by Bill Porter
After about twenty minutes, we finally emerged at a small farmstead. We were covered with scratches and thought the officer might have led us through the bamboo as punishment for entering a restricted area. But in truth, he was trying to help us. He pointed to the farmhouse and said that before the telecommunications station was built, the farmhouse was the only structure on the mountain. Just then, a farmer appeared in the doorway and waved for us to come inside.
The farmer said he had been living here for the past twenty years. He moved here shortly after the Red Guards tore down the other buildings that comprised a small temple that was built next to Stonehouse’s hut after he died. Stonehouse said there was a spring behind his hut, and the farmer showed it to us. It was still flowing, just as it was when Stonehouse wrote #55:
The Way of the Dharma is too singular to copy
but a well-hidden hut comes close
I planted bamboo in front to form a screen
from the rocks I led a spring into my kitchen
gibbons bring their young to the cliffs when fruits are ripe
cranes move their nests from the gorge when pines turn brown
lots of idle thoughts occur during meditation
I gather the deadwood for my stove
The farmer’s hut was twice as big as Stonehouse’s hut, its walls were made of stone not mud, and its roof was now tiled. But the spring still flowed in back, and the slopes were still covered with tea and bamboo, and a couple of pines were still enjoying the breeze. The farmer invited us inside for a cup of tea. He said he lived here alone. His children had grown up, and his wife lived in the village at the foot of the mountain. Like Stonehouse in #183, he didn’t have much to say:
I built my hut on Hsia Summit
plowing and hoeing make up my day
half a dozen terraced plots
two or three hermit neighbors
I made a pond for the moon
and sell wood to buy grain
an old man with few schemes
I’ve told you all that I own
It was with great difficulty that we tore ourselves away and said goodbye to the farmer and the installation commander. But the sun was going down. By the time we returned to Huchou, our driver had to use his headlights. When we entered the bus station to pick up our bags, Mister Kao was still there. He was waiting for us. He said he had arranged for us to spend the night right there. He said the bus station had its own hotel. It even had a name: Bus Station Hotel. It was quite spartan, but why not? Three beds cost 30RMB. How could we refuse? Before Mister Kao headed home, he even gave us directions to one of his favorite restaurants. It was called Tinglienfang and was a ten-minute walk. The walk was worth it. They had the best steamed buns we had ever eaten. Afterwards, we went back to our room, opened a couple beers and watched the moon outside our window rise above the bus station parking lot. It wasn’t the Master of Nets Garden in Suchou, but we couldn’t have been happier. What a day!
The next morning there was a knock on our door. It was Mister Kao. He said the bus for our next destination left in thirty minutes. It was only 6:30, and we weren’t planning on leaving that early, much less getting up. But Mister Kao was in charge of our lives now, and we were grateful. We got our gear together and went out onto the street in front of the bus station and bought some fried bread for breakfast. After coming back to the bus station the night before, we had told Mister Kao our next destination was Mokanshan, a mountain about fifty kilometers south of Huchou. He said he would see if he could arrange something for us. Apparently he did. He said the 6:30 bus would take us to Wukang. He said he called the bus station manager there, and the manager had arranged for a van to take us up the mountain for 100RMB. That wasn’t cheap, but we had no choice. Mister Kao said there was only one bus a day to Mokanshan that time of year, and it didn’t leave until the afternoon.
Mister Kao was like a travel agent. The previous day he’d arranged for the taxi to take us to the top of Hsiamushan, then arranged for us to spend the night at the bus station hotel, and now he was arranging transportation to our next destination. Before we said good-bye, we walked out to the bus station parking lot and took a picture together with one of the drivers. A few minutes later, we waved our travel agent bodhisattva good-bye.
Thirty minutes later, just as Mister Kao had told us, the bus station manager in Wukang was waiting for us, and so was the van he had hired to take us to Mokanshan. The name was known to every businessman and bureaucrat in the Yangtze Delta. It was where people went to get away from the summer heat, assuming they could afford to take time off from work. We weren’t trying to get away from the heat, but we thought we should check it out, if only for future reference.
It was a fall day, a sunny fall day, and it was a beautiful drive through the countryside and into the mountains. By the time we got there, we wished it had taken longer. We were there in less than an hour. Mokanshan was different from the other mountains we had visited. Instead of temples, the mountain was dotted with villas. It was 700 meters above the surrounding countryside, and the surrounding countryside was only a few meters above sea level. During the summer, its slopes were ten degrees centigrade cooler than Suchou or Hangchou or Shanghai.
As we got out of the van, we had to put on our jackets. It was October 23, but the tourist season was already over. We were practically the only guests at the only hotel still open. It was called the Yinshan and was a rambling old place. According to the manager, it had once been the villa of a Shanghai official. He said that most of the villas on the mountain were built by foreigners decades ago but that nowadays they were used to accommodate the employees of various government agencies. His was one of the few hotels open to the public.
