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Published: August 6th 2007
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A Night at the Opera...
Spitting Fire/Changing Faces, Sichuan Opera, Chengdu. "You have your thoughts and I have mine. This is the fact and you can't change it even if you kill me."
(Ba Jin, shouted out at the end of a televised public humiliation in the People's Stadium of Shanghai, during the "Cultural Revolution" on the 20th June 1968). Ba Jin who was one of the greatest of China's 20th century writers was born in Chengdu in 1904.
Chengdu was the latest stop in my world trip
(click here). The city is famous for its spicy food, the Giant Pandas, the Sichuan Opera and the nearby Leshan Giant Buddha (the world's largest Buddha). It was also the home of many literary figures including the Tang era poet
Du Fu and the more recent Ba Jin (1904-2005).
Ba Jin (real name Li Yaotang) took his pen name from the Russian anarchists Bakunin and Kropotkin. He was rehabilitated after the Cultural Revolution but I doubt the Chinese authorities were ever very comfortable with his political opinions, even if he was dubbed as China's National Treasure in his last years of terminal illness.
Chengdu is yet another Chinese city in a great hurry to modernize. The City Walls described in Ba Jin's novel 'The Family' have long since been offered up in sacrifice to
the great bulldozer.
At the end of the last blog
(Beyond the Clouds to the Kingdom of Women) I left you in the small city of Xichang about to catch the train to Chengdu. In the last blog I mentioned that I failed to sleep on the sleeper train to Kunming. This time, although it was the same type of hard sleeper carriage I got a good nights sleep. I don't know why. The beds were just as short and narrow. I must have been tired.
Giant Pandas and a night at the opera
In the city of Chengdu I did some of the obvious things. This included a visit to see the Giant Pandas at the
Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding. A visit that is well worth while. If you want to see a lot more pictures of the Pandas and would like to know more about the the centres attempts to preserve and breed Pandas click here. I also visited the Sichuan Opera (which you can see from the pictures in this blog).
I hung around in Chengdu for several days because it took me 4 days to write up the last blog. Finally on the 11th of
June I made my way to the nearby town of Leshan. It is a 2 hour bus ride to Leshan along a very fast modern highway. I spent a couple of days in Leshan. The Giant Buddha and the scenic area around it are a
UNESCO World Heritage site. The Buddha carved into the cliff face is the world's largest Buddha at 71m high.
I returned to Chengdu on the 13th of June. I then booked my train ticket to Xi'an for the next day. So, I left Chengdu at 4pm on the 14th of June. Another overnight sleeper train, this time into the cultural heartland of China.
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