A Trip to Yinchuan, Ningxia China Part 3

10 Oct 2008

I used up the last coffee sachet this morning. I should have packed the equivalent number of coffee sachets as I have the number of trip days.
But there’s always KFC to fall back on, and they are open for breakfast at seven. I checked it out last night when having dinner there. For those who thumb their noses at KFC, let me say that I have always enjoyed their much more tender and juicy chicken compared to those back home in Singapore. They do their chicken right, as their much vaunted slogan goes.

I signed up for a local tour which will take me to the Sand Dunes Lake 沙湖, the Helan Rock Carvings 贺兰山岩画 and the Xixia Royal Mausoleum 西夏皇陵. It is going to take the entire day and cost 378 yuan without meals.

Promptly at seven I received a text message on my mobile, from my guide for today, that she will meet me at the hotel lobby in fifteen minutes. Ms Rong is her name, the ideogram 戎 belonging in the ranks of the tiny minority as far as surnames are concerned. Ironically it meant barbarian. Ms Rong is no barbarian. She’s twentyish, has average looks, dress simply and possess a temperament ideally suited for her chosen vocation.

Two other persons joined the tour from my hotel. I thought they were a couple, but later found, to my relief for the young man, that they merely work for the same danwei, work unit. The use of that term usually meant that the enterprise is state owned. The pushy young woman was from Chongqing Municipality, a mega city of 32 million on the Yangtze, created during the construction of the Three Gorges Dam. I don’t like her very much. She behaved in a rather haughty manner, once deeming it fit to openly correct this Southerner’s less than perfect Putonghua. The young man, a local university graduate who spoke impeccable Putonghua, was merely showing her around. His home is in Dawukou 大吴口, a provincial town to the north. It owes its existence to coal power. His parents migrated here from the central plains in 1965 when the coal industry first fired up.

Next to be picked up is a well heeled young couple from Qinghai, with their adorable four-year old daughter. That makes a total of six of us, excluding the guide and driver, in a seven-seater minibus. It does seem off season for tourists.

First stop for the day - Shahu, or the Sand Dunes Lake. From the brochures it offers much the same desert recreational activities as Shapotou, with one major addition. Bird watching. Every spring thousands of migratory cranes, swans and various avian types roost and breed here among the tall and thick rushes.

Before the sand dunes, our little four-year old has to go.
“马上就到了”, “We’ll be there in no time”, says the driver, trying to avoid an unscheduled stop.
I have always been wary of that term 马上, literally meaning ‘on horseback’. The catch here is that it may not necessarily be a fast horse, which means our little girl may have to wait for just a little while longer or a lot longer. She’s got to go, and we had better stop, and we did stop. Poor girl. I know exactly how she must have felt.
There is another expression I am similarly wary about.
几步路.
“How far away is it?” one might ask.
“几步路”, a few steps away, which can literally mean what is said, or a long long way to go. I have been taken in by those words before.

There are plenty of visitors to the Sand Dunes Lake despite being off-season. As the Chinese idiom goes: 人山人海, people mountain people sea. They come from all parts of China, the wealthier from Shanghai and Guangzhou, their poorer cousins from Shanxi and Henan. We piled onto a huge open sided flat bottom ferry and set off leisurely among the rushes of the lake. Many tall structures can be found serving as hides among the slender reeds, but there was not a single bird of the feathered variety to be seen. However we were repeatedly assured by our guide that there will indeed be huge flocks of them in the spring. For now, we will just have to rely on our imagination.

On the other side of the massive lake are the sand dunes. Here is what the tourists have come for. Fun in the desert. There are rides on the twin-hump Bactrian camels, slides down the steep inclines, or a spin on motorised dune buggies, which in my opinion does great damage to the harsh but yet delicate desert environment. For 100 yuan I took a 7 minute ride on a motorised glider, 100 metres above the lake’s surface. I must confess that by doing so I have been equally guilty of contributing to the deteriorating desert environment. I am sorry. For those less inclined there are photo opportunities with massive sand replicas of the Great Wall and the Eight Fairies as backdrop.

Lunch in the outlying areas always poses a problem for me. To eat or not to eat. The Shahu fish head banquet is a supposed must-have delicacy here, so says our guide. Not for me though. The colour of the lake did little to allay my suspicions about the level of pollution. The young family, being Muslims chose to eat at a halal restaurant. I settled at a fast food outlet, careful to order from the menu a simple bowl of vegetarian noodles with tofu.

