Changting Longyan Page 4

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Changting Page 4

"Little Red Religious Center!"
(Click Thumbnails for larger images)
Click for Changting Page 1 Introduction to "Little Red Shanghai"
Click for Changting Page 2 (Hakka Museum, Old Town, Hakka Maids, etc.)
Click for Changting Page 3 (Hakka Cuisine and "Drinking Culture")
Click for Changting Page 5 (Hakka Hamlet of Tufang)
Click for Changting Photo Album by Photographer "Babushka" (Great Photos of Hakka Festivals!)

“China’s two most beautiful small cities are Fenghuang in Hunan, and Changting in Fujian.” Rewi Alley

Buddhists and Taoists at the Same Table It’s ironic that Little Red Shanghai is also a Little Red Religious Center. Changting hosts at least a dozen religions—everything from Buddhism, Confucianism, Catholicism, Taoism, and Protestantism to Mazu worship, animism, Hakka Mother worship, and the State Sports Lottery. One Changting mountain has a Buddhist temple on the bottom and Taoists on the top. Babushka exclaimed, “Rare indeed when both Buddhists and Taoists eat from the same plate!”

Confucius and Cobwebs Changting’s enormous Confucian temple, built in 1133 AD, is currently under restoration. My guide proudly informed me, “Taiwan has an exact duplicate of this temple. And in almost 1000 years it has never had cobwebs. It’s a miracle!” But come to think of it, I’ve never seen cobwebs in churches either. (Maybe I can go online and get the secret off the 'web'?)

Southern Meditation Temple (南禪寺Nanchan Si) Chinese admire Yugong, who patiently shoveled away at two troublesome mountains that blocked his way and his view. He said, “If I die before it’s finished, my sons will continue, and grandsons, and their grandsons….”

God eventually took pity and moved the mountains, and the moral is [Fortune cookie, please!] … Never give up and you’ll succeed!

Changting’s Buddhists haven’t moved mountains, but they’ve leveled one! They lopped off an entire mountain to provide the perfect fengshui for the Song Dynasty Southern Meditation Temple, which is being rebuilt at a cost of over 50 million Yuan!

By 2010, this will be the largest Buddhist complex in Jiangxi, Fujian and Guangdong provinces, with three temples on three different levels, one containing a massive Buddha carved of pure white jade.

They must have felled a forest for the beautifully engraved wooden columns, posts, and eaves. Too bad they’ll soon be painted in gaudy red, yellow and blue. I much prefer North Fujian’s earthy whites and browns.

The Buddhist Abbess asked me, “Does Xiamen University have a Department of Religions?”
“I don’t think so,” I said, “but I teach business, which is like a religion for some people.”

She ignored me and said, “We want to start a religious study center, perhaps in Xiamen, or Fuzhou.”

The idea intrigued me. Xiamen has NanPuTuo monastery and China’s oldest Protestant church. Only 90 minutes to the north is Quanzhou, UNESCO’s World Museum of Religion.

Maybe I should start taking up a collection.

After the Nanchang Temple I visited the nondescript Catholic church, built around 1920 or so. It was tucked away inconveniently down Shuimen Gang (水门港), a side alley off ZhaoZheng Rd. (兆证路), and locked up tight. But I enjoyed watching the lady outside the gate make miniature umbrellas. Some children offered me some of their mud pies. “Next time,” I promised, and made a mental note to be sure there was no next time.

Mazu’s Tianhou Palace (汀洲府天后宫 ) Landlocked Changting boasts the largest of the Ting River’s 19 Palaces to Mazu Goddess of Seafarers, because until only recently, the Ting was their only means of transportation. Today, the eternally young goddess resides in style in the TianHou Palace (天后宫).
To reach Miss Mazu’s place, I headed north on ZhaoZheng Rd. (兆证路) to Shui Dong Street (水东街). Across the street from the Ting River Mansion (Tinjiang DaSha, 汀江大厦), I hung a left down the narrow alley guarded by a granny making wooden scrub brushes and a lady selling fish that swam about blissfully in red and blue plastic basins, unaware of their fishy fates.