Since the day was still young, we took a short hike through the bamboo that surrounded everything. But except for the bamboo-covered slopes that stretched as far as we could see, there wasn’t much else. I’m guessing that people enjoyed hiking around the mountain during the summer. But we didn’t feel like hiking. We walked back to our hotel and took the day off. After lunch, we even took naps. And after dinner, we sat on the balcony outside our room and watched the moon disappear over the roof of our hotel. It was certainly different from watching the moon from the bus station hotel the previous night. It was quiet. And it was cold. We should have had some whiskey, but all we had was beer. I’m not sure what we were expecting to find on Mokanshan. But whatever it was, it wasn’t there.
We left the next morning at seven on the daily bus to Wukang and were there an hour later. From Wukang, we took another bus to Teching. It was only fifteen minutes away, and it was on the train line. Since the train to our next destination didn’t leave for two hours, we stashed our bags at the luggage depository and hired a motorized three-wheeler to take us to Leitienchen. In Huchou, Mister Kao had told us Leitienchen was famous for its freshwater pearls, and we decided that would be more interesting than waiting at the train station. We told our driver to take us to the pearls.
We were there in fifteen minutes. But if there were pearls, they were hiding. It was just a village on a canal. When we asked the driver about this, he told us to follow him. After parking his vehicle, he led us into an alley that wound through the village and eventually came out at a pearl factory. It was located along a canal that was filled with wire cages full of oysters. There was no one at the gate, and our driver led us straight into the work area where girls were sitting in pairs on benches. We watched as one of the girls opened an oyster, removed its mantle, and sliced the mantle into tiny squares. Then the other girl picked up the squares with tweezers and inserted them into the oyster. After inserting a dozen or so squares at various points in the oyster’s interior, she put the oyster in a basket. Then the two girls repeated the process with the next oyster. Apparently, the pieces of mantle acted as the irritant inside the oyster that caused it to form a pearl.
While we were taking pictures of this process, our pearl factory tour came to a sudden end. The manager storm
ed in and chased us and our driver out. Apparently, the process was supposed to be a secret. Actually, there was nothing secret about it. We had seen documentary films that showed the process. The factory manager was probably more concerned about the lack of security.
Huchou bus station bodhisattva and driver
Our driver then led us back to his vehicle. But before we headed back to Teching, I asked him if there was any place in the village where we might buy some pearls. He then led us to the village market. It was a covered area where local farmers brought their produce to sell. It wasn’t market day, and the place was nearly deserted. We thought maybe some local entrepreneurs would be selling their own homegrown pearls, but no such entrepreneurs were in sight. While we were wondering why our driver brought us there, he led us to one of the small stores that bordered the covered area. The owner had several necklaces for sale. That was probably why the factory manager chased us out. All the pearls were the property of the factory, and he was probably aware that some of them wandered out from time to time. The owner said the factory had an arrangement with another factory that turned its pearls into jewelry. Local people, she said, weren’t supposed to sell pearls to outsiders.
The woman declined to explain how the pearls in her store got there. Presumably, they were smuggled out of the factory, or produced on the sly. In any case, one strand was such a beautiful iridescent pink, and the price was so right, I bought it for my wife. We walked back to our three-wheeler in a happy mood and laughed as we slipped out of Leitien Village and the clutches of the freshwater pearl police.
18. Hangchou
By the time we got back to Teching and reclaimed our bags, we still had thirty minutes before our train was due. To kill time, we wandered into a store next to the train station. Among the items we couldn’t pass up were aluminum-backed pocket mirrors engraved with pictures of Hangchou’s famous West Lake. The lake looked so beautiful we bought a dozen to give to friends back home. Ninety minutes later, we checked into the Hangchou Overseas Chinese Hotel that overlooked the real thing. When Marco Polo visited Hangchou in the thirteenth century, he described it as the most beautiful city in the world. Taken as a whole, we thought Suchou had maintained more of its traditional charm. But nothing in Suchou could compare with Hangchou’s West Lake.
Adrift on West Lake
Lots of cities in China had a West Lake, but Hangchou’s was the most famous of them all. It wasn’t simply the lake itself—which was lovely enough—but its associations. For most of the past thousand years, Hangchou, and not Beijing, has been the cultural capital of China. This is saying a lot, but it’s true. A number of years ago, I saw a series of maps of China’s dynasties showing population densities in terms of the number of artists, poets, statesmen, and intellectuals of note. According to the maps, the area around Hangchou out-produced all other areas in China beginning in the Sung dynasty a thousand years ago, and the city maintained its prominence until the focus finally shifted to Beijing in the Ch’ing dynasty a mere 300 years ago. With so many poets and artists in residence, it isn’t surprising that the city’s lake acquired such fame.
Originally, the lake was not a lake but a lagoon formed by the nearby Chientang River. For the people who lived in Hangchou there were two problems with the lagoon. First, its water was too brackish to drink, even during droughts. Second, the tidal bore that came up the Chientang River every fall flowed into the lagoon and often flooded the city. The lake that we saw on our arrival and Marco Polo saw in the thirteenth century was the result of dikes and locks built by a series of governors beginning in the ninth century.
