Tibetan impressions, holy hiccup and toilet seat hill

Tibetan impressions:

Under a deep blue sky (amazing) we drove out of Chengde into the hilly mountains around. Our aim: 'Xiao Potala' (the Little Potala) and the monastery Puning Si. Both of them are part of the so-called eight outer monasteries. In fact there are only four of five monasteries, maybe they chose to call it eight monasteries because eight is a lucky number in China, but this is only speculation. Interestingly, the monasteries were built because of politic / diplomatic rather than religious reasons. Some buildings are such only to be contemplated from the outside and inside there's nothing at all.

Our impression: Amazing! The Xiao Potala is an exact copy of the real Potala in Tibet. It is located on a beautiful green hill, fresh air... we just felt like in Tibet except that we had no signs of altitude sickness. Xiao Potala is an old copy of the potala built back in 1767 because the Manchu kings wanted to stay friends with the Mongols (at that time fervent Tibetan buddhists, i.e. lamaists).

The highlight of Puning Si is the tall wooden Avalokiteshvara (sanskrit name) / Guanyin (Chinese name) / Goddess of Mercy statue (the highest of its kind in the world). The Goddess has 42 arms with each of them holding something in its hands.

No wonder Agnes (a co-traveller) got a holy hiccup (German: Schluckauf) thrice that day -probably to express her favorable impression. With 35 degree sun from a blue blue sky burning down on us a spontaneous water fight was a welcome refreshment.

Last but not least on that magnificent day we climbed on a hill. Officially it's called club (German: Keule - Haegar laesst gruessen!) rock (Bangchui Feng) or hammer rock, but looking at it from far away it resembled more a huge seat - most probably a toilet seat and near the rock it indeed felt like just Haegar the Viking was missing. We just called it 'toilet seat rock' following our first idea. Needless to mention that the view down the mountain into the valleys and on the other mountains was fantastic on that bright and sunny day.

Thanks to Agnes & Joerg & the Manchu kings for this excellent trip!

Holiday in the Manchu kings' summer resort

Some things really make us angry. Nor many. But imagine a town 250 km away from Beijing. In that case the town is called Chengde. You want to go there. You choose the so-called fast train. And then you sit there and think: the speed of the train would be a perfect speed for jogging, maybe for riding on a bike, but definitely not for a fast train. Einstein is probably right about his relativity theorem. 4 hours for 250 km (the fast train) is fast compared to the 6-7 hours that normal trains need.

Chengde itself was flourishing in the 18th century when it was chosen as summer and automn residence by the Manchu kings back then. Now it's aUNESCO world heritage site and visited by tons of Chinese tourists (even at 8am in the morning the mountain resort is crowded. The resort itself has a palace (ok, but not the best we've ever seen), a Chinese landscape garden with ponds and lakes (nice to stroll around), many deer (German: Hirsche und Hirschkuehe) which are a Chinese longevity symbol and therefore have to be touched in any case, a grassland (Mongolian style) and hills. Just have a look at the photos to have an impression yourself.

Holy coaly and 'big together' in Datong

Even if you missed my sophisticated puns in the title of the blog entry, that's no problem :-)... Who or what is Datong? Nowadays Datong is the coal pit of China with plenty of coal trucks, coal trains (no wonder that the last steam engine train of the world was produced here in 1988), coal-fired power plants and supposedly coal dust all over the town. We were lucky enough not to see the last one - maybe due to the weather. Datong used to be the capital of the Tuoba. What, you don't know the Tuoba yet? (here comes my history corner...) The Tuoba were a union of Turkish-speaking nomads who united Northern China around 386 AD, converted to buddhism and built some magnificent buddha grottoes (the so-called Yungang Caves) near Datong.

But the most spectacular sight in and around Datong which we visited was the Hanging Monastery (Xuankong Si). In the morning there were no big hords of tourists there and we could enjoy the monastery in sunshine. How could anybody build a monastery in such a place? And why? The 'how' seems to be a clever kind of architect, however given the fact that it was built approximately 1400 years ago, it still looks like a world wonder to me. Climbing up and down the staircases inside the building complex felt quite eerie and the holes in the stairs with 'excellent view down the rock' encouraged me to walk cautiously. And why did they built the monastery on the rock? There are many theories. For safety, some say, because of the floods of the once-upon-a-time river in the valley (others say) and again others claim it's for the holy atmosphere up there.

Second place of interest are of course the Yungang Caves. With much love for details and artistic value, one cave tells the story of one of the buddhas (Gautama) from his birth to his life in a palace. I especially liked the scene of him riding on an elephant. Doesn't sound to you like a very Chinese idea? Well, maybe it isn't because the styles used here mixed Indian, Persan, Chinese and Greek styles. You can imagine that many parts of the caves are heavily destroyed (thanks to the coal dust, vandals including the cultural revolution, unsuccessful early restoration attempts etc)...

