D14: 府谷 → 马镇

October 4, 2024

I appreciate products that embrace the idea that they're using a herb named "duck shit"

After a brief interlude on the Shanxi side of the Yellow River to look up in horror at the number of stairs we would need to climb if we wanted to check out a modern pagoda which we'd seen during the stop and go traffic we'd gotten during the last thirty minutes of the previous night's bus, it's time for us 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, Qianfodong² 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.

Chosen solely on account of being the only hotel on this side of the Yellow River listed as "foreigner friendly," the Front Desk was fine. The security guard, on the other hand, kept calling people³ trying to find some reason we shouldn't be allowed to stay.

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 also 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 Dai⁴) 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.

In a park on the Shanxi side of the Yellow, a statue depicting the river as a nurturing mother

Nice paving stones on the Shanxi side of the river

Leaving Shanxi for Shaanxi, neither province has bothered to have a "good-bye" or "welcome" sign

Places where religion is performed rather than expressed, China's Recognized Places of Historical Interest—even when they aren't Major Tourist Sites—don't welcome a hundred supplicants to the God of Wealth Shrine to leave behind embroideries, red velvet banners, framed pictures, and their own statues of Caishen. They don't encourage families wanting a child to place stacks of miniature shoes on the Guanyin Shrine.

They—unlike in Europe or Southeast Asia—are dead, unchanging places. They aren't perfumed by clouds of incense and dust; and they never, ever, ever⁵ have been granted permission for the construction of new shrines and new monuments, or the excavation of new carvings⁶ from the rock face.

Collection of gifted Caishen in the God of Wealth Shrine

Every little nook and cranny on the rock face had gotten additions such as these

But this Qianfodong in Fugu is wonderfully, delightfully, refreshingly different. And, if we got a little bit too carried away with behaviors (like looking behind or underneath things) that are totally acceptable⁷ in the sorts of un-touristed places we normally go (for fun or with), the monk who rightfully chastised us accepted the apology without too much more than a tongue lashing.

From Qianfodong until Dr. M and I parted ways at the train station in Wubao 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.

I would have called this sandstone door lion "one of the most weathered I have ever seen"

Except that, her proximity to him is the only reason I knew the lioness on the other side had, at some point in her history, been a statue

The stairs up to Qianfodong are considering whether or not they'd rather be a ramp

Concrete stairs down to street level, probably built over top of stairs that had given up on being stairs

A more recent set of stairs heading up to a side entrance

Providing electricity and controlling flooding, dams along the Yellow River (like the one just upstream from Fugu that we'd seen from the bus) 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 both 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.

Speaking of running trails and riverside promenades, we came down to the park inside the levee to check out a pop-up Space Exploration Museum that was way more interesting looking from up top

Once we were down below, however, ways back up were few and far between. Eventually, once all pretense at a park disappeared, we found ourselves having to climb back up the levee

An oddly flimsy⁸ warning sign "when the water is this high, it's moving that fast"

Depending on their level of economic development, the cities, towns, and villages it passes are—by and large—completely missing the expected riverside promenades, parks, gardens, and running trails that ought to have been built within the past decade.

Whether they're lived in or abandoned, the villages and scattered houses we pass aren't just far above the current 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.

Stunning wall paintings in one of the caves at Qianfodong

And, the date according to the traditional sixty year cycle⁹

I may not know their names¹⁰, and I may have never seen them illustrated in this fashion but I recognize many of the figures from other temples

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.

It's pastoral. It's pretty. Round upon round of straightening and regrading has made for a nice, wide road that—if the government weren't actively restricting trucks from taking this—could carry 100× the volume of traffic using it. But, even as used as we are to the benefits of urbanization emptying the spaces between cities, we aren't used to places where the spaces were never very full in the first place.

This set in the next cave over look to be trying to copy that style

Didn't find a date on these and their "nice enough but not as nice as the first set" is why Dr. M thinks the other set is probably 1930 instead of 1990.

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.

I will then screw things up for us by thinking that the overpriced 60y I'm told for both of us is a "price per room" rather than a "price per person" such that everyone and their uncle tries to overcharge us for everything from the rice we didn't have with dinner to the spare Apple charger we decide not to buy when getting a bowl to go looking for the leak in Dr. M's tire.

Fire extinguishers in the tunnel. I walked. She rode. We both thought it was horrible.

¹ Without checking the Antiquities Atlas or going to look in person, the first set of "holes in the cliff" which we had seen from the bus—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 Which literally means "Thousand Buddha Cave" and, after "Big Buddha Temple" is probably one of the Top Three Names for cave temples.

³ At a minimum, this included the hotel owner and the local police station. It also seemed to include some random friends of his.

Unique in that there are no signs of previous usage, a bathroom break by the side of the road at the first "I can duck behind that" we've seen in a while

⁴ I'm not actually sure if that's National or Provincial

⁵ Well, hardly ever

⁶ Finished in 2011, the Arhat Cave at Daxiangshan is a rare example of new carvings being allowed at a Major Site. However, that was over ten years ago. The most recent of the new monuments at Qianfodong is a little over a year old

⁷ 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.