Snap to cold

This was most of yesterday's nearly 24-hour trip back from China; Detroit layover was a little under three hours, and the connecting flight to LGA arrived early.

Some friends from Columbus stayed at our place last week, and were driving west as we flew east. "We reached Columbus late last night," they report, "ahead of the polar temps. On the eve of Jan 20, it seems we’re entering an ice age." 

Traveling far away I've managed to keep awareness of the impending storm on the back burner, except as the lingering question "how will I start a class the day the deportation razzias begin?"

树木

Some trees from the China trip, in the order I saw them. 

 Shanghai's plane trees

Made-to-order woods in front of the newly opened Shanghai Museum East in Pudong.

A 500 year old cypress at the Confucius temple in Quzhou. 

Gnarled and thriving tree - its trunk mostly hollow - at Wuyishan

Perfect cone

 

A thousand-year-old tree in Wuyishan, beneath which a Daoist temple has recently been rebuilt.

Fernful tree at Wuyishan.

Some of the trees doing their thing atop and beneath the Danxia of Wuyishan

Reminder that Wuyishan's is a humid subtropical forest 

Fantasy trees (hand painted) at Xiamei Ancient Town near Wuyishan

Representatives of the thousands upon thousands of recently planted trees we saw along newly laid roads. housing complexes and parks, all propped up by pyramids of bamboo

A closer-up view of the base of the Chinese banyan I showed you a few days ago. An artist has garlanded it with an oyster shell dragon.

Convivial Chinese banyan cluster in a park in Quanzhou.

The west pagoda of Kaiyuan Temple in Quanzhou, framed by some young Chinese banyans in early morning light.

Base of an 800-year-old banyan at Kaiyuan.

Mountain reminder that, thanks to the Great Leap Forward, old growth forests are as good as nonexistent in most of China.

Millennarian tree at Cao'an Buddhist temple (the one with the image of Mani).

Even palm trees get replanted and propped up.

 Call for a different relationship to trees at Wuyishan Museum

Microcosm

For a final day in Fuzhou, a visit to the fabled Hakka 土楼 tulou, villages built as square or cylindrical fortresses. It feels like a village rolled up and folded in on itself, but also like a proto-apartment building, or even something from a sci-fi movie. In this late 19th century one, 怀远楼 Huaiyuan, four layers of small rooms with tiny windows are arrayed around an inner ring, creating a corridor of market stalls on its outside, and an open ring of kitchens on the inside - no plumbing in the rooms! Inside that is a temple/classroom. Other tulou have different, bigger or smaller constructions inside, and some are still inhabited. As a solution to a design problem, they're brilliant and evocative. To live in, perhaps a little too panoptical for me!

Emporium

Apologies for radio silence! We had three full wonderful days in 泉州 Quanzhou, a bustling southern city which proved the perfect complement to the natural wonders of Wuyi. A UNESCO world heritage site, "Emporium of the World in Song-Yuan China" described sometimes as a "museum of world religions," Quanzhou - known to the world as Zaytun - was the main port of the maritime Silk Road, a cosmopolitan trading hub with communities from as far away as the Levant. 

During its peak there may have been as many as six mosques here - the 11th century shell of one, modeled on a mosque in Damascus, is a major site (you can see it just beneath the first of the two pagodas at right above) and an inspiration for an architecture of peaked arches. Beyond Buddhists and Daoists galore, there were also Christians, many Nestorian, and even a Hindu community, 300 pieces of whose temple - the only one known in China - have been excavated in recent decades. A splendid museum celebrates the way these traditions influenced each other, the city's inclusive spirit - and the virtues of trade.

Perhaps most thrilling for a scholar of religion is what's described as the only Manichaean temple in the world, though it's apparently been flying under the radar as a Buddhist temple, and is operating as such today too. Someone's left a big stack of spirit money for burning here, and another was busily throwing moon blocks on the floor for guidance. Much more anon - I have seven hours on a train day after tomorrow - but for now here's a centenarian Chinese banyan near where we stayed, one of many marvelous trees.

Woo-ee!

If floating through the cliffs of Wuyishan on a raft was fun, actually walking around, over and under (!) them and the forests and tea farms wrapped around them is another experience again! Quick selection of pictures, with commentary in a few days...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

九曲

We came to Wuyishan prepared. The Shanghai Museum East displayed the whole length of a four century old scroll painting of the famous "nine bends," a sandstone landscape full of gnarly scholars' stone-like mountains full of temples and travelers. Nothing could really look this loopy, surely? But I wanted to confirm! 

This scene near the start is the closest I managed to correlation of what we saw and what the painter depicted. Not too much of a stretch! 

I'll let some other scenes of the two-hour journey speak for themselves...

And so it goes...