Some scenes from the recent vertiginous trip to China's northeast, more or less in sequence except this map from the museum dedicated to the neolithic Hongshan culture in Chifeng, which conveniently shows all the places we went in black, starting with Dalian at the bottom and winding up in Shenyang at the far right. ... There's a story to each pic. Ask!
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Key: Grand water display and a more mysterious coastal veil near 大连 Dalian, followed by tabletop barbecue, a friend's young son helping turn the skewers. Classic holy mountain scenery at 医巫闾山 Yiwulüshan and unique mountaintop outcroppings at 克什克腾世界地质公园阿斯哈图石林景区 Heshigten Global Geopark. Silkworms fried to perfection at a restaurant near Yiwulü. Roadrip into Inner Mongolia yielded signs in Mandarin and Mongolian, blades of giant windmills as long as a parking lot, and delicious dried stonefruits. Contrived jade dragon worship and big sand dunes at 玉龙沙湖 Yulong Sand Lake, a few hour north of 赤峰 Chifeng. An enteprising espresso-tuktuk with very good coffee at the entrance to Chifeng's 赤峰红山文化博物馆 Hongshan Culture Museum and a scene of the red mountain (=hongshan) which gives it its name. Models of pagodas at the 辽代历史文化博物馆 Liao Dynasty Cultural Museum (starting with the ancient 木塔 wooden pagoda south of Datong which we saw nine years ago), also in Chifeng, and a live v-logger in rented Qing dynasty kit holding forth among peonies at 喀喇沁王府, a Mongolian prince's mansion an hour closer to Beijing. One of a myriad fossils - this a bird-like feathered dinosaur named after Confucius - found in the Jehol Biota near 朝阳 Chaoyang, a town (at 3 million probably the smallest city we stayed in) with a fun non-chain coffee shop in an old housing complex and whose Liao dynasty pagoda is accompanied by a steady stream of circumabulators. (You might recognize it from the scale models in Chifeng.) A wall of apartment complexes in 沈阳 Shenyang and the somewhat clunky cherubs gracing the lush landscaping of the one we stayed in. Shenyang's 东陵 tomb complex for the founder of the Qing dynasty, which I remembered from my first Shenyang trip, has steles in Mongolian, Manchu, Tibetan, Arabic and Chinese and some happily overgrown roofs. A diaorama of worshipping Hongshan people from the 辽宁省博物馆 Liaoning Provincial Museum, and a fragment of a face that could be any of us any time. Just some of the offerings at a swanky seafood hotpot place, 小鱼当家. And one more view of the fossiliferous neolithic and Liao-shaped Northeast, from the seatback of our Korean Airlines Flight out.
