After a brief interlude on the Shanxi side of the Yellow River to look up in horror at the stairs up to a modern pagoda which we'd seen from the bus on the way into town, it's time to cross into Shaanxi and go back upstream in search of the closest of the cave temples¹.

A National Key Protected Cultural Heritage Site since 1996, Qianfodong was a fascinating example of a place that had been recognized for it's historic importance while also being allowed to remain a living, breathing place of worship.

I've never before seen such a rich patchwork of old, older, new, and newest with religious icons scattered all over the place, monks still resident on site, and a dearth of protective glass or signs warning of the evils of flash photography. More importantly than my having never seen something like this, as someone whose primary field of research focuses on historic and modern people's interaction with religious rock carvings, Dr. M had never seen something like this.

Sure you get the occasional place that's made it all the way to being a Provincial Cultural Heritage Protection Site without having all it's movable bits carted off to the local museum and research institutes for conservation and study, but National sites (rather like the Confucius Temple in Dai²) tend to have a strictly placed set of clean and uniform offerings in front of each idol put there by someone whose job it is to set out beautiful displays of fruit and colored mantou and remove them again before they go moldy. They aren't perfumed by clouds of incense and dust. And they never, ever, ever³ have been granted permission for new shrines, new monuments, or new carvings to be made.

At least in China, Recognized Places of Historical Interest—even when they aren't Major Tourist Sites—are mostly sterile places where religion is performed rather than expressed. They aren't places where a hundred supplicants to the God of Wealth Shrine have left embroideries, red velvet banners, framed pictures, and their own statues of Caishen. They aren't places where families wanting a child have left miniature shoes on the Guanyin Shrine. They aren't alive.

But this Qianfodong⁴ in Fugu is wonderfully, delightfully, refreshingly different. And, if we got a little too carried away with behaviors (like looking behind or underneath things) that are totally acceptable⁵ in the places we normally go, the monk who chastised us accepted the apology without too much more than a tongue lashing.

From here until Dr. M and I parted ways four days later, we would follow the course of the Yellow River downstream along a mostly de-trucked route that had also undergone relatively recent straightening and grading. 

Dams along the Yellow River (like the one just upstream from Fugu) to provide electricity and control flooding have made the valley substantially safer than it was even 20 or 30 years ago, but the raging volume of water with it's sudden, dangerous constantly forming, reforming, and disappearing whirlpools and sandbars caused by the loess that gives the river it's color and it's name make the Yellow entirely unlike any other Chinese river.

There is no shipping. No docks. No fish farms.

The cities it passes through are missing the expected riverside promenades, parks, gardens, and running trails.

Whether lived in or abandoned, the villages and scattered houses aren't just far above the water line, they're mostly all far above the highest potential historic waterline.

The Yellow River is not a nurturing river. It does not irrigate. It does not bring life to the land. Rushing south and east as it carries thousands of cubic meters of water per second, it is a massive inland sea draining hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of land.

The Yellow River is a monster.

And, as befits the road that runs alongside such a beautiful monster, although our road south will have orchards full of red dates in the process of being harvested and the occasional field full of grain, we will often go a dozen or more kilometers with no people, no shops, no houses, no restaurants, no resupply points. Just river and river road.

Which is why, when we got into Ma we were grateful—dirty as it was—for an unlicensed guesthouse above a convenience store and restaurant combo across the street from the bright new Senior Citizens Activity Center.

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¹ Without checking the Antiquities Atlas or going to look in person, the first set of "holes in the cliff" while almost certainly shaped by human hands were sufficiently indeterminate on the religious versus residential scale that heading in our intended direction of travel made more sense.

² I'm not actually sure if that's National or Provincial

³ Well, hardly ever

⁴ Which literally means "Thousand Buddha Cave" and, after "Big Buddha Temple" is probably one of the Top Three Names for cave temples.

⁵ Even if the abbess were to hand me a broom and tell me to go dust the primary object of devotion while I'm up there, I don't think I could ever manage—as Dr. M has—to be climbing on an altar while devotees are praying to the Buddha.