For months we’ve been trying without success to get a photo of a ring-necked pheasant, a bird native to China which also happens to be a common non-native gamebird in Brendan’s home state of Kansas. Despite scaring them out of the brush on a daily basis, we’ve never managed to photograph one before it takes flight.

He thinks he’s crafty . . .

Until now. Last week Emma spotted a male lying in the brush and we got off a few quick shots. He’s no trophy specimen – you can see a nicer photo in any American hunting magazine – but with only a few weeks left in the Walking the Wall shooting season (digi-“film” only), we’re just grateful we finally bagged our bird.

. . . but he can’t get away from us

Of all the Buddhist grottoes we’ve visited – Dunhuang, Matisi, Jintasi and Shikong – we’d have to say we had the most fun at Yungang Grottoes near Datong. Not that the works were as gorgeous and beautifully preserved as at Dunhuang; they weren’t. Nor were the grottoes set against a spectacular mountain backdrop like those at Matisi and Jintasi, or a private, intimate experience like we had at Shikong.

What was so enjoyable about Yungang, and what we hadn’t experienced before, was that we were able to wander about the caves more or less unrestricted. We weren’t required to hire a guide, we could linger as long as we liked, and we could take photographs wherever we wanted.

Despite being affected by air pollution from Datong, many of the colours remain extremely vivid

Construction on the caves started in 453 AD at a time when China was divided between the Northern Wei and Southern Qi dynasties. At that time, Datong was the capital city of the Northern Wei and the rulers, wanting to show how serious they were about respecting Buddhism, thought Datong would be just the place to build one of the largest collections of Buddhist art and sculptures. This was no remote trading centre like Dunhuang, this was the capital city, and the capital city deserved a good set of grottoes.

The statue at Cave 20, probably the most well-known image of Yungang

Statue sizes vary from less than an inch to nearly 20 metres high

The rulers, however, did have an ulterior motive. After declaring Buddhism the national religion, they commissioned monk Tan Yao to build five enormous Buddhist statues at Yungang in the likeness of five of the Northern Wei emperors. The message was clear – adopt Buddhism, but remember that the emperor is God. It’s hard to say how well that message went down with the loyal subjects – the dynasty only survived another 40 years or so after the completion of the caves.

Looking up at one of the statues of Buddha carved in the likeness of a Northern Wei emperor

Celestial musicians can be seen around this Buddha’s head

There are only 45 caves at Yungang, but there is an astonishing number of statues crowded into those caves – 51,000 to be precise (give or take a few). The whole complex might not be as extensive as Dunhuang, which has more than 700 caves, but you do get to see more – at Dunhuang you must join a tour that only visits 10 or so caves.

A wall of the Thousand Buddha Cave

There are only a couple of hundred here

While we had a lot of fun at Yungang, the truth is that we probably shouldn’t have had quite so much fun. Since the 1960s the caves have been protected in law by both the Chinese Government and the Datong Municipal government, and in 2001 the whole area was listed by UNESCO on the World Cultural Heritage List. But to us it seemed that on the ground the grottoes are seriously underprotected.

First of all, people are allowed to wander through the caves alone as opposed to being forced to join a guided tour, as is the case in Dunhuang. Despite the presence of security cameras, it seemed to us there was ample opportunity for vandalism, and while we didn’t see any, one idiot can do a lot of damage (as we’ve seen occasionally on the wall). And sure, it was fun to stroll around unsupervised, but when 1500-year-old treasures can be destroyed in an instant, maybe a little less freedom wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

The walls are covered in delicate little carvings like this one

The long ears and headdress are typical of the Indian Gandhara style of carving, for which Yungang is famous and quite unique

Secondly, restrictions against flash photography seem to be a dead letter. While there are signs that seem to forbid flashes, no one takes them seriously – some of the caves looked like Hollywood openings with all the flashbulbs going off. And going off in front of commercial tour guides. And guards. You’d think they could do better than that, but if they can’t, maybe they should just ban photography altogether.

Indian Gandhara style brought with it influences of Greek art into China

Finally, there is a threat to the caves coming from the outside, and that’s air pollution. Just across the road is Datong’s largest coal mine. Though the local and state governments are said to be taking steps to reduce the impact of air pollution from the mine and from traffic, we can’t find anything specific on what these steps actually are. But if they are as effective in implementing these “steps” as they are in managing the much simpler problems of access and photography, Yungang’s future could be seriously endangered.