Halfway across the ancient bridge I stopped for photos of the Ting River flowing past the magnificent Tang Dynasty walls, and caught a few shots of the women below, pounding their laundry to pieces on river boulders.

Across the river a vine- and moss-covered wooden house was perched above a Tang Dynasty gate. I took the road to the right, past old buildings of the simple, unadorned, time-stained wooden architecture that I love. One wooden shack overhanging the street reminded me of a suspended gypsy caravan.

The road was lined on both sides with Hakka selling vegetables, meats, sacks of grains (barley, lentils, peas, rice), spare parts for woks and electric hot plates and kettles, and assorted bits of hardware spread out on sheets. Just up the river, on the left, at the entrance to Mazu’s TianHou Palace (天后宫), a grinning grandpa greeted me with (what else?), “You’ve come! Have some tea!”

Cross-Straits Mazu Meeting The monks bustled about preparing for a delegation of 40 Mazu worshippers bringing their family idols from Taiwan on March 30th (two days later). The little Mazu idols travel in style. Chinese often book a separate airline ticket for the idol. I wonder if they request vegetarian food for her?

Loudspeakers played some kind of chant tape, though I can’t tell a Buddhist chant from a Mazu chant. Both are repetitive, drone-like affairs. But in Quanzhou’s Kaiyuan Temple I once heard an English chant tape. Either the monks were studying English or it was an attempt to convert foreign devils to Buddhism. The tape repeated, over and over in the same funeral monotone, “Happy Birthday to You, Happy Birthday to You,”—for an entire 60 minutes!

But what’s 60 minutes in the eternal scheme of things?
Ohmmmmm.

Mazu’s Christmas Trees Wafts of smoke rose from giant urns impaled with humongous incense sticks. Four smaller statues guarded a 300-year-old statue of Mazu hiding behind the urns.

One was a blue man with horns, the other a red man with one horn in his forehead, and the other two were fair maidens. Two fair maidens and two horny men. It was food for thought.

To Miss Mazu’s left and right were ten-foot Christmas tree-like cones decorated with 3,600 illuminated gold images of Mazu. They revolve constantly, but Mazu’s monks were happy to put the brakes on them long enough to allow me a few good photos.

Sixty Yuan a year gets your name below one of the 7,200 gold Mazus. After some quick math, I wondered why on earth I’m teaching business to Chinese. They could teach us capitalists a thing or two.

Mazu’s Boudoir When not holding court, Mazu hangs out in her ornate chamber behind the temple. The front room has a round table with a polished stone table with five elegant bowls of rice set out with chopsticks, and saucers full of delectable vegetarian fare. Her private boudoir in back boasts a carved wooden bed hung with rich tapestries---not bad for a girl who renounced the world and everything in it! With similar chambers in Tianhou palaces around the world, she must be netting quite a profit from saving ships.

To the right of Mazu’s boudoir is a statue of her ever vigilant mother and father. An inscription by the DaoGuang Emperor, written 170 years ago, memorializes those who contributed to the renovation of Mazu’s temple—even though they never got their names on the electric Christmas trees.

The monks served tea and explained the temple’s history and their plans for expansion, and then we headed to the Protestant Church where Comrade Zhou EnLai made his headquarters in April 1932.

Church of the Revolution Just across the river from Mazu’s temple is the Protestant church commandeered by the Communist Party in the 1920s. The sign reads, “Putian Tongqing” (庆同天普), “Let all under heaven rejoice.” I’m not sure who wrote it—the Communists or the Christians.

Protestants have been in Changting about a century. In 1908, the London Missionary Society opened the Gospel Hospital (福音医院) on East Gate St. (东门街, Dongmen Jie). It became the Red Army hospital in 1925, and one of the foreign missionary doctors is famous for his patriotic support of the Communist party—and for delivering one of Mao’s sons.

The Protestant church was designated a National Level Historic Preservation site in 1960, but used as a government office until 1988, when it was returned to Christians.

