A very large Ferris Wheel at the southern end of Shanghai. Dusty Venus — most of the dust is a result of construction/demolition.

This little boy was making so much noise that at first I thought his life was in danger, but he was simply one of those kids who is very loud while having a good time.

I cannot find these little sunflower bars in Nanjing; they seem to be a specialty of the Lake Tai region. Anyway, I ate about 30 of them and concluded that these would be ideal for hiking and camping, and they are really cheap.

For dealing with people, you just can’t find an easier place than the lake Tai/Hangzhou Bay region. It’s just so much easier to find things out and communicate.

Language note: Bang, 1st tone–?, supposedly means a creek. in practice, it means a canal, or, by extension, a village by a canal. You see this word a lot in village names of the Lake Tai region; my impression is that you don’t see this character much in other parts of the country. The other big word in towns with canals is Tang, 2nd tone, 塘，which supposedly means a pool but in practice nearly always means a canal…

A colleague here in Nanjing said that he finds most famous tourist sites in China “underwhelming”. The Chinese somehow manage to take a relic or site that has an interesting story behind it and turn it into trivia and platitudes. I don’t know how the process works, but they can make anything boring. Take, for example, the story behind Li ShiMin’s horses.

The attached photos of Li Shi Min’s carved horses and a plaque were taken last summer in XiAn. I’ve included information from a larger plaque, word for word, and that is all there was to read at the Forest of Tablets museum. Compare what’s on the plaques with some things they could have mentioned.

Li ShiMin personally led armies into battle as the Tang unified the country. Four of his horses were killed in battle. “He enshrined these horses in stone, with an accurate rendering of each horse’s physical traits, including the number of arrow wounds.” Such intimate concern for a horse was typical of nomadic rulers, but not of previous and subsequent Chinese emperors. In one of the carvings, the groomer looks Turkic.

The early Tang rulers inherited a northern Chinese culture that had long been influenced by the cultures of nomadic tribes; the southern Chinese had some trouble accepting them as fully Chinese.

Li Shi Min was Chinese enough to lead the Chinese, yet close enough to the nomads to lead the Turkic tribes who regularly threatened border areas in the northwest. They became his wing army in distant places, expanding Tang control effectively to Lake Balkhash, which is beyond the current border.Within fifty years of his death, the nomads revolted and reverted to raiding Chinese border cities, and China lost control of a huge swath of land through which trading routes passed.

The earliest evidence of their Turkic written language is a stone inscription that, among other things, records their resentment of the changes that had taken place since the days of Li ShiMin. They were now enemies of the Tang emperor. The cost of foreign policy increased for Tang China; they no longer had rulers who understood the mentality of the nomads.

Li had a flair for the well-planned dramatic gesture. Once a group of nomads threatened the capital when it was weakly defended. Li rode out to meet them with only one hundred troops and challenged their leader to one-on-one combat. His adversary declined. Li still had to buy them off to get them to leave, but he had bought time when he needed it. Then he sent a message to another potentially threatening nomadic ruler, challenging him to a duel, and again the nomad declined. Because he understood their psychology, he saved a lot
of bloodshed.

Two year later, just after Li had become emperor, the same Turkic tribe neared the capital, and again Li was outmanned, as Tang forces were widely dispersed. This time he rode out to meet them with only six men. He shouted across the Wei River, rebuking the nomads for breaking the peace treaty. The nomads did not know what to make of this guy. Then Li’s army showed up from behind him. The bluff worked. Li explained his thinking to a subordinate, which is how it entered history. The nomads figured that he would stay inside his fortified castle, leaving them free to loot the surrounding region. Now they had to throw that plan out the window, and Li’s total lack of fear made the nomads wonder if they would have trouble making a retreat. The next day, the Turkic ruler made a peace proposal, and Li arranged a horse sacrifice to seal the deal, which was just the right thing to do when dealing with these particular horsemen. Motley Crue played a stomping set as the nomads danced and swilled fermented mare milk.