As always, all our photos of indoor artifacts were taken without flash. It’s quite possible that taking such photos, even without flash, was technically against the rules, but whatever restrictions may exist in theory are completely unenforced. For what it’s worth, we specifically asked for and received permission from a guard to take photos without flash. Under these circumstances, we couldn’t really see the harm.

The border zone where the Great Wall divides the provinces of Shaanxi and Shanxi from the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region is coal country. Not far below the surface is the Shenfu Dongsheng coalfield, the seventh largest coal deposit in the world and potentially the most profitable.

Datong coal mine

Coal is the fuel that powers China’s phenomenal economic growth. The country’s coal consumption has increased almost 15% annually in recent years, and coal supplies almost two-thirds of its energy needs. It doesn’t take a crystal ball to see China’s energy future, and that future is black.

The vision for tomorrow

A more realistic version

But if coal is important to the prospects of China as a whole, well, it’s everything in the mining valleys where we walked in northern Shaanxi. There’s not a lot of water in northern Shaanxi and it’s too hilly to irrigate effectively, so the agriculture’s pretty marginal. That means that coal is just about the only game in town. Almost every village is a mining village, and those few jobs that aren’t in the mines or the coal-fired power plants are in the businesses that service the mines and the power industry. Most of the traffic on the roads consists of massive trucks carrying coal between the mines and the power plants or distribution centres. Most of the young people we spoke to in the region who are going off to university are getting their degrees in mining engineering or a related field.

A truck stop between Fengzhen, Inner Mongolia and Datong, Shanxi

Up from Shanghai for a mine inspection

There are also smaller, informal economies that revolve around the coal industry. At the big truck stops, small armies of men gather to wait for pieces of coal to drop from the trucks as they take off; they then collect these and presumably sell them. On the more remote roads that get less traffic you can see older men and women walking along with old seed bags, gathering the bits that fall to the roadside on a much smaller scale, probably for personal use.

Men rushing to collect the scraps

Waiting for the next truck

While the mines obviously bring jobs with them, it seemed to us that life was pretty tough in the area, even by Northern China standards. Everything, and we mean everything, from the roads to the people to the sparrows to the sheep, was coated in soot. It was impossible to spend even a few hours outside without looking like a chimneysweep.

Sixteen tons, whaddya get, another day older and deeper in debt . . .

A typical roadside scene

As we’ve mentioned before, we found people noticeably less friendly in coal country than elsewhere. We don’t know why, but one guess is that because many mining jobs are filled by workers migrating in from elsewhere, levels of trust within communities are lower than in more stable villages. Certainly the number of vicious, unchained attack dogs guarding homes would support that.

We wanted a photo of an unchained dog, but when you’re fending off a loose, half-crazed German Shepherd with a walking stick it’s tough to get off a shot

Then there’s the pollution. The statistics are grim enough on a global and national level. China is about to pass the US as the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases (though of course China comes nowhere near threatening the status of Australia and the US as the per capita greenhouse pollution champs). And air pollution, again largely from coal, accounts for over 400,000 (yes, that’s almost half a million) premature deaths in China per year.

But the local pollution impacts are especially nasty. When you consider that we were coughing up black phlegm after a few days in the region, you can imagine what it might be like to live there (and how damaging the coal dust must be to young, vulnerable lungs).

Two kids next to a New Year’s coal pyre

A lovely roadside stream of ?????

To add to the list of horrors, China’s coal mining industry is far and away the most dangerous in the world. According to official statistics, about 5000 to 6000 people die every year in mining accidents; independent estimates put the figure at 10,000 to 20,000. Although occupational safety standards in a poor country like China are bound to be different from those in the West, such a high accident rate is hardly inevitable. The death rate per million tonnes of coal produced in China is about 150 times that in Australia; the fatality rate in India, a considerably poorer country, is only 9% of China’s (if you believe the Chinese stats, which nobody does).

But hey, if it’s just all too hard for China’s coal mine owners to invest in modern safety equipment and practices, maybe putting up a slogan will do the trick.

Safety in production, unrestricted sales!

