiful building blocks in all shapes and sizes. Every stream is scoured for interesting rocks, the bigger the better, and they are taken and hand polished to be sculptured and put on display in towns and gardens. Mountains are attacked for marble, limestone and slate which are taken to town to be cut and hand hewn into slabs, pedestals, fences, square stones, round stones, any shape or size, as well as the final headstones for the family vault. Even the national parks show off their rocks.

Chang Shan Geological Park rises steeply behind Dali and runs north south, being pushed up by India. We visited this spectacular mountain range by chairlift from Dali and saw water issuing from solid rock into a beautiful clear pool, complete with goldfish, at the base of the waterfall. The hydro-geologist was told not to be so sceptical about the source of the water so we moved on to the geological explanations where only the truth lies. Around the path to the Dragons Pool, and another chairlift, via a flat path, with geological explanations of the various geological features. Rex is now an expert. The rugged terrain went into the clouds so we retreated to the chairlift down to Chinawood.

The rocks end up in huge shops where the really interesting ones are sliced into thin slabs and mounted. Seascapes, forests and cloud-like formations were the most obvious as well as the ubiquitous jars, vases, Buddha's and elaborate statues of dragons, horses and lotus flowers. My favourite was Bronte beach on a grey rainy day in winter.