Within four years, the Turkic tribes accepted Li as their overlord, so there must be something to these stories. He brought their most talented military leaders into the Tang government, treated the nomads well, resettled the bulk of them in the Ordos (near modern Ningxia) and kept them busy on campaigns. Subsequent Chinese rulers were not so comfortable about having nomads in their government, and through botched communication, they turned a loyal ally into an enemy. The nomads reverted to their old pattern, raiding border cities and demanding subsidies in exchange for peace agreements.

Li Shi Min’s eldest son built a yurt inside the palace compound. He surrounded himself with Turkic retainers until ordered to cease, whereupon he selected a group of Chinese retainers who spoke the Turkic language. He was a fan of Turkic music. He staged a mock funeral and played the corpse himelf, “surrounded by wailing mounted nomads”. Unfortunately, this colorful character never became emperor
because he plotted against his own father.

Before the Tang Dynasty, northern China (or at least its ruling classes) had become a mix of Han Chinese and sinified tribes that had formerly been frontier nomads. After centuries of division, the north and south were united again, and the northerners were surprised and amused that the southerners drank tea instead of yogurt. The southerners granted that the northerners were skilled horsemen, but thought that the northerners were a bit rough and not very talented at literary pursuits (although they did admire Li Shi Min’s calligraphy). The northerners had gone native; women were full social entities in the north, permitted to run businesses and represent themselves at court. The northerners spent far too much time on horseback, hunting and practicing archery when they should have been studying the classics or grinding ink.

The transformation of the north had been a gradual process, Going back to when nomadic Xiongnu moved inside the Great Wall during a period of turmoil and set themselves up as frontier guardians for the Han. After the late Han Dynasty fell into a state of constant civil war, northern warlords needed all the muscle they could get and began incorporating nomads into their armies. Cao Cao defeated an army of nomads and incorporated their remaining force into his army. By the time he had taken control of northern China, he he had large populations of these peoples living within his borders. He demanded that the larger and more dangerous bunch, the Xiongnu, send him a royal hostage, since they were reativley independent and still had contact with Xiongnu outside of China. Northern courts continued this practice. These hostages received Chinese educations and became culturally savvy. Nomads had happily avoided the responsiblities and impossible burdens of taking charge for 500 years, but in the early 4rd Century, one of these Xiongnu hostages established a state in the north during a period of anarchy. His family had led the Xiongnu for five centuries, so he was an acceptable candidate. The Xiongnu obliterated the capital city of Luoyang, killed the emperor, and then did the same to ChangAn (XiAn) when a successor took power there.

The upper classes moved to southern China in droves.

The Xiongnu-led state lacked political and administrative experience and lost the support of their subjects, many of who were Han Chinese, and soon enough, the Xiongnu upstarts were slaughered in their turn.

From here, the plot thickens, with a huge cast of nomadic tribes and Han; the names of nomadic tribes don’t really tell you the ethnicity of the people, only which group was leading at the time. Nomads absorbed each other and formed a blur of federations and alliances. States rose and fell in northern China with depressing regularity, but over time, the northern states developed a system of government that combined nomads and sedentary peoples by granting each group broad autonomy within its own sphere. The most famous of these was the Tuoba Wei, a somewhat Turkic state that started the Longmen grottoes near Luoyang. The north had developed high culture but held onto many nomadic traditions. This was the background for the northern elite during the early Tang, which explains the carvings of Li Shi Min’s horses.

And that’s how I spent my summer vacations.

Quotes from “The Perilous Frontier”, Tommy Barfield

The plaque text

I didn’t change the spelling mistakes and bad punctuation.

THE SIX STEEDS OF ZHAO MAUSOLEUM

Zhao Mausoleum located at Mt. Jiuzong, 45 li (22.5 kilometers) northeast of Liquan County. It is the site where the second Tang Emperor, Taizong, was buried. The six steeds of the Mausoleum were originally set in the eastern and western courts in Xuanwu-men on the northern slope of Mt. Jiuzong. They were sculpted by an imperial edict issued in 636 (10th year of Zhenguan) to honor the prowess of Emperor Taizong (Li Shiming) who fought for establishing the dynasty. The celebrated artist Yan LIben drew the sketches and supervised the drawing.