The Purple Pagoda of Pain

Normally I don’t go in for alternative health therapies. I don’t doubt that some of them work; it’s just that I’m more comfortable with the kind of medicine I grew up with.

So it’s hard to explain, even to myself, how I came to be a victim of the ancient Chinese therapy of “cupping.” Maybe it was because there were five therapists simultaneously recommending the treatment, miming how it worked, and trying to teach me the Chinese term for it – and only one of me to explain that all I wanted was a head, neck and shoulder massage. Maybe it was because I was too tired to argue with them when they told me it was just the thing for sore shoulders. Maybe it was because the “spa” at our guesthouse, like many spas at country hotels, doubled as a house of ill repute, and I was just grateful that nobody was trying to take off their clothes.

Whatever the reason, I soon found myself face down on a couch with 13 (lucky me!) candle holders suctioned to my back, without completely understanding what I was in for. Later I learned that cupping, which is related to acupuncture, is a technique where the therapist places a candle within an inverted cup until the flame extinguishes itself due to lack of air. Using the vacuum created by the flame, the therapist applies the cup to the patient at a pressure point and leaves it in place for about five minutes. The vacuum draws blood to the surface, and at least in theory, draws toxins out of the body and provides relief from pain.

Cupping also causes massive bruising, but the first I heard about this was when Emma screamed in horror as I was changing to go to bed.

Anyway, cupping did seem to work for me in a perverse sort of way. The next day, when it came time to get back on the trail and walk 30 kilometres, the pain that came from my pack rubbing against 13 giant hickeys on my back made me forget all about my sore shoulders.

We have no idea if many Chinese people feel this way, but for us Spring Festival was a lot like Christmas – fun while it lasted, but thank God it’s over. Yes, there’s a great sense of excitement in the days leading up to it. Yes, there’s a fantastic celebration on the eve of the holiday, but just when you’ve had enough and everything seems perfect, the party keeps on going . . . and going . . . and going.

And maybe that’s why the Chinese New Year holiday period closes with its own special celebration, the Lantern Festival. After two weeks of closed shops, ATMs that had run out of cash, and 21 hours of fireworks – from 5 am to 2 am – every day, we certainly felt the passing of New Year to be an event worth celebrating.

Lantern Festival fireworks above Hequ, Shanxi province

We happened to be in Shenmu, Shaanxi, for the start of this year’s Lantern Festival. We arrived a few days before opening, in time to see the lanterns being set up. This was an elaborate process that took a few days, with dragons, horses, fish and miniature replicas of famous Beijing sites being recreated on the spot. This all seemed to be part of the festivities – while the artists and craftsmen put up scaffolding, arranged the lighting and assembled the lanterns, vendors sold kites and food and families got to hang out in the town square and socialise.

Constructing a giant Chinese lantern

The offerings at the kite vendor’s

Only three years old and he’s already driving on the sidewalk!

How the dragon got its scales

Strictly speaking, the Lantern Festival is held on the 15th day of the first lunar month in the calendar, but in many larger Chinese towns, elaborate lantern displays are lit for public viewing about a week before the actual festival. We’ve actually seen a few of these festivals now, and while the lanterns are always pretty, we especially liked the Shenmu festival, which focused more than most on traditional Chinese themes.

A porcine entrance to the festival

A replica of Beijing’s Temple of Heaven

The Gate of Heavenly Peace

And a good old-fashioned dragon

Private fireworks over the town square in Shenmu

When we were planning our trip to China, over a year ago, we thought it would be great to start things off by coming for Chinese New Year. We had visions of huge fireworks shows over the Forbidden City, happy crowds eating mooncakes in Tiananmen Square and dragon dances in the streets.

What we found instead were empty streets and shuttered shops. When we headed to Tiananmen just before midnight, there was a small crowd with a high proportion of Westerners milling around the Gate of Heavenly Peace, shivering and looking bored. After some small, uninteresting fireworks displays, the evening fizzled out and we went back to the hotel to bed.

That’s not to say that Chinese New Year is a dud – it’s just that, unbeknownst to us at the time, the biggest holiday of the year in China is a more private affair. While public festivities similar to New Year’s Eve in Sydney or the Fourth of July in America can be found, most Chinese spend their New Year at one of tens of millions of smaller, family-oriented celebrations.

