In the Land of Confucian -- Foreigners in China

Week 12 (November 14, 1997) -- In the Shadow of Jiuhua, Part 2

by Scott Urban

Introduction: Scott Urban went to China in 1994 to work at the China Daily newspaper in Beijing, where he stayed until 1997. While in China, Scott contracted a severe form of bicycling mania, which manifested itself in his 6,000-kilometer bicycle journey to Xinjiang in 1995 with friend Brice Minnigh.

In the Fall of 1996, Scott Urban and another friend William Lindesay spent every weekend possible cycling to the Great Wall of China to find lost sections of the Wall, with nothing more than curiosity, bicycles, and a map of the greater Beijing area.

This Jiuhua story was written in April 1995 about Scott's brother Pat's visit to China, their unusal encounters with Chinese people. The story begins in the middle of that visit. Jiuhua is one of China's four sacred Buddhist mountains (the other 3 being Pu Tuo in Zhejiang, Emei in SIchuan and Wutai in Shanxi). Jiuhua is located in Anhui Province, East China. In its heyday there were more than 300 monastaries around Jiuhua Mountain.

Scott currently resides in Denver, Colorado, USA, and is involved in a number of China-related projects. He can be reached at 110362.3041@compuserve.com .

It soon led to a small Buddhist pagoda or shrine of some sort. The man waited as a I posed for a photo next to the thing. We could see that the trail would descend from there and pass by a small farmhouse -- way up here near the top of the mountain. We could hear the voices of people sitting in the shade of the eaves. I didn’t like the idea of having to traipse through someone’s front yard like this, but there seemed little choice -- it was a trail.

Then an unpleasant surprise. Safe from view, I caught sight of the green uniform of a Public Security Bureau (PSB) officer descending the same trail from the sidewalk on the summit. He avoided the shrine and ducked down into the farmhouse, not seeing us.

A near-miss. But it would not be our only encounter with the men in green.

"Damn," I thought. "That closes that option to us." I explained to Pat why we wouldn’t be going down that trail. The old man too saw the officer and put his tofu baskets down and went to investigate. As expected, he came back and led us again toward the summit.

But before reaching the path at the top, he cut off to another trail. Our spirits were buoyed.

The trail led to a homestead: a small shack housing a large Buddha and a home-shack next to it. Bending over in the field next to the home was a bald person whose head and skin had been blackened from years spent under the Anhui sun.

Something about the person indicated she was a woman, maybe just the general roundness of her body. But she seemed to have been on the mountain as long as the mountain had been there.

She got up and walked toward the old man. We stood behind him. This was not their first acquaintance. They spoke in the local dialect, which I could not understand.

He instructed us to give her some tofu, whether as an offering or charity I couldn’t tell. Pat was more than happy to unload the less-than-delectable morsels. But that wasn’t the old man’s intention: we were to keep our tofu and buy a dollar more for her.

The old man laid out a bundle for me. By then, the woman had disappeared into the house-shack. I took the bundle of tofu and followed her in.

Inside was darkness, and I fumbled for a place to put the tofu or even for something to say. What does one say in such a circumstance? I didn’t even know why I was bringing her tofu.

From the corner of my eye I caught the white flash of her teeth -- she was changing clothes, and there I was in the room with her. The awkwardness amused her, and the flash of teeth from her gleaming smile showed it. Setting down the wafers, I retreated and waited with the old man, his tofu, and my brother.

We noticed a trail of beaten-down bushes descending from her home. That’s what we wanted. But the man explained ad nauseum why we couldn’t take it. All I understood was that "it doesn’t go anywhere." He succeeded in convincing us to follow him yet again, past the woman’s house and back onto the path atop the mountain.

The first leg of our journey from Jiuhua was becoming a circus. We couldn’t escape this mountain.

The man admitted he didn’t know the way. We thanked him and parted ways.

Exacerbated, my brother made a bid to bushwhack his way down, convinced that we’d hit a trail sooner or later -- China must be full of ‘em, he figured. I followed. It was slow going through the thick brush. Our legs were taking a beating from the prickly undergrowth and bleeding from the scratches.

I suggested it was a bad call. We had seen an actual trail by the woman’s shack, why not go back and take it?

We went back up to the sidewalk and to the trail to the woman’s home. At the juncture stood a monk wearing an intense scowl.

We proceeded past him and to the woman’s home. Indeed the beaten-down trail from her home only led to her latrine, past a sign which could have said "don’t go here" for all we know. We bushwhacked a bit further and emerged on the rock face.

It was here that we took stock of our situation.

I went to the far end of the steep rock, following a fissure in the surface. "No sign of a trail over here!" I called out. But Pat had already climbed off the rock onto the next most likely way down.

"I don’t want to face that monk again," he said as he proceeded downward. He felt guilty for being here. He reasoned that this side of the Buddhist mountain is sacred, reserved for the Buddhists since the other side is overrun with tourists.

Deciding to forge ahead, we put on long pants to protect from the bushes. A machete would have been more useful. The going was slow, bit by bit, and the undergrowth tore through my trousers.

Now we can get our bushwhacking badges!" Pat yelled to me.

Too far down to consider retreating, we took a breath and I offered words of assurance. "There must be a small creek down there," I said, pointing to the ravine below. "And surely over the last four thousand years the Chinese have built a path along that creek."

We were proceeding to trailblaze when I came upon a stone wall. Striding atop it, I could see that it was part of a complex of terraces, long since forgotten and all but invisible from afar. It was a sight both relieving and intriguing. I felt that I was walking through history, a feeling one often gets when wandering off the beaten path in China.

We continued and picked up a very, very faint trail. I latched onto it and my brother followed, both of us excited to have some direction. In minutes the faint track emptied out onto a groomed, staired, stone-paved path, along a creek flowing in the ravine. I called back to my brother: "You’re going to be psyched in a few seconds!"

Hot damn! was the sentiment as we cruised down the easy path: we were on our way. The abandoned terraces gave way to cultivated ones as we walked deeper into the ravine, which was shaped like a dog-leg. At the elbow far below us stood a small farmhouse, and in front of it we could see several figures. They had probably spotted us, too.

Elation yielded to anxiety as we descended the path. Contact with these people was going to be the meeting of two worlds. I’d be in the hot seat as my English-speaking brother rode shotgun.

Fear of the unknown is a terrifying and irresistible fear, and it would hold true as much for those people as it did for us.

But it was a necessary part of the kind of trip I told my brother we’d be in search of as we left both the metropolis of Shanghai and the beaten trail of tourist travel in China....

[To be continued]

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