I’m giving up (for the moment) on catching up, as it appears we have another day or two of heavy-duty traveling ahead of us.  It’s frustrating to me not to have time to write – I’m totally unused to traveling on someone else’s schedule, and we’re busy from dawn to dusk on most days.  I have a spare hour or two right now, so I’ll talk about Xining.

Xining is the capital of Qinghai Province, in the northwest of China on the Tibetan plateau.  There are, not too surprisingly, quite a few Tibetans living here and so the focus has been on Tibetan things: we went to a museum about Tibetan carpetmaking, thangkas (Buddhist religious paintings), and Buddhist sculpture.  We visited a grand mosque (not very exciting), a park (even less exciting), and the Tibetan Kum Bum monastery, which actually was exciting – perhaps “fascinating” would be a better word.

The Kum Bum monastery is one of the major monasteries outside Tibet – the birthplace of Tsongkhapa, the founder of the Yellow Hat sect of Buddhism, and a former residence of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama (i.e. the current Dalai Lama).  It has nine temples, of which we saw three or four.  The first one was the Lesser Temple of the Golden Roof, which was fascinating – inside the courtyard (no photos allowed, alas) the second floor balconies hosted nine or ten taxidermied animals – bear, goat, cow, and yak among others – which represented the animals that the Buddha tamed.  (I may have this wrong, our guide’s English was not the world’s best, and it was so noisy with the pilgrims and other tour groups that it was sometimes hard to understand him.)  The scent of Tibetan incense was in the air, reminding me of my trip to Dharamsala in India.  It’s a pleasant smell, sort of like woodsmoke with a hint of sandalwood, and I really like it.

The second temple we visited was the Great Hall of the Golden Roof, which was gigantic, and unfortunately so dim that it was hard to make out the beautiful Buddhist tapestries  and Buddha sculptures in the hall.  It was packed with pilgrims, and I found it hard to really appreciate given the press of people (a pickpocket would have had a field day).

The last temple we visited (I’m skipping a couple of temples that, while beautiful, flatten out when trying to describe them) was the Hall of Butter Sculpture, which featured sculptures and tableaux made of colored yak butter.

You are probably thinking of this as some sort of curiosity, like those little decorative butter pats they have at fancy hotels.  No, this is closer to Art.  The sculptures were every bit as detailed and gorgeously painted as any other Buddha statue I’ve seen – they were simply made of yak butter.  (Yak butter, which comes in three grades – one for lamp oil, one for eating, and one for religious use – is a considerably harder fat than cow butter, so is pretty solid at room temperature.)  You’d never know it was yak butter if someone didn’t tell you – “waxworks” would be more appropriate a term than “butter sculpture”.

A brief word on yaks.  They are cute.  Damn cute.  I mean, really really really “take me home and feed me” cute.  I saw one up close (and paid to take a photo with one) at Sun Moon Mountain, and if I could figure out how to get it home, I would have bought it on the spot.  I have no idea what their temperament is like (considerably fiercer than cows if I remember correctly), but they are just adorable.  Viz:

Not the best photo, but I haven’t had a chance to dig into Mike’s considerably better collection of photos yet.

We then stopped by a model Tibetan village, where I came across this “woodshed” full of yak-dung patties:

They are used for fuel (of course), but according to our guide yak dung is also used to clean food dishes while on the move, since there isn’t much water available.  I don’t think I buy this, but it’s what the guide says.  *shrug*

I almost forgot!  Before the lamasery, we stopped by Yet Another Jade Shopping Opportunity, where we were herded into a small room and harangued at length and with great enthusiasm in Cantonese, by a guy dressed like a Vietnamese pimp, with no translation since our guide didn’t speak Cantonese.  I figured he was simply selling us timeshares in South Florida, but it turned out that he was a jade wholesaler and was trying to convince us to become retailers for him.  (My mom understood most of what he was saying, but refused to translate, because, as she said, “I’m not going to make his sales pitch for him.”)

So anyway, that was the cross-cultural surreal moment of the day.  After the lamasery and the Tibetan village, we went to Qinghai Lake, the largest salt-water lake in China, which was both freezing cold and thoroughly unexciting.  From there we went to a hot-pot dinner restaurant, and thence back to the hotel.