As I photographed the church’s locked exterior, two ladies in their eighties rushed out, raised their arms and voices in greetings and ushered us into the church courtyard through a side door. They apologized for the locked doors, explaining that burglars had recently stolen their TV, VCR, and other valuables.
One lady’s husband was the doctor who patched up my guide when he was a rascally child, never imagining the mischievous kid would grow up to be a big potato in the city!

This couple had moved to Changting during the Japanese air raids of 1942. She too was a doctor, trained in Russian methods of medicine. She was the best midwife in town. “When there was no hope for either mother or child,” she said, “they called me in as the last resort, and I usually saved both.”

Her apartment was a crowded museum of the past. Wall-to-wall photos from the 1920s and 1930s included her daughter, a martial arts expert, and her five grandsons, six granddaughters, and other relatives, some of whom are professors at Xiamen University.

Books and pamphlets were stacked everywhere, even on the mosquito net-covered four-poster bed. Her biggest treasure was a giant large-print bible mailed to her in 1992 by a man in Taipei, Taiwan. Beneath a poster of a cross with the Chinese inscription, “Jesus Loves the World,” was a photo of Deng Xiao Ping. But it doesn’t hurt to cover all your bases.

Birth of a Revolution--in a Church? A padlocked, green wooden door behind the church led to Zhou Enlai’s former quarters. We ascended the dusty, narrow wooden steps to the top floor, and the plain wooden rooms where the Revolution was born.

I sat at Zhou Enlai’s plain wooden desk and looked out at the Ting River and the city’s Tang Dynasty Walls. The contrast between the simplicity of the place and the scope of its implications was mind-boggling.

I suspect Zhou and Mao had no idea that the strategies they scrawled on a cheap blackboard would eventually drive out us foreign devils, and transform an ancient culture on the verge of senility into a superpower with Long March Rockets, Shanghai fashion shows, Big Macs, and Wal-Marts.

The rooms that birthed a nation are now storerooms, but no one dares touch Zhou Enlai’s bedroom, which still has nothing but the small bed, humble wooden desk, and one rickety chair.
Plain, but charged with power and destiny.

The English Revolution The main hall is now the site of another revolution—that of language. One way China is reintegrating with our shrinking global community is by teaching the masses English. The former hall of the revolution now holds weekly English lessons around the long green wooden table, pews, and blackboard, where the pastor has scrawled in neat English cursive, “Nice to meet you!”

Click Here for Changting Page 5 (Hakka Hamlet of Tufang)

P.S. Don’t miss these great Changting Sites!

Source of the Ting River

Ancient Well (老古井Laogu Jing)
Changting’s oldest well, considered a miracle because it never dries up, whatever the conditions. On top of that, while Mao ZeDong lived in Changting, every morning he used the well to wash his face, brush his teeth, and clean his clothes (not necessarily in that order). And to make the well healthier, he brought in a well specialist, which I thought was a well-meaning gesture.

Tingzhou Hakka Research Institute (中国汀洲客家研究中心 Zhongguo Tingzhou Kejia Yanjiu Zhongxin)

Tingzhou Ancient City Wall (汀洲古城墙Tingzhou Gucheng Qiang)
Tang Dynasty, at least 1200 years old.

Dragon Hill against White Clouds (龙山白云—Longshan Baiyun) – the Jin Sha Temple.

Zhongshan Park and the Qiu Bai Pavilion (秋白亭 Qiubai Ting).
Every two-ox town in China has a Zhongshan Park (named after Sun Yat-sen, but called Lenin Park during the Soviet Chinese days). The Qiu Bai Pavilion is named after Qiu Bai, the young revolutionary martyr. To the rear of the Hakka Museum you can see where he was imprisoned, and where he was shot.

Hakka Girls. They’re everywhere. Please just take photos, not the girls.

Chaodou Rock’s Shuiyun Temple. The Buddha is said to have his back to tourists because he’s piqued that so few people repent and begin life anew.

Xiamen University’s Former Campus (厦门大学校本部旧址)

A Xiamen University professor told me China had 5000 years of history but that was 18 years ago, so now its 5018 years of history.

And 3 months.

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