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Published: September 21st 2011
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It feels like quite some time since I actually talked in any great detail about Xiangyang, the city I lived in until very recently, so let's do that.
Given where it's situated - 10 hours from Xi'an, 18 hours from Beijing in, truth be told, a fairly nondescript province in the middle of China - it's never likely to be any kind of foreign tourist Mecca, particularly given the competition there is for tourism amongst Chinese cities. This competition is, of course, one of the problems for any country where the development has been so rapid and vast, because villages that become towns and towns that become cities in such a short space of time can't do anything other than build a city-by-numbers. This is convenient in a Milton Keynes sort of way but it does mean that parts of it (as with, I'm sure, every other city like it in China) lack soul and character and even, to an extent, identity. Xiangyang, however, does have a few things to put it ahead of the pack. The main one relates to a chap called Zhuge Liang who chances are you won't have heard of, but in terms of Chinese military
and political history, he is kind of a big deal - you know, like Ron Burgundy.
At the risk of just repeating stuff that you can read on wikipedia should you want to, all I'll say is that during the Three Kingdoms period (somewhere round 220BC) he was a military strategist who was famously asked three times by one of the Warlords of one of the Kingdoms to help him. He is widely regarded, so people in Xiangyang told me, as being the best strategist of those times, and he lived in a place called Long Zhong for about ten years, which is now open to the public.
Long Zhong is about half an hour on the 512 bus outside the city and is pretty much the biggest tourist attraction in the city. It is actually a mountain that people (although not me) like to climb, partly I think for the view, partly for the inevitable pagoda at the top and partly because there is a kind of toboggan slide thing from the top to the bottom, I guess as a kind of reward for yourself, but even the terrified screams of fellow visitors flying down the hill
just weren't enough for my legs to get me up there in 36 degrees heat.
Elsewhere at the site itself, there are plenty of temples some older/more interesting than others; plenty of statues; some beautiful serene lakes and structures that if they were in England I would call bandstands. The highlight of it all though was a maze called 'The Eight Diagrams' that was based on one of Zhuge Liang's military strategies. The maze was made of eight sets of different coloured wooden poles, all at around shoulder height that were linked together. I have always wanted to go into a maze and while I had always imagined that my first foray into one would be something vaguely reminiscent of The Shining, I still enjoyed it so much that I went round it twice (in the time it took my friend to go round it once). If you ever go, the secret seems to be that at every turn you go the opposite way to the way you think you should go (as someone with the directional skills of a blind puppy, this is probably advice I should adopt for every situation, not just when I find myself in
a maze), although whether I'd be quite as confident with this method when the poles were replaced by Cavalry with swords kicking up dust to disorientate you remains to be seen, but at the time I was pretty happy strolling around like Johnny Maze-beater, claiming to have defeated Zhuge Liang's greatest strategy.
One of the slight disappointments for me overall (and this is in no way specific to Long Zhong or Xiangyang) has been the lack of genuinely old stuff in China. The reasons for this are fairly well known of course and there's little point in going over them here but for a country with an incredible amount of history it is disappointing to turn up at many of the sites with a few a famous and notable exceptions and find that almost everything is a modern replica of something that used to be there. Particularly because unlike, say, Greece, where it is made very obvious which bits are new and which bits are old, here, again with a few notable exceptions, the only signs up are the ones saying that the building/wall you're looking at is 2,000 years old, and it's only the scaffolding and building dust
around the suspiciously new looking, clean building that tips you off.
It isn't only at Long Zhong that Zhuge Liang is commemorated, in the new part of the city, near the huge WANDA shopping mall, there is Zhuge Liang square which is home to night time dancing, pool tables, a fountain, a fun fair, men whipping these spinning top things, and the biggest statue I have ever seen. It's a lovely place to go to at night and the statue really is an impressive thing to see: bronze coloured with a back drop of the mall and a very fancy looking hotel, it has the sort of impressive and imposing look that statues should have. He stands there looking almost regal, with one hand behind his back and the other holding a fan (the particular type of fan made from crane feathers that he is famous for) with a look of pride and dignity on his face - presumably never expecting that one day his greatest achievement would be tamed by a 27 year old kid from Liverpool.
Pura Vida
Dave
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