These works of art, distinguished for their relief, original compositions and succinct and true to life carving skills, are masterpieces of stone carving from the Tang Dynasty.

In 1914 two of the two steeds, “Saluzi” and “Quanmaogua”, were smuggled out of China, and are now in the Art Museum of the University of Pennsylvania, U.S.A. The four stone sculptures in this museum are
designated as National Cultural Treasures.

Note that no mention is made of the great Motley Crue concert.

The intact horses are replicas of the UPenn museum horses.

The original:

This bookstore orders most of its history books from the same few publishers, so it’s a good place to learn about the incestuous world of writers and those who write book reviews. Writers sometimes cluster into groups that review and promote each other’s books. The author of this book is found reviewing the next five books on the shelf, which are written by people whose names are quickly found on other nearby book jackets, singing the praises of other literary cronies.

“Well-researched” appears a lot in reviews of history books. Jimmy writes a book about ancient Persia; Bozo writes a review that gets published in the London Times. Jerry writes a book about the Mongols; Bozo writes another review that gets published in the Times Literary Supplement. Jesse writes a book about the Polynesians, and Bozo writes a review for the Wall Street Journal; once again, Bozo breezily declares that the book is “well-researched”. How did Bozo ever become such an expert on so many subjects?

I took graduate courses in Chinese. Bring me a book on Tang history and ask me if it is well-researched, and I’ll say, “HOW THE HELL WOULD I KNOW?”

Southern dialects seem to multiply like rabbits.

Wenzhou City, southern Zhejiang

Someone on a bus told me that speakers of Wenzhou dialect were used like Navajo windtalkers during World War Two; the Chinese military felt confident that nobody in Japan could understand Wenzhou dialect (“someone on a bus said” is a good theme and solves many problems–maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not; it’s just something that someone said).

I read online that Wenzhou dialect has tricky pronunciaton, grammar and syntax, and is thus exceptionally difficult to learn.

Sounds plausible, but online sources are not really much more reliable than someone on a bus. It’s hard to have much faith in the Internet when learning anything beyond the most superficial stuff about China, unless you are reading a university website written by people with Ph.D.s who will be excoriated for passing on misinformation.

I don’t have a Ph.D. Better stick with “Someone On A Bus said…”

I can say this much–Wenzhou dialect sure does sound funny.

Maybe. Perhaps. It seems. I heard. Someone said. Editors hate these words, but these are the words of a halfway honest person…

Riding downhill through the mountains from Lishui to Wenzhou, I had something like deja vu–it felt exactly like I was in Tim’s old van, and we were coming down from the Central Mountain Range into the city of Yilan in Taiwan. Wenzhou and Yilan occupy alluvial plains on the coast and are cut off from other cities by mountains, both roads follow rivers and head in the same general direction. It was winter both times. If Tim and I were to get a van and drive from Lishui to Wenzhou, we could probably master time travel. But that’s a bad idea; Wenzhou is the pits.

Southwestern Zhejiang

The She people of southwestern Zhejiang occupy the only autonomous region in eastern China, which means they are the last remaining ethnic minority in eastern China. Ethnic minorities are a slippery subject here; read even a little bit and you soon hit chapters that start with headings like, “The Multivalence of Subalternity”.

Better to stick with Someone On A Bus (SOAB).

According to SOAB, the She migrated to this area from Guangdong several centuries ago; they are a Miao people, sort of; the vast majority of She no longer speak She; the She language has been heavily diluted by Hakka, and don’t bother going to a She ethnic dance performance, since it’s just a bunch of completely sinified people pretending that they are still some exotic Miao people. It’s like going to Hawaii and being greeted by willowy Filipino chicks in grass skirts.

According to S. Robert Ramsey (he has a Ph. D. and perhaps even uses public transportation), “Some 369,000 people in southeastern China are classified as She. They are highly sinified, and many–perhaps most–speak Hakka or Min dialects of Chinese.” Linguistic research “reveals a language with some of the typological features of Yao…but a language that nevertheless seems to be genetically closer to Miao.”

