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Published: March 26th 2018
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Day 31: Exploring Tian Shui
At 7.30 we were, to some extent, roused by music being played in the street via a public address system, followed by 30 minutes of possibly stirring speech, mostly by a woman. Over an excellent Jinjiang Inn breakfast (including hard-boiled eggs, boiled in tea), Maghnus revealed that he had hit the town last night and gave us an account of his revels.
The plan for today was to visit the Buddhist grottoes at Maijishan (Wheat Stack Mountain), so named because the caves have been carved into an isolated geological feature that looks like a stook. It is 35 km southeast of Tianshui, is the 4
th most important such complex in China and 194 caves plus extensive artwork survive.
Maghnus had a cunning plan – to go by taxi to the “old” railway station, then catch a Number 34 bus for the remaining 30 km, at a cost of 5 yuan per head, thus getting a chance to travel with normal local people. It was a huge success, the taxi drives were great, but the bus drives were out of this world! The buses themselves were very basic, semi-automatic, but quite clean
and functional. Like all buses, they had a bucket for rubbish and unlike buses in (say) Glasgow, there were no fast-food cups or containers kicking around the floor, and no abandoned copies of a free news-sheet.
Away we went – and it turned out that the road is to be upgraded, so in preparation has been removed almost in its entirety. Instead, all traffic (of which there is a lot) tries to maintain normal speeds, including a great deal of overtaking, along a dirt track, liberally sprinkled with excavations, potholes, tar-barrels, trenches and every other sort of obstacle. The outward run was like being the ball in a pinball machine, the driver took no prisoners and overtook everything in his sight, regardless of oncoming traffic or any other consideration. As if this was not enough, on the homeward run a different driver had an even greater level of determination, the experience was totally bizarre and wildly, madly entertaining. One nice little detail: we noticed that tankers had thoughtfully sprayed the dirt surface with water, presumably to lay the dust, and before we started out a company employee had cleaned our windows.
The Maijishan Grottoes have an
Maijishan Grottoes
Just part of the walkway system AAAAA award and are in a National Park. The whole thing is first class, you park 3km from the caves and either walk the rest of the way or take a little electric bus; local people have concessions to sell souvenirs, food, horse-rides etc. Details of the site itself will be on the internet, suffice to say that the cliff is perhaps 200 feet high and the authorities have provided a maze of steps and walkways of mesmerising complexity and vertiginous nature so that one can wander at will (if one has a head for heights). In wonderful spring sunshine, with only moderate crowds, and in a setting of outstanding beauty, a visit to Maijishan Grottoes must be one of the world’s best experiences.
We rounded things off with lunch on the site, and Kevin was especially delighted with his Tomato and Scrambled Egg. An excellent day. Noted, in passing, various stacks of bricks and the fact that these are always manhandled brick by brick. The inefficiency is remarkable, as far as we can see, each individual brick is picked up and moved, by hand, at least six times before it gets into a bricklayer’s possession. This reminded us
Maijishan Grottoes
A corridor on the cliff face that you do not see anything being palletised, and nothing carried in builders’ one-tonne bags. Every sack of coal, fertiliser, cement etc. is manhandled onto a lorry, then off again at the merchant’s premises, then onto the customer’s lorry and so on ad infinitum. Equally, we have not seen any shipping containers travelling by road – everything is apparently broken down at the docks and then loaded as individual items onto trucks (BTW, I saw a truck today fully 160ft long).
All this brings one to note the disparities that still exist, and which the present government of China has committed itself to address. The South China Morning Post reports that 2 million people are still below the official poverty line, an income of 2,300 yuan (U.S.$360). A farmer may produce 2 tonnes of corn per year, worth 1,500 yuan before deduction of seed and costs of production. It would cost about 7,000 yuan to buy a cow. The perceived way out of the poverty trap is for a son or daughter to get educated and then assist the ageing parents; university tuition fees (c.a. 7,000 yuan per year) may well be grant-funded, but it costs a
One of the Defenders
Sorry it is on its side; this image reminded me of someone... student about 10,000 yuan per year in living costs. The government is pledged to make huge additional progress within 3 years, which brings us back to the bricks. And the mega-stadia, the roads, tunnels, railways and thousands of people employed in security services, roads cleaning and every sort of public work. It is an old adage of coinage that “they make it round, to go round”; the government pumps money into infrastructure so as to stimulate the economy, and also to ensure that the stimulated economy can be efficient. The principle is sound, but the scale on which it is being exercised is truly remarkable and (one assumes) unprecedented.
Now that spring is here, we noted violets, chickweed and speedwell today, all flowering. Oddly enough, no ferns to be seen so far.
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