I played with your heart
The south entrance through the walls of the city is remarkably well preserved. The walls themselves are mostly crumbled down to being huge angular piles of dirt. Most walled cities of China, like most walled cities of Europe no longer have any remnants of the walls. But, Zhengding had large walls for a small city. And that small city didn't have explosive growth this century so the walls have remained more or less there if not intact.
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(The walls were quite ambitious walls built during a period of growth. The city never actually expanded to fill the walls and although there are now suburbs outside the walls there are still farms inside the walls.)
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Once through the gate I was bicycling on the aptly named, charming, beautiful "Cultural Heritage Street." A surprising number of the buildings were empty. This explained why the street was so nice and clean and devoid of the sounds and smells of Chinese life.
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The shops that were occupied were occupied with sellers of artwork and faux antiques. I started to have a bad feeling about "Cultural Heritage Street" which was confirmed when I saw that some of these lovely Qing Dynasty buildings were still under construction and were not Qing Dynasty at all.
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The people of Zhengding have realized that they are living in a nice well preserved town near Beijing and are working on the principle of "if you build it they will come."
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Later, at Longxing Temple, I met some Indian tourists who were in China to do business in Beijing. The people of Zhengding city are apparently correct.
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My first stop was the Hua Pagoda of the Guanghui Temple. Admission was 10rmb and came with a lovely picture postcard. This is a lovely pagoda topped by a collection of animals and stone demons. Inside the building there are paintings and frescoes.
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It was hard to tell if the fresh plaster over some of the paintings is there to fix previous damage or if it was intentionally placed there to hide the paintings.
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Around the inner part of the pagoda were empty stone niches that once had held gods, buddhas, and demons. At the very top of the stairs there was a locked door behind which I could just see the forms of two headless Buddhas.
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I would find out later in the day, when I bought a book of photographs that the damage done to this pagoda was probably that of wind, rain, and age rather than deliberate vandalism of the Cultural Revolution. The lone photo of the pagoda shows only the stone core where the stairway is and nothing else, the carved wooden walls, floors, and ceilings are all missing.
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According to the book it was first built in the Tang Dynasty and restored in the Jin Dynasty. Obviously it was restored again and more recently than the invention of photography but the book, which was published in 1998, makes no mention of this.
My next stop was the Sumeru Pagoda of the Kayuan Temple. The entrance fee was also 10rmb. They didn't give me a postcard though. Even though the structure appeared to be in fine shape, around the perimeter of this pagoda was a wire fence with English and Chinese cautioning you to go no farther and warning you of falling objects.
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The particularly notable thing about this museum was a huge fragmented stele and a similarly huge but marginally less damaged turtle dragon creature that the stone had originally been mounted on the back of.
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They had pictures showing it being dug out of the ground mounted on the "we don't really believe in any of that superstitious nonsense about spirt walls so it is just coincedental that we have a bulletin board here" bulletin board.
After the Sumeru Pagoda I went to lunch. My method of randomly ordering whatever has resulted in some good meals, some bad meals, and the occasional surprising meal. I assume this was supposed to be an appetizer plate for three or four people. It was a mound of cold sliced roast beef in vinegar sauce for 15 rmb. Yum.
Now I went to the Longxing Temple complex. At 30 rmb this place was the most expensive place I visited today. The four Heavenly Kings (or lokapala) stand at the corners of the entrance hall. The colors are vibrant and the statues look perfect, possibly because they were rebuilt in 1982.
Parts of the Longxing Temple complex were last rebuilt as recently as 1999 and as long ago as 1958. At least some of the damage that has been repaired by the most recent historians rebuilding China's past yet again was not damage done by the Red Guard.
(Famous or important things in China have often been famous or important for a thousand years or more. They get repainted, refurbished, and rebuilt regularly or at least once every century.)
It was a temple. like most temples it had a lot of buildings full of things varying from the interesting to the dull. Like most temples you were not supposed to take interior photographs of any kind because they were hoping to sell you their book of photographs. This is a shame because the book of photographs is abyssmally done. At this point I'd only been taking photos seriously for about a year and I could have taken better pictures than most of the ones in this book.
I bought this book solely for its picture of the interior of the hall of the Vairocana Bodhisat. It wasn't the way I would have taken the photo. But, it is better than most of the photos in the book. And it is definitely better than the two pictures I surreptiously took with my cellphone after being stopped from using my real camera. The almost African faces of the four Buddhas that made up the Bodhisat were so serene and calm and just stunningly beautiful when viewed against the backdrop of blue, green, red, and gold. If I had my tripod and permission to photograph I think I could have used a whole roll of film just in that hall.
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After leaving the hall of the Vairocana Bodhisat I went searching for the toilet. Every other time I go to temples it seems that I cannot help but find the toilet wherever I go. This had held true earlier in the day (when I didn't need to pee) with every deserted courtyard I went into holding yet another bathroom.
I didn't find the toilet. I did find a display of Jade burial armor, for which they charged me 3 rmb to look at. I also got to try my luck at a singing bronze bowl. Last time, at Zhouzhou bridge, the water danced for me. This time I couldn't quite get the rythym right and it wouldn't.
After a couple of empty courtyards, and the garden of the headless Buddhas, I finally found the toilet. After completing that most necessary of business, I left the temple and bicycled home.
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