Ramsey’s fine book is 22 years old. The few paragraphs regarding the She were based on research done in the 1950s, which explains why he covered their language in less than half a page. Getting to the She would have been an expensive and difficult trip in the 1980s. Now, people like SOAB and I can bump into She people on buses.

Nanping and northern Fujian

The tourist map for Nanping prefecture listed the dialects for every district. Besides Wuyishan, the Min River, tobacco, tea and tree roots (carved and uncarved), Nanping can claim some fame for the Tower of Babel dialect situation within its borders.

The map listed the following dialects for the area of Nanping City: Mindong, Minzhong, Minbei, Minnan, JianOu dialect and Hakka. However, SOAB said that because Nanping is a city of opportunity, it has attracted many outsiders, many locals have been forced out by the higher cost of living, and so people generally speak Mandarin when dealing with strangers.

JianOu is a city north of Nanping City that was larger and more important than Nanping in the past. The city wall in JianOu was first erected in the Tang Dynasty. Small communities of JianOu speakers are found far from JianOu today, which is unusual.Perhaps this city’s dialect was the market and business language for a large area for a long period of time. Perhaps the people of JianOu simply had more babies over time. Since I only passed through JianOu twice on a bus, please give me a full report when you get there.

Zhenghe and Songxi are two very small town in northern Fujian. People were friendly and reassuringly normal. Nobody got in my face with an aggressive sales pitch. According to the prefectural map, they speak Minbei dialects and JianOu dialects (even though these places are somewhat removed from JianOu city).

I started paying a little attention to the dialect situation back when I was taking tours to China. A number of tour guides casually claimed that they could speak seven or eight dialects, and I had to wonder how they could do that. Zhao Yuanren and his wife were considered brilliant linguists; they actually learned seven dialects. Also, people from Mandarin-speaking families and Hakka-speaking families in Taiwan can go their whole life without learning to speak Southern Min, even though they are surrounded by it.

One guy told me that you just have to speak Mandarin and change the sounds according to a few simple rules. However, Chinese dialects have different grammar and use different words than Mandarin; for example, the southern Min word for WOK is actually the Mandarin word for an ancient ceremonial vessel (ding). Dialects also contain words that have no Mandarin equivalent.

A Chinese person who claims to speak seven dialects is probably doing this: find a very cooperative local, someone you know and will see again, someone who is willing to play, “Let’s pretend this guy speaks our dialect.” The local knows Mandarin words and grammar, so when the outsider uses local pronunciation to produce a sentence, the listener converts the sentence into Mandarin and figures out what the outsider is trying to say.

Once I had a Chinese couple in my group. They both spoke Cantonese, but Cantonese from different villages in a small area of Guangdong Province. They said that their two dialects were mutually unintelligible. They were slowly learning from each other, but it wasn’t easy. These were smart people, and they were married. Seven dialects, my eye….

Road to Song Xi

Road to Song Xi

Song Xi Hotel

Road to Song Xi Sights

Road to Song Xi Sights

Road to Song Xi Sights

Road to Song Xi Sights

Zheng He Town at Night

This happened twice early in the day: I stopped to talk to a local, and as I walked away, another local ran up and asked, “Did he interview you?” I didn’t find out what this was about until that night at a coffee shop in Nanping.

Okay, while traveling, I wrote two jokes.

1. Let’s say I’m a traveling salesman. What kind of expense account could I expect from a tribe of nomads?

In rural China, not many people can appreciate this joke. They just wanted to know where I am from, where I work, how long I’ve been in China, etc.

2. Let me teach you a country sales pitch. When you see a pedestrian, shout, “HEY!”

That night I was in a coffee shop with a view of the Min River’s bifurcated head, the confluence of two tributaries in downtown Nanping. One of the employees came over to talk every night, which gave me someone to look at while Dan dealt with his foot. She had told me that Zhanghu has a good Yuanxiaojie Festival, and tonight she told me why people had thought I was a reporter. The people in Zhanghu had severed a railway that passes through their town to protest against monetary mistreatment. In the end, their standoff became a national issue (that I never heard about), and they got their money (the explanation went no further). Now the people of Zhanghu are locally famous for their solidarity. They have also earned a nickname, Diao People, Diaomin (刁民). What else do you call people who devised a plan to gain national attention in circumstances where so many others have failed? The clever squeaking wheels.

or about thirty kilometers, most of the villages along the Min’s southwest bank were next to long inlets, snakelike coves where the river intersects a low valley. These sheltered habitats were all strung with farms for pearls, oyster meat, fish and aquatic squirrels. Most of the towns I passed through had two or three neighborhoods on small peninsulas connected by bridges.

