The first modern pagoda (that I will later on learn is used to burn the previous year's couplets and other such paper goods) that I come across is worth stopping for twenty minutes to make a video.

The ninth isn't even worth going 50m out of my way so I can snap a photo.

Today is a very full day. From pine trees slashed to ooze sap that will become one of the raw ingredients in turpentine to riverside scenery along a river so calm and so flat, it's practically a lake. Even considering that there's a hydroelectric dam somewhere downstream of me, it still shouldn't be such a perfect, glassy, calm like the ocean at slack tide.

The Liu Family Ancestor Temple—with it's second floor that's alternately fallen in and so disused I don't dare climb up the stairs to take a look—should have been the highlight of the day. In absolute terms of time spent in a single place or time spent on editing videos, it and it's Cultural Revolution Big Character Slogans certainly got the bulk of my attention.

However, it's the Baqiu People's Auditorium that's the actual highlight. Now filled with sewing machines and turned into a clothing factory by some boss making product for companies too small to care about production line control, the river stone mosaics above the doors are a stunning and unique example of folk art.

Sure, the Liu Temple, with it's unexpectedly large and complete selection of mostly non-vandalized ephemera, is cool. But, it's cool in the same way that lots of other things are cool. These basically forgotten mosaics (and I'm not even sure that mosaic is the right word) are different. Rocket ship, airplane, truck, it's basic "rah, rah, development" content that isn't particularly unusual. What's unusual is that someone took different sizes and shapes of pebbles and made low reliefs in multiple shades of natural stone.

I didn't even intend to go to the Baqiu People's Auditorium. It was an accident of trying out a new to Chinese mapping software feature of being able to set intermediate destinations and my needing to pick a random spot in Baqiu or else the routing to Xiajiang would take me across the Gan River and put me on the National Road earlier than I wanted.

Creak my way into town, hungry and tired because each of the three jars of tinned fruit I'd had during the day suppressed my need to feed when I got to somewhere with food and now I was starving! First discovery is that my booked hotel chosen for being listed as having an elevator not only doesn't but that they've also got a second floor lobby. Luckily, that's enough to earn me a free cancellation. Unluckily though, the also listed as having an elevator new place (which at least has a first floor lobby) also doesn't have an elevator.