Tomorrow morning we fly out early to Xian, where we’ll be visiting the terra cotta soldiers and getting some kind of cultural performance in the evening.  Hopefully, we won’t get any more Cantonese timeshares in South Florida, but you never know.

Today was a travel day, so not much in the way of sightseeing.  I did, however, get the opportunity to try an Asian delicacy which I skipped in Vietnam and have regretted ever since:

(Background: when I was traveling in Vietnam, my guide took me home to see his family’s lychee farm, and they slaughtered a chicken in my honor.  I was fascinated, since (innocent American I) I had never seen a dead chicken before, but was NOT prepared to find the chicken’s head in my bowl at lunch!  He explained that it was a delicacy, but I wasn’t prepared to try it, so I gave it back to him, whereupon he ate it with gusto.)

The chicken head was okay: the skin part (the comb, etc.) was tasteless and slightly rubbery.  The inside, which I suspect of being chicken brain, was rich-tasting and not at all bad.  But when I got to the eyes, I decided I’d had enough.  I thought it was OK, not going to rate it as a delicacy though.  I should track down my guide in Vietnam to tell him I finally had the nerve to try it, though.

I have also managed to break nearly a complete set of ebony and birch size 0 double-pointed knitting needles.  Nothing daunted, I went over to the nearest department store with my mother and asked for bamboo chopsticks.  No dice.  Apparently it’s the middle of a desert and bamboo warps badly, so nobody sells it.  No bamboo skewers or other utensils either, naturally.  However, at the last moment I noticed a cheap bamboo flute, which I promptly bought for $1.50, brought home, and hacked up.  I now have 3/4 of a bamboo flute, and a full set of five size 0 hand-carved bamboo dpns on which to finish knitting my sock.

More later, when I have a chance…

Yesterday we went to the Mogao Caves near Dunhuang, also in northwestern China.  These caves were carved out of sandstone by Buddhist monks and decorated with the most amazing murals, frescoes, bas-relief, statues, and tile over the course of about 1000 years, funded by offerings from merchants traveling the Silk Road.  They are amazing.

Up until this point I frankly hadn’t seen anything in China that I would fly 5000 miles to see, and was in fact a little disappointed with the tour: we’ve mostly gone from overcrowded tourist spot to overcrowded tourist spot, with very little left in the sense of awe.  It’s hard to fully appreciate beautiful scenery when it’s overrun with tourists (including you), and hard to take good photos when on a tight time schedule and trotting after your guide.  While it was nice to get fed three times a day and not have to worry about hotels, I was worried that the entire tour would be like that.  But the caves, now, they are something else.

There were originally over 1000 caves carved out of the sandstone, but only about 600 have survived to the present date.  (We’re lucky to have any of them at all, between the plundering of locals, passing archaeologists, and the depredations of the Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution.  The guide said that if they’d been any closer to the city, they would probably have been destroyed by the Red Guard, but they’re several dozen km from the city, so the guard never got around to them.  Lucky!) They’re not exactly caves – more like rooms carved from sandstone and elaborately decorated.  They’re also referred to as grottoes, which confused me no end because to me grottoes are associated with water and this is in the middle of a giant desert.

At any rate, we went to the caves and hired an English-speaking guide to show us around.  We visited about fifteen caves in toto, ranging from the 4th century AD to the 11th century.  They were covered, walls and ceiling, with beautiful, delicately painted renderings of the Buddha – past, present, and future – and the boddhisatvas, apsaras, etc. – plus depictions of everyday life and paintings of the donors.  Also statues of the Buddha and bodhisattvas, although the statues had mostly been restored in the 18th century, as the wood and clay had decayed with age.

The styles of the paintings and the people depicted in them had great variety – there were Persian, Indian, and Greek influences in some of the paintings, appropriate for what was at that time a bustling merchant center, and the people in them were not just Han Chinese, but also a number of minorities (visible from their different facial features and clothing).  But mostly what I remembered about them was the incredible fineness of the artistry, and how well-preserved it was.  The reds and whites (made from lead) had flaked away with age, but the blues, greens, ochres, whites made with mica, etc. were still visible, as was some of the gold leafing in the higher portions of the chamber.  The brush-strokes were fine and distinct (in the areas where the chamber had not flaked away), giving you a real sense for how they must have looked in their glory.  It made me wish I’d been there, back when it was being created.