Decorations on an old house near Daheta

Chinese New Year (also known as Spring Festival) falls on the second new moon after the winter solstice (or in a very few years, on the third); this year it was February 18. The holiday lasts for 15 days, until the full moon, and culminates in the Festival of the Lanterns, where red lanterns bearing words of good fortune are lit up outside the home or around the town. The whole period is a time for family reunions, huge meals, and like the American Christmas, absolute chaos in the country’s transportation network. According to China Daily, over 2 billion trips are made by plane, train, car and bus in what is the largest annual human migration on earth (see “50m Chinese on move as holiday winds down”).

There are 12 animals in the Chinese New Year cycle which also rotates around five earthly elements, making up a whole cycle of 60 years. This year is the Year of the Golden Pig and is an especially auspicious year for giving birth. Apparently there was a marriage rush on last year in preparation, and according to China Daily, baby and medical authorities in the cities are fearing an overload on their services (“China embraces ‘piglets’ boom”).

The pig is the last animal in the 12-animal cycle, thereby signalling ultimate success

There are scores of traditions, taboos and symbols associated with Chinese New Year, and they are reflected in holiday decorations. The week before New Year’s, town markets are filled with lanterns, banners, posters and trinkets proclaiming good health, wealth, fortune and happiness. New clothes are bought for the new year, and during spring cleaning old demons are literally and figuratively swept away from the home. The town square is decorated with lights and lanterns, and images of the zodiac animal (in this year, the pig) are hung up on shop windows.

We thought about buying a lantern for our tent but couldn’t find one small enough

In Yulin’s marketplace the decorations stalls stretched on for hundreds of metres

These large banners are hung alongside doors and windows

Last year we arrived right on New Year’s Eve, so we didn’t see the leadup to Spring Festival or the shopping frenzy that occurs while people buy food and decorations. Being out here in the country we’ve been able to see where all these decorations go – everywhere. Spring couplets, called chun lian, are hung on either side and above the front door of the home, on truck fenders and car windshields, on the pig and donkey pens. All over villages, the colour red leaps out from around the windows or doors, scaring away evil spirits and inviting in good fortune.

A typical doorway display

The small banner reads “Fat pig, lots of meat”

The village grindstone

But why settle for just the colour red to scare away evil spirits when you’ve got firecrackers? The story goes that at the end of the old year, villages would be terrorized by a monster who ate people and animals. Firecrackers were the only thing that this monster was afraid of, so at midnight on New Year’s Eve, firecrackers would be set off to scare away the monster until the next year. Huge packets of fireworks and firecrackers are sold in the week leading up to Spring Festival and a few weeks after. Needless to say, boys and young men are probably the main customers and set them off at all times of the day and night.

The merchants in Yulin’s marketplace don’t seem to appreciate the importance of demon-scaring

A not-so-small arsenal

Of course, not all of the customers are young men

When we grow up, we want to write Chinese advertising/marketing copy like the following, taken verbatim from a RuChun rose tea package. After reading this, how could you resist a Valentine’s Day cuppa?

Rose other calling card rose, red rose, rose. The rose is the plant for the rose family wild rose. Is used as medicine by the colored flowering fern, center medicine named rose. The colored flowering fern contains the volatile oil, live oak and so on. Nature wet, taste sweet and tiny bitter has dispels symptoms such as bloating the solution to be strongly fragrant, with the blood, stops pain, regulates menstruation and so on the function, mainly treats the hepatogastric to be mad the pain, the food little vomits wickedly, menstruation does not move, falls throws oneself the grief and so on sickness, often drinks the rose flower-scented green tea to the bodily beneficial health.

The Yellow River near Shapotou in August

For better or worse, rivers and irrigated agriculture gave rise to most of the world’s great ancient civilizations. The oldest agricultural civilization, Mesopotamia, developed along the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates; the Nile gave birth to Egypt, and ancient India came into being in the valley of the Indus.

In China, the Yellow River – Huang He – is known as “the cradle of Chinese civilization.” At 5464 kilometres, it is the second longest river in China and the seventh longest river in the world. Even more than the longer Yangtze, the Yellow River is central to Chinese history. The oldest distinctively Chinese civilizations developed along the Yellow around 3000 BC. China’s ancient capitals of Chang’an and Luoyang were both situated on its tributaries. Long sections of the Great Wall were built expressly to protect the fields watered by the river.