Zhanghu is at a bend in the river where the Min becomes like a lake, about a quarter of the way to the Pacific coast. Boat traffic is regular but not enough to pollute the river badly, and even though it was Spring Festival, the fishermen and aqua farmers were painting, repairing, and commuting to work in boats that are paddled from a standing position. Local fish and shellfish probably taste great, but I never found out.

As in every other village I passed through, the little kids of Zhanghu usually went nuts when they saw me. They would follow me until I pulled out my camera, which is when the youngest children would immediately take flight.

I asked people about a nearby mountain that’s labelled on Google Earth, but they had never heard of it. Locals often use different names for things I find on maps or online, so beyond the most general geography, there’s little point in researching a place in the countryside. Even locally purchased maps offer only a vague guide to local roads, and if you assume ANYTHING about relative distances or directions, you’ll probably get lost. If you want to know where to go, ask a kid.

Travel from Nanping is so uncomplicated and cheap take a bus, walk around villages, stand by the highway (国道), and catch a bus back to town. For 120 yuan, we had a hotel with hot water right downtown. After I go off the bus in Nanping city, several groups of people from southwest China accosted me on Jiangbin Road and showed me the swords they were selling. I think they were supposed to be in ethnic minority regalia, but that look could not have been authentic; it was too much like the Flinstones, matched together in a thriftshop with some plastic Navajo jewelry. Anyway, they had such a basic, ground-up business strategy–approach random strangers on the street and whip out a sword. .

Yesterday, it’s hard to say a line you need tomorrow, words you can’t remember, but they haven’t been forgotten, knotted balls of stuff that you untangle in their hour, pretty bugs on paper that decide the flow of dollars charging down a hillside like a mighty horde of Alans, yeah, he had a house, but now he’s living as a squatter, hey, back in the day, they would have made him sell his daughter, you won’t see me on the streets, I’m living in the water.

One of the newest and best-funded shopping malls in Nanjing is called Aqua City (shuiyoucheng). In tribute to the canal culture of Nanjing and the entire Yangzi Delta, long waterways loop around the stores, connecting several ponds with fountains of colorful, dancing water. One of the fountains has a stage in the middle. The canals are enlivened by leaping arcs of water that people can walk under. Right by my favorite coffee shop is a waterfall that drops three storeys; every small child who passes by shouts out, “It’s raining!”

Naturally, the sparkling water, slick advertisements and well-lit stores attract quite a few people who just want to stroll and enjoy the scenery. Last Monday I was at a coffee shop there. In one hour, I saw two urban rustics lead their children to the place where the waterfall splashes into the canal–a perfect place for little junior to urinate, certainly preferable to the nearby rest rooms.

Of course Aqua City’s water circulates continuously, so before long, their urine was pumping out of fountains and leaping in arcs that so many people like to slap with their hands as they pass underneath.

Other Chinese say people like these “are at a low cultural level”. Living on a higher cultural plane, the architects of Aqua City did not anticipate this sort of behavior and neglected to install fences.

Empty Gestures

The other day a woman in a store explained to me how to use toilet paper–”First, you open the package, then you remove the toilet paper sheet by sheet…”

At that point, I assured her that I understood the technology. It reminded me of people in Korea who taught me how to use elevators. These people were only trying to be helpful, of course.

Learning the Drill

Several weeks ago, I and some other foreign teachers attended our school’s opening ceremony for incoming freshmen. New students spend the first several weeks of university life on military training, marching in unison, right-face! Company Halt! They wear camouflage uniforms, and for reasons I can’t explain, the dominant color of the camouflage is blue.

