Blogs from Dunhuang, Gansu, China, Asia - page 3

For the past four months, we've been living at the Mogao Grottoes in Dunhuang, a small city located at the edge of the Gobi and Taklamakan deserts in Northwest China. The Grottoes were first carved around the 4th century CE, purportedly by the Buddhist monk Yuezun, who saw a vision of a thousand buddhas at a cliffside near the oasis in Dunhuang. For over 1,000 years, Buddhists, powerful local rulers, and wealthy patrons carved out and decorated nearly 500 different caves into the cliffside at Mogao. This ended around the 14th century, likely due to foreign armies encroaching into the area. In 1900 an Hungarian-born "archaeologist" discovered a hidden library at Mogao, which contained thousands of ancient texts and manuscripts, including the earliest printed book in history, the Diamond Sutra. Danny has been teaching English to ... read more

Dunhuang for me was the part of the trip I was looking most forward to, we just had to get there. I was only around 5hours by train from Jiayuguan but the train times were all really stupid times. In the end our train was supposed to depart around 5am infact it was delayed and departed just before 7 and even then became further delayed so we eventually arrived around noon. Then according to all the information that I could find we wanted to head for Charlie’s café which was apparently across the street from the bus station. Unfortunately the bus station moved 3years ago and the café is no longer opposite it. So after we took a taxi to the bus station we then found out from two German guys that we had to walk ... read more

黄河远上白云间，一片孤城万仞山； 羌笛何须怨杨柳，春风不度玉门关。 More than 1300 years ago, a poet wrote this poem to describe the landscape around Yumen. I am not a good translator, meanwhile, you know that the poem is always very difficult to show its feeling in a different language. From the poem, we get the information that the land outside Yumen Gate was already barren and infertile. The Yellow River was flowing far away. The only town stood besides the barren mountains. Plants should not be blamed not living there, since the spring wind couldn’t get through the Yumen Gate. It seems that the Yumen Gate is the line between life and desert. Back to the 21 century, the situation seems worse and worse. Not only the area outside the Yumen Gate is difficult for all creatures. In fact the Yumen Gate is ... read more

Until this point we had decided you can tell a lot about your future journey by the outside of the bus and the attitude of the driver. We hopped on our next sleeper bus and were asked to remove our shoes which we did excitedly assuming this bid positive signs for our 11 hour trip. Oh how wrong we were! As we got started on our very bumpy trip, we are actually convinced that we were literally driving off-road directly through the rocky desert, the driver turned on his version of an aircon or what we would call the fan. Not only was the air coming out hot (we measured it with our travel thermometer the next morning and it reached 39 degrees) but it stunk like a combination of a baby’s nappy and off milk. ... read more

There are those of us who have an extensive knowledge of the whos, whens and whats of history, veritable encyclopaedias of this earth; and then there are the historically inept muppets like myself, whose brief escapade into the annals of the past via a couple of years of appropriate schooling ranged from 'how to build a motte and bailey castle' to 'World War One' with precious little inbetween. We are left perplexed and knee deep in metaphorical quicksand in any museum, gazing vainly at dates and place names we will surely never remember. These nuggets of wisdom are apparently intended to fit snugly into a jigsaw of historical comprehension which is a mere mental void. I feel the blame should be shouldered in equal measure by the influences of Hawkwind and Bexley and Erith Technical High ... read more