After lunch our bus takes us on an arduous ride to the Art Gallery amidst the Helan Mountains. The road passes through many grimy and soot laden towns and villages. This here is coal country. The road itself is in urgent need for repair, and I am not the least surprised that funds for such have already been disbursed. One can only speculate on the whereabouts of all that coal money.

The ancient rock carvings of the Helan Mountains have been dated to 1000 years through 10000 years. They have been recognised by Unesco’s World Heritage Foundation, no less, as a veritable treasure trove of ancient art works. Close to the foot of the mountain range and higher up on the sheer cliff faces are thousands of carved motifs depicting various aspects of life and death. Scenes of hunting, copulation, warfare and veneration rituals are plentiful. Other symbols include reproductive organs, palm prints and various animals, both wild and domesticated. Most prominent among these is the symbol of the Sun God, 30 metres above ground level, on the vertical face of a cliff. It is oval in shape, with linear spokes radiating from huge bulging eyes. The most recent carvings will have to be at least a thousand years old. That can easily be dated by the accompanying Xixia script which is decipherable to experts, though we were warned that the picture carvings are not necessarily contemporaneous with the script. Other than the rock carvings we were occasionally entreated to an appearance of the rare Helan mountain goat, a species close to extinction. This whole area reminds me of the ravines of Alice Springs in Australia. Instead of wallabies we have the mountain goats here. And aside from the guide’s commentary, the silence is similarly deafening.

No self respecting tour in China is complete without a visit to some commercial concern. Thus despite the relative late hour, and a major attraction left to visit, our bus pulled into a wolfberry farm. It is more a place selling all sorts of wolfberry products than a farm. It did have a tiny patch of the fruit bearing shrub located at the rear, providing the tourist a live sample of both fruit and tree.

The Chinese name for the wolfberry is gouqi 枸杞, and the Ningxia gouqi is reputed to be the best in the country. Buyers from all over China descend here to purchase the best of the best. This tiny red berry is touted in Chinese herbal medicine as having many health enhancing properties, top of which is 明眼 ‘brightening the eyes’, followed by养颜 ‘retaining one’s youthful looks’. My wife has been cooking with gouqi for ages and still we need glasses, and soon, a facelift. The entire gouqi plant has great medicinal value it was claimed. Besides the berry, the leaves, the roots and the bark all have their uses in Chinese medicinal folklore. The Qinghai couple bought something, if only some preserved fruit mixed with gouqi, which they passed around. I took one and thought it tasted a little bitter at first bite.

The last stop is the highlight of the day for me. This is what I have come to Ningxia for! We arrived late at the gates of the fifty square kilometre Mausoleum. It was already four in the afternoon. On either side of the entrance run majestic red painted walls of more recent vintage. Four gigantic Xixia ideograms, two on each side, stood out in bright gold. They look like Chinese, but they are not. They belong to the only other mono-syllabic ideographic script that mankind has ever devised. Translated, they read ‘大白高国’ literally, ‘Great White Tall Country’.

First we were ushered to the Museum and taken on a trip back into Xixia history. The account of their existence was painstakingly pieced together only in recent years by dedicated scholars of the Xixia from all over the world, including many academics from the West, chiefly the Russians.

The Xixia people were a race called the Tanguts, distant cousins of the present day Tibetans. At the end of the 10th century they managed to secure large tracts of land on both sides of the Helan Mountains and established their little kingdom which they called externally as Xixia Guo and internally as Da Bai Gao Guo. Their system of governance was highly Sinicised, and eventually a new form of writing was evolved from the Chinese written script. One of their major cities was the afore-mentioned Karakhoto northwest of the Helan, and their Imperial Mausoleum on the eastern foothills.

The site of their Mausoleum is said to possess excellent fengshui. Behind it is the formidable Helan, and in front of it the mighty life sustaining Yellow River. To this venerated location was attributed the continued prosperity of their tiny kingdom for 190 years amidst such strident powers as the Khitan Liao, Tungus Jin and Han Song. But it could not withstand the mighty onslaught of the Mongols, led by the greatest conqueror of all times, Genghis Khan.

Genghis himself was said to have harboured intense hatred for the Tanguts. They had time and again broken pledges made to him. They deliberately fail to provide flanking attacks on his enemies, promised to him on his campaigns west. On five occasions Genghis mounted punitive action against the Tanguts but failed. On the last but one he was thrown off his horse, which had stepped on one of those notoriously lethal tiny metal spikes sown by the defenders for this very purpose. Genghis was mortally wounded. On his deathbed, in the summer of 1227AD, he ordered the beheading of the surrendering Xixia king, the systematic extermination of its population, and most importantly, the surgical destruction of the Mausoleum complex divine spirit, lingqi 灵气 by severing the dragon pulse 龙脉 of each of its nine tombs. That, according to Mongol belief, will ensure that the Xixia people never rise again, leave alone prosper. No wonder the burial place of Genghis Khan was kept a secret at the time of his death, and is still a mystery to this day!