An old irrigation canal. Sometimes we walk along canals when there are breaks in the wall.

For thousands of years the Yellow River has been a “working river,” to use the Australian jargon for rivers whose natural attributes have been sacrificed to production. Its primary use was irrigation, and the primary means for getting water from the river to the ditches above was an ingenious contraption known as the waterwheel.

Reconstructed waterwheels in Lanzhou

As you can see from the photo above, a waterwheel looks like a narrow version of a paddlewheel on an old steamboat, but unlike a paddlewheel, it does its work without the assistance of a steam engine. The river’s current pushes the paddles on the waterwheel so that it turns continuously. Meanwhile, buckets built into, or attached to, the paddles scoop water from the river. When the buckets reach the top of the waterwheel, they spill into a flume.

Emptying the load

Before the invention of modern pumps, there would have been thousands of waterwheels, large and small, along the Yellow, but today most waterwheels are reconstructions for tourists, like those pictured above. However, along the smaller canals that transport water from the river to the fields, there are still a few in use, like this one near Zhongwei.

This waterwheel delivers water to a small orchard

Irrigation remains the main use of the Yellow River today, but in the last century or so it’s had to take on a number of extra jobs – hydropower generation, industrial use – and today it is a thoroughly overworked river. Demand for the river’s water is such that it has sometimes failed to reach the ocean in recent years, and with China’s rapid industrialisation, the Yellow has become one of the most polluted rivers in the world.

A modern concrete-lined irrigation canal

A hydropower dam near Qingtongxia

Despite its problems, the Yellow is still able to manage a bit of fun and games. At Shapotou, where dunes from the Tengger Desert spill down to water’s edge, there is a large amusement park. When we were there on August 5, the day I broke my foot, the place was a madhouse, with throngs of tour groups pouring out of buses, camels milling around in the 35 degree heat, and children dripping ice cream all over themselves and anything within reach. On our return in November, the atmosphere was more subdued, but that just made it easier for the big kids to have a turn.

Me going for a new sand speed record

Emma at the helm

Physical graffiti

It seems to be a universal human impulse to decorate blank vertical surfaces with art. In the 1930s, lonely Basque shepherds in the western United States carved images of women from their hometowns in Spain into aspen trees (see “Mystery of the Arborglyphs,” one of the first articles Emma ever published). In cities ‘round the world, the words of spraycan prophets are written on the subway walls. Here in China, there are thousands upon thousands of cliffs, boulders and steles embellished with the striking characters of the Chinese script.

Stone tablets on the sacred mountain of Tai Shan in Shandong province

And in the mountains above the Yellow River, the ancient inhabitants of Ningxia carved thousands of images into the walls of the canyons they traversed as they moved between the Yellow River plain and the deserts of Mongolia. The Helan Shan is home to one of the richest concentrations of rock art in China. Since the 1980s Chinese archaelogists have discovered dozens of sites scattered among the valleys on the eastern slope of the range, and there are probably many sites still to be discovered.

The only one of these sites that is practically accessible to tourists is at Helan Kou, 58 kilometres northwest of Yinchuan, where there are over 5000 images carved into the rocks along a permanent watercourse. Accurate historical information on the site is a bit hard to come by (like much of what we see) – according to the interpretive signs at Helan Kou, the carvings are between 3000 and 10,000 years old, while a Professor of Chinese Art at Rhode Island School of Design contends they are mostly between 2500 and 1500 years old (see “Writing the Landscape: Petroglyphs of Inner Mongolia and Ningxia Province (China)”). Well, at least that rules out the years 500-2007 AD.

“Hey Rocky, watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat.”

Whatever their age, the carvings deal in some of the time-honoured themes of rock art worldwide, namely wildlife, domestic animals and scary faces. Unusually, there are also a handful of carvings with an agricultural theme.

A hunting scene, with what appears to be a tiger

Two goats running from their pen

Boo!

A head of grain, possibly millet

The carvings are fantastic in their detail, their degree of preservation, and in some cases, the delicacy of the carving. We don’t actually know anything about rock art, truth be told, but we do seem to spend a bit of time wandering around deserts where rock art is found, and whether in the American Southwest, Australia or here, we’ve rarely seen rock art carvings with lines as fine as these.