One of the things that the caves drove home was how civilized China was, back when Europeans were still running around in animal skins hitting each other with sticks.  The art in those caves would still be sophisticated and glorious if it were made today – and it was over 1500 years ago!  Coming from a country where the history of the dominant culture spans less than 400 years, I find it awe-inspiring.  The giant Buddha statues (100+ feet high) carved into the rock – by hand – testify to determination and imagination on a grand scale.  They are just gorgeous.  (The bigger one is also now the second-largest Buddha statue in the world, after the Taliban dynamited the two giant Buddhas in Afghanistan.)

From a purely technical perspective, I was also amazed by how long the pigments have lasted.  I believe they’re mostly made with various kinds of stone – the blue (said the guide) was lapis lazuli and azurite, the green malachite, the reds ochre.  The lead-based red and white paints oxidized away from humidity, and much of the gold leaf was scraped away by locals, but the patterns are still clear.  If I were doing painting, I would hope for my work to last equally long.

Today is a travel day – we are stopping by a silk carpet factory that specializes in rugs made after the style of the Mogao paintings, but as I’ve already bought one gorgeous silk rug, I doubt I’ll buy another.  After that it’s a four-hour ride to the next city we’re stopping in, so it’s really an entire travel day.  I expect I will probably finish one more of my travel socks tomorrow.  It’s going laboriously slowly, since it’s a two-color sock in black and multicolor yarn, but I’m getting there.  Mogao caves it’s not, but it will be pretty, and I hope fun to wear.

I somehow got behindhand a few days ago due to the breakneck pace of our travels (we’ve now done something like three cities in four days – no way to travel!), and some things have gotten scrambled in my head, but I’ll do my best to catch up.

After the caves, we went to a silk rug factory, which was very similar to the other silk rug factory except that the patterns were nontraditional, modeled after the paintings in the Mogao caves. I did find a tiger rug, and the little travelingtiger insisted on getting a photo with his silk-rug cousins:

I thought briefly about buying it, but it would have cost about $1000, and I wasn’t willing to shell out that much, so I moved on.

Then we visited the local market:

After that, we left for the next city, Jiayuguan.

We flew into Dunhuang this morning, after leaving the hotel at a thoroughly ungodly hour.  We dropped our bags off at the hotel and relaxed for a few hours before lunch, then went out to the singing dunes (which reputedly make a humming noise when the wind blows, i.e. most of the time).  There we got a good look at one of the biggest drifting-sand deserts in China, and also got to ride camels!

Riding camels turns out not to be too tricky – the only difficulty is when mounting and dismounting, because the camel kneels down and you have to grab the saddle as it lurches forward and down.  Here’s one starting to kneel, below:

The hair on the hump felt furry and soft, sort of like a fluffy sheep, but without the grease.  I took lots of photos of the camel herd, and will put them up on the website whenever my Internet connection (or perhaps the censors) allow.  They were very cute.
At lunch, I had wound up inadvertently eating something exotic.  My rule of thumb, as a whole, is not to eat anything while traveling unless you know what it is, on the grounds that it may turn out to be considerably more exotic than you were anticipating.  In this particular case, it was a small dish served next to a mound of popcorn that had been coated with sugar and stuck together to make (in essence) drifting sand dunes out of Crackerjacks.  No one was quite sure what it was, and I wasn’t enthused, but Mike summoned up the courage to try it, and said he liked it, so I tried it as well.  It was interesting, with a chewy, gelatinous texture, and a slightly rank/gamy odor to it which I wasn’t quite sure if I liked.  After we’d all eaten some, my mom flagged down a passing waitress and asked her what it was.  “Camel paw,” she said.  (Apparently camels don’t have hooves, but big floppy feet.  Kinda cute, actually.)

So anyway, now I’ve eaten camel.  I think I’d rather leave them alive and kicking; they’re just way too cute, and not nearly tasty enough to justify eating.  But to each their own tastes, I suppose.

Tomorrow we’re going to a bunch of Buddhist grottoes, with ancient (and extremely extensive) murals painted all through them.  THere probably won’t be pretty photos, since I think flash photography is forbidden, but I’m looking forward to it.