I stood in silent contemplation, in front of the number three earth mound. It is the largest in the complex of nine, collectively dubbed the pyramids of China. It was said to belong to the founder of the kingdom, Emperor Li Yuanhao 李元昊, the numbers one and two tombs belonging to his grandfather and father respectively. The wind has died down, and the sun dipped below the Helan Ranges in front of me. This thirty-something metre high denuded mound of earth, with a ground diameter even wider, was once adorned with ornate royal carvings which counted in the ranks of the finest. It was pillaged and burnt to the ground by the rampaging Mongols, and through the ages, its secret entrance found, and its invaluable contents robbed.

The destruction of Xixia is so complete that erstwhile little is known of its history. On Koslov’s mission to Karakhoto he had managed to excavate, apart from that double headed Bodhisattva, crates of historical documents in the Xixia script. Now the plight of these heroic peoples have come to light. This genocide is yet another sad chapter in the sorry history of humankind.


11 Oct 2008

It continues to be a fine cool day today, as indeed my entire stay in Ningxia has so far turned out. Ms Rong the tour guide has tipped me off regarding the two yuan bus service. It depots at the doorstep of my day’s destination, the Islamic Cultural Centre in Yongning 永宁 a town about 15 kilometres away. But first, I must have my morning fix. My walk to the Nanmen station KFC takes me through a bustling morning street market, which puts our own Tekka much to shame.

There are many varieties of fruits and vegetables on sale. I’m not so sure about the fish and meats as I usually shun that section because of the smell. Everything here goes by the jin, one jin being equivalent to 500 gm, slightly heavier than the pound. I don’t think anyone here needs to go hungry. Food seems so plentiful and so affordable by comparison. I really envy the range of choices afforded the local people. The bright colours of the sugar beet, wolfberry, cherry tomatoes, mandarins, eggplant, chillies and many others all make for an interesting portrait. I snapped away happily at the displayed goods and nobody seemed to mind, as long as their faces are not directly photographed.

I should sooner get used to the idea of others giving up their seats for me. It happened again this morning. I was on the packed local bus heading for the Ningxia Hui Cultural Village when this forty-ish man tapped me on the shoulder. I wasn’t sure if it was his seat that he gave up, but he did indicate to me that there was a seat available just behind me, and I could see that he was preventing others from taking it. It kind of makes you feel old, but to reject would make him lose face, so what the heck!

The Cultural Village complex occupies a large area, about five times the size of own Sultan Mosque. It has a huge forecourt, Tiananmen style, where the faithful gather on holy days, and a museum inside tracing the origins of Islam in China. The buildings are constructed in the modern Arab style, quite unlike the typical older mosques in China, which are generally modelled after Chinese temples. This one has, among others, four grand gold plated onion domes topping each corner pillar of the complex, much like those found in the Middle East.

After paying the entrance fee of 30 yuan I was greeted at the grand entrance by a guide dressed conservatively, complete with headscarf and sleeves up to her wrists.
“A-salam aleikhem!” she greeted. Peace be upon you.
“Aleikhem salam!” I returned the greeting. She was taken aback, not expecting an answer.

Just past the grand entrance there was an exhibition hall showcasing, of all things, the Kuwaiti Royal Palace and a scale replica of a Kuwaiti dhow. That instantly led me to speculate on the likelihood of the Kingdom’s sponsorship of the complex. The Arabs’ coffers are full these days and what would a fistful of yuan be to them. However the Chinese government itself is extremely wary of money from the Arabs, fearful that these may be channelled to fund extremist causes among their Muslim minority.

Together with a small group of other visitors we were led through the museum exhibits. We were shown that the Islamic faith primarily entered China from the two Silk Routes, the older land route via the Tarim Basin oases in the 8th century, and the later sea route via the port of Zaiton, or modern day Quanzhou 泉州 in Fujian Province, in the 14th century. Today, out of the 55 minority groups, ten embrace the muslim faith. Almost all live exclusively in the far northwestern provinces of Xinjiang, Qinghai, Gansu and Ningxia, and a sizable population in Yunnan, from whose ranks emerged the famous Ming navigator Admiral Cheng Ho. Their total head count in China range from 30 million to 90 million, 2.3% to 6.9% of the Chinese population, depending on whose figures you believe.