A grand opening! 奥运会 2008 / Olympia 2008!

Yippieeee! The Olympic Games 2008 have started in Beijing! And we were there! The Olympic expertise team :-) was watching the Grand Opening of the Games from a rooftop garden of a Chaoyang restaurant with a big TV screen properly dressed with new Olympic t-shirts (see photo). Zhang Yi Mou, the famous Chinese filmmaker, fulfilled the already high expectations as director of the opening ceremony. A great firework, thousands of Chinese drummers - we liked it; the performance was very Chinese ! When the athletes entered the new stadium (according to our knowledge the order depended on the number of strokes in the Chinese writing of the country name), the vibes at our restaurant felt just 很好 (excellent). The people in the restaurant were from a big variety of nationalities and thus nearly always somebody cheered. Maybe except for those countries which nobody knew nothing of and whose teams only consisted of three to five people only. Another two hours passed until all the athletes had entered in the stadium. We had cheered for Germany led by the basketball star Dirk Nowitzki, the whole restaurant had applauded for Roger Federer whom everybody seemed to know as well as for Rafael Nadal and of course the Chinese team (the biggest of all) got a frantic applause from the many Chinese and a warm greeting from all of us. The Olympic feeling has finally fully arrived in Beijing. I am looking forward to a fair and suspenseful competition!

Some more really good photos of the opening ceremony can be found at: http://www.sueddeutsche.de/sport/575/305543/bilder/

Forever wall

Once upon a time some Chinese emperor let build a Great Wall. Probably not for the purpose of us having a good Saturday trip out of town. Nevertheless this was our Olympic discipline for today: Ultimate Wall Climbing.

What to do if in an Olympic competition there is no 'enemies' at all because the Wall is deserted and no other tourists are there? Congratulations, then you normally have already won the Gold medal. Unless you try to climb up a steap hill where there is no official way and the sand hill moves in the opposite direction. Victims? my legs (red). Maybe there was some sense behind the sign saying: 'Forbidden to climb on the wall' and on the farmer warning us to take a lot of care. But it was worth the experience! The part of the wall at the Huanghuacheng section we visited was the most unique part of the Wall I've been to in China so far!

After that we went on to the 'Silver Mountain Pagoda Forest' (Yinshan Talin) - some old deserted pagodas in a fascinating mountain and forest landscape.

The first picture shows some pagodas at Yinshan Talin, the second one the Great Wall at our part of the Huanghuacheng section.

Chinese love story

If you now think because of the title of this blog entry: 'Katharina has found herself a Chinese lover' ,you are totally mistaken. No, today is just the Chinese equivalent of Valentine's day. "七夕"(say: tschi schi), literally the Day of the Seven" has a long history but not a history of giving presents and flowers to the beloved as it is in Western countries often the case.

The story of Chinese Valentine's origin goes as follows:

The seven daughters of the Goddess of Heaven caught the eye of a cowherd during one of their visits to earth. The daughters were bathing in a river and the cowherd, named Niu Lang, decided to have a bit of fun by running off with their clothing. It fell upon the prettiest daughter (who happened to be the seventh born), to ask him to return their clothes.

Of course, since Niu Lang had seen the seventh daughter naked, they had to be married. The couple lived happily for several years. Eventually however, the Goddess of Heaven became fed up with her daughter's absence, and ordered her to return to heaven. However, the mother took pity on the couple and allowed them to be reunited once a year. Legend has it that on the seventh night of the seventh moon (on the 'Day of the Seven' which this year is today), birds form a bridge with their wings for the seventh daughter to cross to meet her husband on earth.

Apart from that only Olympic news: This week I was on business trip to Suzhou and Tianjin and not only have additional airport security measures been taken, but also on the highway back from Tianjin to Beijing each car was 'security-checked' when re-entering Beijing.The driver told us they do that on every single road leading into Beijing. You can well imagine that this leads to traffic jams...

Also the number of Chinese flags on the streets and cars has increased a lot. But wasn't it the same at the World Football Championship in Germany (just the flag looked different :-))?

Beijing in ruins and many umbrellas

It seems that the measures to improve air quality are at least a little bit working because today we had a blue sky and could see as far as the mountains close to Beijing which seldomly ever is the case.

The old summer palace (yuang ming yuan) was crowded by Chinese men with trendy weekend dress and Chinese women with umbrellas to protect from the strong sun. Basically the so-called old summer palace are ruins and a nice park with a lotus pond. What makes it so interesting is the place's history: Constructed in 1747 by Jesuit missionairies in European style, the old summer palace was ironically destroyed by the Europeans (the English and French) in 1860. Also interesting to know: at the same time when European style was en vogue in China, the European kings and queens had Chinese rooms built in their residences and collected Chinese porcelain vases.