Trip, Tombs, Temples, and Churches

Two or three times a year, the "Employee Welfare" committee puts together some vacation travel opportunities for the workers.  The company even kicks in a little bit of money keep the out-of-pocket costs within reach for everyone.  It's part of the benefits program.  There are usually short, medium, and long travel options to choose from.  Last year, Theresa and I did a long travel option and went to Hainan.  Last week-end, I went on a short trip to TaiMu Shan.

Theresa decided that she did not want to go.  First off, any place in China with "Shan" as part of the name implies that there will be a hill or a mountain to climb.  Her knees ache at the thought of such climbing due to the old surgery scars from the treatment of a MRSA infection a few years back.  Another reason she chose not to go was because it was forecasted to be very, very hot.  Her idea of the perfect vacation week-end get-away was to hang out at the apartment pool.

At total of around 60 people went on the trip.  Most were families;  husbands, wives, kids, and even a few parents.  At 7:30 on a Saturday morning, we filled two buses and began the 8 or 9 hour drive southward.  The map at top (courtesy of Google) shows our route.   Most of the driving was through ZheJiang provice.  It takes an hour or less from Suzhou to crossover the province's northern border.   Our destination, TaiMu Shan, is in FuJian province, but just a few miles after you crossover ZheJiang's southern border.  So for most of the trip, we were looking out the bus windows at ZheJiang province.

Driving through ZheJiang is like driving through West Virginia.  It is mile after mile of tree-covered mountains with small towns in most of the valleys and big, industrial cities in the those valleys that have access to a navigable river.   The scenery was beautiful and made even more so by the clear blue skies. And for nine hours there was not much to do other than to watch that scenery go by through the bus windows.   In the course of those nine hours down and another nine hours back, I saw several things that struck me as interesting.  (Apologies for the poor photos which follow.  They were made from the window of a moving bus.)

 The first thing I noticed were the tombs.  We started to see them as soon as we got into the rural hill country south of Hangzhou.  If you look at the photo above, you can see the hints of about seven or eight small stone structures.  When I first saw them, I thought they were drainage culverts.  But then I realized what they were.  I would guess that many of these, out away from the big cities and haphazardly placed, are old family plots. 

I've never seen a tomb in Suzhou, though the cemeteries are clearly marked on the maps.  Most are over in the hill country surrounding Tai Lake.  Local friends tell me that Suzhou is a very expensive place to be buried.  They say many rich Shanghainese spend top dollar RMB to assure they have a scenic view of the lake for all of eternity.  My understanding is that most tombs in Suzhou are commercial operations and are rented on a yearly basis.  But I am not sure.  Nor do I have answers to the obvious questions related to funeral rites and burial customs and what happens when the rent stops being paid.

 We saw a few large, commercial cemeteries near the large cities.  But we saw hundreds of tombs like the ones shown above and below.  I now begin to understand the importance of the QingMing holiday - also known as tomb sweeping day.  It would only take a year or two of neglect for these hillside tombs to be completely swallowed by overgrowth.

Last March, I asked a colleague whether she would go to the cemetery on Qing Ming.  She planned to go, but not on the exact holiday...she explained it would be crazy crowded.  She planned to go a week or two early to perform her obligations.  I asked her what those obligations were.  She said: "You know, you clean up around the tomb first, and then you open the doors and invite your ancestors to come out an visit for a while.  You share your respects and your thoughts with them and maybe bring them some offerings of things they like.  Then at the end of the day, you tell them it's time to go back inside until next year and then you close the doors."

I first noticed the tombs on the trip down, but there were many more to be seen on the trip back, when we were driving towards the North.  There were many more tombs facing towards the South.  It's good Feng Shui.   Also, both of the tombs shown above have the circular Yin-Yang symbol over the center of the entrance.  You can see it better in the second photo, but it is also there in the first. 

The second thing I noticed was that, from the bus window, it seemed that there was hardly a time when you couldn't see a temple if you looked hard enough.  You can easily spot them by their golden-yellow colored walls.  In the towns and cities, these colors jump out at you; the surrounding buildings are all whitewashed or the grey color of naked concrete.  Between the towns you can see golden-yellow walls peeking out from amongst the trees on the hills.

I've included a couple of photos showing the more spectacularly located temples.  The one below is actually nestled between the rocky cliffs on TaiMu Shan.  Don't expect to see any photos from inside these temples, as we did not visit either of them.

The third sight and the one that surprised me most, though, was the number of churches we passed.  In Suzhou, I've only seen three - the large new church on DuShu Lake, the old small church  hidden behind the walls near pet street, and the fake church at BaiTang Park that was built as a back drop for wedding photos.  This is in a city that has millions of residents a relatively large population of Western expats.  So I was kind of surprised to see that almost every city and town we passed through in ZheJiang had at least one building marked with a Cross. 

 The churches shown, above and below, are both respectably large.  They were located in cities that appeared to be of modest size - I'd guess 250,000 people or less.  In the larger cities,  I would see two or three churches, some of them very, very large.  In the small towns, I saw small, simple whitewashed buildings with crosses painted  on the gables.

Anyway, the fact that Christianity was visible at all in the Chinese countryside was a surprise to me.  Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism have been integral parts of Chinese culture for over 2000 years.  The traders on the Silk Road brought in Islam about 1200 years ago, but the Muslims are still a small minority that is as much an ethnic distinction as it is religious.   

My understanding was that Christianity came much later and had little chance to put down roots.  When the Western powers began to carve up China into de-facto colonies in the 1800s, the Christian missionaries soon followed.  Officially, the government of China does not look back fondly on that period of their history.  When we were preparing to come to China, we were advised not to bring too much Christian reading material, as it might raise the suspicion that we were planning to proselytize.   They do not want any more uninvited missionaries.

Since returning to Suzhou, the Internet has told me that  ZheJiang province has one of the largest concentrations of Christians in China.  Also, I learned that the Jesuits began missionary work in China as far back as 1550 or so.  I had forgotten (or never learned in the first place) that Saint Francis Xavier, the founder of the Jesuits, died on an island just off the cost of China while trying to further this mission.  The Portuguese brought Catholicism to their colony on Macau from about the same time.  In the 1800s, the British and other European colonial powers brought an fresh wave of Protestant missions.  (In ZheJiang province, the port of NingBo was one of the first and largest of the port cities conceded by China to the British after the Opium Wars.)

These days, it seems that no one knows the true number of Catholics and Protestants in China.  The official numbers total around 15 million for both, or a smidgen over 1% of the population.  Others say that Christianity is booming and the number is three to ten times higher.

I'll leave those questions to others to answer.  Me, all I know is what is saw from the window of the bus.