The Land of Abundance (with a few notes from the City of Superlatives)

As well as 1st October being the birthday of Communism in China, this year the 3rd October was also an important date in the Chinese calendar as it was the Mid-Autumn Festival. Sometimes known as the Moon Festival, it has been celebrated for over 3,000 years on the 15th day of the 8th lunar month and parallels the Autumn Equinox in the solar calendar when the moon is at its roundest and fullest. Where as we in the West traditionally see the man in the moon, the Chinese see a rabbit.

There are are many stories surrounding the festival, including the Jade Rabbit; Three fairy sages transformed into old men and begged for food from a fox, a monkey and a rabbit. The fox and the monkey both gave them food, but the rabbit who had nothing to give, threw himself on the fire and offered his own flesh. The sages acknowledging the sacrifice let the rabbit live on the moon where he became the Jade Rabbit, who liked to make pills and mooncakes. Another story that seems to have a thousand different variants usually involving a character called Change, who swallowed an immortality pill and flew to the moon and met the Jade Rabbit, after her husband, the famous Houyi the Archer, shot down 9 out of the 10 suns and became a tyrannical dictator.

My favourite story is a folk tale that is based more in reality. From 1280-1368 the Mongol Empire ruled China as the Yuan Dynasty. Group gatherings were banned so it was impossible to organise a rebellion. Noting that the Mongols did not eat the traditional Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival mooncakes, an advisor to a rebel leader came up with the idea of coinciding their rebellion with the Festival. They inserted a message inside every mooncake that read 'Kill the Mongols on the 15th day of the 8th month' and on the night of the festival the rebels successfully overthrew the government and established the penultimate Chinese Dynasty, the Ming.

I wanted to check out some places in Chengdu before I left so the day after we got back from Emeishan, my mum and Clare came with me on the bus to Peoples Park, where we had previously failed to walk to. The park is pretty similar to most other parks in Chinese cities Ive seen but with more Sichuanese teahouses. It also has the Monument to the Martyrs of the Railway Protection Movement (1911), a tall obelisk that marks the uprising of the people against dishonest officers pocketing cash during the construction of the Chengdu to Chongqing rail line.

From Renmin Gongyuan, we walked to Tianfu Square and the Muslim Quarter. Chengdu has a sizeable Islamic community and the Muslim Quarter including a huge mosque built in 1666 used to stretch right across Tianfu Square before it was demolished in 1917 to make way for the completely paved park. All that seems to remain now is the one street nearby with lots of Halal restaurants and the Huangcheng Mosque, built by the government to try to make up for the loss of the ancient holy building, but looks more like a Chinese temple than a traditional mosque.

One last stop before we headed back to the hostel was Daci Si, supposedly the temple where the famous monk Xuanzang entered into Buddhism. In 628AD, tired of contradicting versions of Buddhism in China, Xuanzang left Changan (Xi'an) to travel to India to obtain Buddhist scriptures to take back with him to China. It took him 17 years to get there and back and is revered as the founder of Buddhism in China as it is know today. The novel Journey to the West is a highly fictionalised account of his travels, and is the basis of that crazy retro Japanese programme Monkey.

We chilled in the temples Zen Teahouse before stopping off in Carrefour to get supplies for our long trip home. Clare and Graham were getting the train up to Xian and then to Beijing, but my mum and I were going straight back to Shanghai. The flight to Chengdu was only a couple of hours but the train journey back was to take 36! We said goodbye to Clare and Graham and climbed into a motor rickshaw driven by a very friendly and enthusiastic local to the railway station.

Chengdu, recently voted Chinas 4th most liveable city, became the capital of the ancient Shu Kingdom in the 4th century. 'Cheng' and 'du' literally mean 'become' and 'capital' and is very rare amongst Chinese cities in that its name has never changed since its founding. During the Second World War the Nationalist government fled to Chengdu to escape the Japanese forces and during the Chinese Civil War it was also the last place the Guomindang held before being driven to Taiwan. Chengdu is often known as 'The Land of Abundance' for it's fertile plain which the prehistoric bronze age culture of Jinsha recognised 4,000 years ago.

The day after mum and I got back to Shanghai, three days since we had left Chengdu, we decided to see one more holy place before my mum flew back home. For Catholics the holiest place in all of China, Our Lady of China Cathedral, Church of the Holy Mother in China, Sheshan Basilica on Sheshan Hill in Shanghai. It is the largest Christian Building in all of East Asia and used to be a destination for pilgrims from all across Asia. Originally built in 1863 with the building as it stands now being completed in 1935, every May people come from all over China to listen to its Latin services. It turned out, after we had bought our entrance ticket, that the church was being renovated and so we couldn actually go in. Nevertheless it was a nice afternoon stroll on Shanghais only hill. That evening my mum flew home to England.

In between sorting out visas, our flat, packing and saying goodbye to everyone, Clare and I went to Lupu bridge to check out the Expo 2010 Shanghai site. Its being held next summer so chances are we wont be able to actually go to the World Fair, but I thought it would be good to at least see the site that has appeared on billboards ever since we arrived in Shanghai almost 14 months ago. You can get a good view of the site and the whole city from the top of Lupu Bridge which you can walk up. It is the worlds longest arch bridge and was built by a former disgraced Shanghai mayor who wanted to continue the fashion of superlatives that seem to define China and cities like Shanghai.

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Part of trip: Travelling Around Southwest China & Vietnam

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