Paradise (Yangtze)

Daddy, won’t you take me, back to Muhlenberg County
Down by the green river, where Paradise lay?
Well, I’m sorry, my son, but you’re too late in asking
Mr. Peabody’s coal train has hauled it away.


-John Prine

The Yangtze is full of coal barges – loaded going upstream, empty on the return. The Three Gorges Dam was projected to produce 15 % of China’s energy requirements; present estimate is 1%, not because the hydroelectric generation has fallen below projections, but because demand has so exploded. So there will be more dams built, further upstream near Tibet, where the population, if not the ecological, effects will be lesser.

In the meantime, the mountains keep filling the coal barges.

Terra-cotta Warriors (Xi'an)

They are, of course, amazing. We were all entranced.

We were there at the same time as the farmer who discovered them while digging a well back in the 70s, who apparently now signs books full time. (I didn't see the "no photographs sign" and was roundly reprimanded by an appalled British lady.)

More unusually, we were also there at the same time as a team of archeologists.

According to our guide, they are deliberately not digging up some of the sites because they don't yet have the technology to preserve the paint and other materials on the terra-cotta, and they're safer underground.

But the archeologists revealed the secret of where he warriors REALLY come from:

Muslim Quarter (Xi’an)

It wasn’t on our original schedule, but after reading Lonely Planet, I asked that we shift things around to permit a trip to the Muslim quarter. Muslims are the third largest religious group in China, and as the end of the Silk Road,

Xi’an is a major center, with many descendants of Arab traders. We were able to spend a few hours in the street market of the Muslim Quarter,

and also to visit the Great Mosque at the time of early evening prayer, listening to the iman call the faithful to prayer from what looked like a pagoda, in Arabic with a Chinese lilt.

Tom was sufficiently entranced that he ditched the group and stayed in the Quarter for dinner.

Your Kind of Place (Yichang)

Children's Village

Another unscheduled stop – we were supposed to go to the Museum of Science and Technology – but we have one of those at home. So Gloria was able to arrange a visit to the provincial Children’s Village, a bit over an hour from Xi’an.

The children, who range from 3 to 17 – just like our group – are mostly not orphans, but the children of prisoners.

They live in one-story dorms, eight to a brightly painted room,

with the older kids segregated by sex and the older girls’ dorm festooned with pop star posters.

The younger children performed a little dance for us

– so, with the impression that they probably were made to feel like performing seals for visitors, we reciprocated

Tom garnered a fan club by using the universal communication tool of a notebook and dinosaur sketches.

The girls posed with our girls

and compared notes on pop stars, and the boys played with the five balls we brought as a gift for the kids

We ended, of course, leaving chunks of cash as donations – and Aaron kicked in an extra $50 from his savings. I don’t know how much of it will reach the children, or even the Children’s Village. But they have so little, and we have so much.

Big Goose Pagoda (Xi'an)

This Buddhist pagoda, from AD 642,

is wonderful. Full of statues

and paintings of the life of the Buddha

and an amazing, tranquil garden full of birds,

it feels like a holy place rather than a palace or museum like the sites in Beijing. It is once again a practicing monastery; the monks returned after the Cultural Revolution.

Here’s the monk who founded it, Xuan Zang, who also inspired the classic novel of the Monkey King, Journey To the West, which I’ve been reading on the Kindle, and which has proven vaguely reminiscent of our present adventure ”Monkeys are born naughty ad they could not keep quiet for a single moment until they had work themselves out moving thing around.”

We're Baaack

We're off the river and in the amazing, huge city of Chongqing.

We sailed in at midnight last night, and left the boat this morning. After a full day to touring, now I have a nice fat broadband pipe until 8:30 tomorrow morning. Let the blogging recommence.