One interesting piece of information gleaned from the museum led me to refer to my Chinese history texts. In the year 751AD the mighty Tang army which until then had considerable influence in Central Asia was defeated by the Arabs on the banks of the Talas River in modern day Kazakhstan. From then on, to this day Central Asia fell under the influence of the Arabs, and by extension, Islam, instead of the Chinese. A check on the date revealed that it was during the reign of Tang Xuanzong 唐玄宗 the emperor who was infamously recorded in history as being so infatuated by his favourite concubine Yang Guifei 杨贵妃, to the neglect of running his empire. He was thirty six years older than her, and she, fashionally plump I might add, was initially bethrothed to his son.

At the Museum I met a friendly middle aged local surnamed Zhang who kindly attended to my some of my queries. He was there to accompany his colleague from another part of China and could tell that I was a foreigner. This same Mr Zhang who cared to admit to drinking alchohol despite his Islamic faith was so helpful as to arrange my next visit, which was to the remnants of the Great Wall. He made a quick telephone call to the local tourist board and spoke to its chief, checking for the best and nearest location for me to visit. Obviously this man is well connected. He even offered me his driver, to take me to the wall, but I declined. He subsequently negotiated with a taxi driver to take me there and back for 100 yuan.

I arrived at the Ming Wall at Shuidongkou 水洞沟 in the late afternoon. Again as at the Mausoleum, the wind has died down and the temperature rapidly falling. Everyone else had left. I could just about feel the sense of desolation often expressed by those posted to frontier garrisons. There were many. Fan Zhongyan 范仲淹 of the Northern Song came to mind. He wrote a poem when commanding a garrison very near here. It count as one of my favourites:

塞下秋来风景异，衡阳雁去无留意。
四面边声连角起。
千嶂里，长烟落日孤城闭。

浊酒一杯家万里，燕然未勒归无计。
羌管悠悠霜满地。
人不寐，将军白发征夫泪。

I have often contended that the best of English translation could not possibly do justice to the worst of Chinese poems. I can only say that while recalling the poem I empathise deeply with the writer. It brings a chill to my heart and tears to my eyes.


12 Oct 2008

The bus from Yinchuan to Lanzhou takes a little under six hours.
When I reached Lanzhou I made a beeline for my favourite eatery Master Huang 黄师傅. Here I must introduce briefly Lanzhou’s internationally famous snack Lanzhou la mian 兰州拉面. You buy a ticket at the cashier, take it to the noodle chef and tell him the kind of noodles you want. He will then hand-pull the dough right before you. According to local folklore you can tell the social status of a person by the kind of noodles he or she prefers. The women like theirs extra slim, the scholars thin, soldiers like theirs flat and broad, and labourers prefer theirs thick and so on. There are various terms for it, er xi, mao xi or jiuyezi, 二细, 毛细, 韭叶子, a whole culture to eating lamian, or as the Japanese say, ramen.

My favourite is the extra slim ones, never mind if that undermines my gender. I asked them not to add the often fatty cubes of beef, but to heap lots of chilli oil, coriander leaves and spring onions on my noodles. I thought the crunchy translucent slices were cucumbers at first, but they were actually fresh radish. It cost only 3 yuan 50 fen for a large bowl of noodles. Gluttony got the better of me. I had two, plus a boiled egg. I never saw an egg with a bigger yolk. In retrospect I wonder if it was a real egg.

The other Lanzhou dish I wish to describe is mian pian 面片. It consists of tiny pasta squares cooked in a casserole of minced mutton, lots of tangy tomatoes, capsicum, spring onions, chillies and coriander leaves, with rice vinegar as an optional yet necessary condiment. You eat it with a spoon, and it tasted superb!

There is also shui jiao, at Daniang’s 大娘水饺 a chain restaurant serving all manner of boiled dumplings with meat or vegetables or combined, eaten with minced garlic, chilli oil and rice vinegar. It is not a typical food of the northwest region, but like the KFCs and McDonalds it had spread inland from the east. The restaurant is mostly packed with out of state tourists or workers. I saw some of the most vain women here; preening themselves before their hand held mirrors in between mouthfuls of their shui jiao, and lording over their poorer fuwuyuan cousins. Here are the real McCoys, the xiaojies , transplanted city girls working in the nearby karaoke bars and dance halls.

