Into the wilderness of Gansu
Saturday, April 25th, 2009At least the Chinese police are nice to you when you stumble into a forbidden zone and they have to evict you from their prefecture. They bought us lunch and everything.
But perhaps I should back up a bit first.
After a busy week of work in Guangzhou, we had a week-and-a-half off and decided to head for Gansu province, a rarely visited but seemingly attraction-rich destination in Central-West China. Half the reason we chose Gansu in the first place was because the southeast part of the province is a Tibetan area, and we figured by coming here we would get to experience Tibetan culture and religion without the hassles of the permits/restrictions that govern travelling in Tibet proper. Well, how wrong that turned out to be.
After seeing the pretty interesting Bing Ling Si caves on our first full day in Gansu, we stayed the night in the Muslim town of Linxia (with some really unusual mosques that are designed in entirely Chinese temple style, with the minarets looking strangely like pagodas). When we were thrown off a bus that was heading to Xianhe and the Labrang Monastery before it left Linxia, we knew something was wrong and that perhaps that city was closed to foreigners, but, undeterred, we took a different bus to Hezuo, which we boarded without incident. Only 20 minutes after we got off, though, we found ourselves surrounded by six policemen with SWAT gear on, being asked all sorts of questions about what we were doing here. It turns out that even though Tibet proper was reopened several weeks ago after being closed in March for the 50th anniversary of the Chinese invasion, the prefecture we were now in was still entirely closed to foreigners. Lesson of the day: look this stuff up before you set out. Luckily we had snuck a look at a Tibetan temple as soon as we got off the bus, so we at least had something to show for it.
After treating us to a surprisingly good local noodle dish, the head of foreign affairs drove us 80km back the way we came and put us on a bus headed back to the provincial capital Lanzhou.
And so ended our brief experience of Tibetan culture in Gansu. [Though there’s another monastery (less famous but still authenticly Tibetan) in another part of Gansu that seems to be open to foreigners, so next week we’ll try to see if we can visit it, or at least score another free lunch…]
After returning to Lanzhou last night, we headed east today and had a really nice afternoon in Tianshui, visiting a 15th century Chinese temple and enjoying watching the Chinese go about their activities in a picturesque area outside the temple: old men playing board games, photogenic fruit venders wearing straw hats, an orchestra playing music to a small audience – the kind of stuff that’s somehow so pleasing in its simplicity. Like India, everytime you are really annoyed with China it has a way of pulling you back in and endearing itself to you, and it’s most often just the simple things like this, and not the major sights, that do it.
Tomorrow we’re going to visit Majji Shan, which is one of the four major Buddhist cave/temple complexes in the entire country, and by Tuesday we’ll be at the other end of Gansu at the most famous such place in China: the Dunhuang Caves.
Nick