Since it was already past noon, we didn’t want to do anything more than enjoy the lake that everyone—including us—came to see. There were a dozen boats waiting for people like us near the promenade in front of our hotel. But first, we supplied ourselves with a few bottles of red wine. We thought we would enjoy the lake in the manner in which it was enjoyed by poets in the past. As luck would have it, we found three bottles of Marco Polo Cabernet waiting for us at our hotel’s own convenience store. We had tried a number of wines on our trip, and the Marco Polo Cabernet was by far the best. And it was produced right here in Hangchou. We weren’t sure where the grapes were from, but we weren’t interested. Unfortunately, we later learned that the company went belly up, which explained why finding a bottle was always surprising. Finding three bottles, of course, was really surprising. After leaving one of the bottles in our room for later, we went back out to the promenade and hired a boat for the modest sum of 18RMB per hour. We sat down on the sedan-style seats underneath an awning that shielded us from the sun, and the boatman cast off.
Soaking boats to fix leaks
The boatman propelled the boat by using a scull, or single oar, at the stern, sort of like the way a fish uses its tail. We were surprised how fast we went, and how smoothly. We dipped our hands into the water and watched the sunlight dance on the waves, and opened the first bottle of wine. When we asked the boatman if we could try our hand with the scull, he said passengers weren’t allowed to do anything but sit and enjoy gliding around the lake, which was what we did.
The boatman, though, had to row somewhere, so we told him to take us to the Island of Little Oceans in the southern part of the lake. The island wasn’t there when Marco Polo visited in the thirteenth century. It was made at the beginning of the seventeenth century from silt dredged from the lake bottom. But it wasn’t much of an island. The Chinese described it this way: “in the lake there is an island, and in the island there is a lake.” There were, in fact, three lakes or small ponds in the middle of the island. The island was not much more than an embankment separating the ponds from each other and from the surrounding lake. The island’s most famous sight, though, wasn’t its ponds or pavilions or the bridge that zigzagged its way across the ponds. It wasn’t on the island. A hundred meters away were three small stone pagodas standing above the water, as if in space. In former times, they were filled with candles at night and looked like apparitions of a floating world.
Our boatman dropped us off on the island, and we worked our way across the bridge to the other side, where we re-boarded our gliding palanquin and headed for an island in the northern part of the lake, at which time we opened the second bottle of wine. The second island was called Pavilion in the Lake, and that was about all it had room for, besides a small teahouse. Like Island of Little Oceans, it was made from lake silt. Despite its diminutive size, musicians performed there at night and were joined by a few boatloads of tourists. As we approached, we told the boatman to keep rowing. We didn’t want to do anything other than glide and enjoy our wine, which we did until the sun began to set. The boatman said it was quitting time and rowed back to where we got on. He said the only boats allowed on the lake after sunset were those that took people to the Pavilion in the Lake for the nightly musical performance.
As we left the lake behind, we glided down the street as if we were still in our boat—after two bottles of wine, how could we not? I’m not sure how far we glided, but we eventually realized we needed food, and I recognized one of my favorite signs: Koupuli, or “Dogs Won’t Touch ’Em.” It was a restaurant chain based in Tienchin, famous for its steamed buns. Their buns were good but not as good as the ones we had in Huchou. We also tried a bottle of Great Wall red wine with our meal. But it wasn’t as good as the third bottle of Marco Polo Cabernet. Obviously, we were under the spell of West Lake.
The next morning we recovered earlier than usual and went for a walk along the promenade in front of our hotel. West Lake looked lovely in the fog. It was so calm, the surface of the water was like glass. We had already been out on the lake the day before, but we hadn’t seen the sights that surrounded it. We went back to our hotel and rented bicycles. From our hotel we pedaled to the lake’s northeast corner, then turned west onto the road that circled the lake. A minute later, we turned off onto Paiti Causeway and followed it to Kushan Island. The causeway was named for the ninth-century poet Pai
Chu-yi (772–846), who served as the city’s governor. It was Pai who initiated the flood control measures that resulted in the formation of West Lake, and the citizens of Hangchou honored his memory with his own causeway, on top of which was a two-lane road shared by cars, bicycles, and pedestrians alike.
Just past the point where the causeway joined the island, we turned off the road onto a path reserved for pedestrians and bicycles. As we pedaled around the northern part of the island, we found ourselves alone. Everyone seemed to prefer the sights of the island’s south shore: the provincial library, the provincial museum, and the city’s famous Louwailou restaurant. We were more interested in the man who made the island his home. A minute later, we arrived at his grave. His name was Lin Ho-ching (967–1028), and he lived on the island in the early eleventh century. In fact, for the last twenty years of his life, he never left the island. Nor did he marry or have children. His wives, he said, were the plum trees he planted, and his children were the cranes he trained to dance. One of the birds was his favorite. And when Lin died, the crane died of grief. There was a pavilion near his grave that commemorated their friendship.