Whenever in Lanzhou I never fail to take a stroll along the Yellow River Esplanade. This is the city’s largest green lung, providing its residents at best, a limited respite from the air and noise pollution synonymous with all Chinese cities. Pockets of citizenry do their own thing here. There’s one of chess enthusiasts, another of cards, and even one of mahjong players. My favourite area is the performance corner near the pavillion. During the day there is always a troupe here staging the local Gansu and Shaanxi variety of opera called qinqiang 秦腔. It usually attract large crowds, mostly the retired elderly and the peasantry from the outlying districts. Qinqiang is one of the more robust forms of Chinese opera, the martial style of singing and the accompanying music rousing the audience’s spirit. The story line often revolves around past military triumph and defeat, heroes and villians, glory and shame.

Another crowd pleaser are the singers of Qinghai folk songs 青海民歌. It is usually performed as a duet, by members of the opposite sex. There is no accompanying music, but the singing follows a repetative score. After a while I find myself humming along to it. The lyrics are in the Qinghai dialect and the singers are ever so good, projecting their clear voices as if over the plateaus and plains of cloudless Qinghai itself. Most are love songs, with plenty of romantic, even salacious, banter and the audiences loved it, erupting with laughter from time to time. I didn’t understand a single word, but I enjoyed every single moment of it.

Tomorrow I shall be leaving for Guangzhou. As the flight leaves early in the morning I have checked in at a hotel close to the airport bus terminus. This big hotel, just outside Lanzhou University, is nothing to write home about, to say the least. In fact I have already forgotten its name.


13 Oct 2008

Just my luck. It rained again here in Guangzhou when I arrived in the early afternoon. It is still raining, and getting heavier it seemed, though not as heavy as last week.

This morning I left the hotel at 0530, and caught the first airport bus. The flight from Lanzhou to Guangzhou, again via Xian, was all quite uneventful, except that I had the luck to sit next to a guy and his brother, who are obvious ethnic minorities. They are Dongxiangs 东乡族, one of the ten minority groups I mentioned earlier that embraced Islam. Their language is similar to Mongolian and they can trace their ancestors to Genghis Khan’s hordes. They live in Linxia 临夏, near Lanzhou, and are on their way to Guangzhou for business. I wasted no time in showing them my July 1980 National Geograhic map of Chinese minorities. He studied it with great interest and offered me additional information on the other ethnic groups in the area.

On the same flight was a small group of about twenty elderly German tourists. In all likelihood they have come from Dunhuang, a town on the Silk Road or Seidenstrasse, the original German term coined by Baron Ferdinand von Richthofen. Lanzhou is often the starting point for those Dunhuang Caves which house the world’s largest collection of ancient Buddhist wall art.

Here in the rainy city I paid a visit to Peoples’ Park. Despite the light rain it was full of people, as the name suggests. The park occupies an entire block, very near to Beijing Road, the centre for Guangzhou shopping. The park grounds are well maintained despite the masses. Mature trees provide lots of shade, affording some respite to sojourners like me in this often hot and humid city. As in the Lanzhou park there are people doing their own thingy. Al fresco ballroom dancing is extremely popular. Others indulge in light activity like badminton, or simply forming a circle and kicking a shuttle around 踢毽子, what older Singaporeans remember as chapteh. At another corner a young man strums on his guitar, singing familiar Cantonese ballads to willing listeners. Attracting quite a crowd was the Cantonese opera section.. The singers are amateurs, ordinary folk enjoying themselves. They were really good. Regretfully we don’t see much of these spontaneity on our own shores.

I had planned to go to the Esplanade along the Pearl River, but cancelled it because of the rain which was getting heavier. Perhaps on my next visit with my wife. It was getting very uncomfortable out there, the first time I feel the humidity after so many days in the dry and cool northwest. Tomorrow I leave for home.



PS: For the benefit of the non-Chinese reader I will try to convey the gist of, and the emotions embodied in, Fan Zhongyan’s poem. It is a pleasure to point out the perfectly balanced form as presented in the number of words in each stanza. When read in Chinese, there is a rythmatic cadence to its structure. I readily conceed that my amateurish translation does little justice to its beauty and stature.

塞下秋来风景异，衡阳雁去无留意。
四面边声连角起。
千嶂里，长烟落日孤城闭。

The frontier scene changes with the arrival of autumn, the migrating geese overhead has no intention of staying
On all sides rose the sound of the enemies’ horn
Amongst these hills, a lonely garrison stands, gates shut as the sun sets.

浊酒一杯家万里，燕然未勒归无计。
羌管悠悠霜满地。
人不寐，将军白发征夫泪。

Downing a cup of crude wine I long for home far away, there are no plans to return as victory is not yet at hand
The barbarians’ flute fills the air, the ground laden with frost
No one sleeps, the Generals worried sick, the conscipts weep with yearning.