The students were divided into groups according to their major, and for well over an hour, they marched around and finally passed in front of us for inspection. The best marchers walked in front of their classmates because they had mastered a somewhat arrhythmic stride that involves long steps with pauses. The best shouter in each group called out the cadence.

Finally, the university president got into a jeep that weaved between the groups of assembled troops. He shouted repeatedly into an onboard mike, “You’ve been working hard!” That went on for about three minutes, and then the university treated us to a fabulous banquet.

It’s always a relief when a function that you expect to be boring turns out to be so entertaining.

Cao Cao

Cao Cao is a famous character in Chinese history and fiction, but for twenty-odd years, I ‘ve been trying unsuccessfully to get a good explanation for his fame out of Chinese people. Their comments are so unilluminating–”He was a general. He was so smart. He was so wily.” And that’s about all they give you. Is Cao Cao famous for being famous?

Finally, I found a good description online; the link is below. I so often get the best materials on Chinese history and culture from foreign academics; they rely on Chinese sources, but they seem better at presenting history convincingly. . Studying Classical Chinese with an American at the University of Iowa was great; studying Classical Chinese with Chinese teachers in China was dreadful.

After reading this article (the link is below), I started talking about it to a Chinese guy in the sauna at the gym. I only got a few sentences out of my mouth before he startled cackling in a way that was just a bit too exaggerated. “Is that what you foreigners say about Cao Cao?” he said.

“What do you Chinese say about him?” I asked, and of course he had no response. This is a problem for some people in China–they seem to think the outside world is genetically incapable of understanding their culture. That’s one reason why so many questions are met with boring responses, deliberate obfuscation and deliberate mystification.

Anyway, if you are interested, this article brings Cao Cao to life in a way that I don’t think I would ever get from Chinese sources.

http://www.anu.edu.au/asianstudies/decrespigny/morrison51.html

Food Signs – Gaoyang Restaurant in Yinchuan

Food Signs – Pingliang 1

Food Signs – Pingliang 2

Food Signs – Pingliang 3

Food Signs – Pingliang 4

Food Signs – Pingliang 5

Food Signs – Pingliang 6

Food Signs – Yinchuan 1

Food Signs – Yinchuan 2

Food Signs – Yinchuan 3

Food Signs – Yinchuan 4

The XiXia script has to date between the early 11th century and 1227, when Genghis Khan’s army took vengeance on those duplicitous Tanguts. The script looks pretty fresh, and it serves as a base to guess how old some of the other rock carvings are.

This particular valley was a favorite carving place for thousands of years. I’m guessing one reason is the rocks in the riverbed because there are beautiful shades of purple and red. Also, the dry rocks
change color as you approach them, shifting from white to purple. Splotches of color suddenly materialize before you every few steps.

Not to mention that the scenery is great.

There are countless rock carvings along the eastern side of the Helanshan range; villagers at various places can point the way to a pile of boulders bearing images of deer and goats.

There were hundreds of carvings. The photos are sort of a sampling of various ages and styles. In some cases, the petroglyph experts picked a way at the rock to reveal images that would generally not be visible to the untrained eye.

Beijing from an office window.

Loess is the main reason for Beijing’s haze. When the sky looks milky where there are no clouds, and the haze is consistent from the ground to the tops of skyscrapers, this is loess.

I pronounce it Lois–how ’bout you?

I had to see a lot of the stuff before I grasped that it is Dirt Fog, microscopic particles of earth in the air. Once kicked up, they have great hang time.

If you want to see loess more often than in Beijing, then go to XiAn. Nobody goes to XiAn for the air. It’s not a place that doctors recommend to rich people with respiratory difficulties.

At the power plants on the fringes of town are piles of soft coal as large as Han burial mounds. The city always has a lot of heavy industry because its inland location is harder to bomb, and there are a lot of mines upwind.

I remember that tour groups often came down with throat infections in XiAn. Pollution seems to taste much harsher when added to a broth of loess. It’s not an unusual type of dirt, many countries have it, but midwestern China is the place where it turns to earthen vapor and hazes up the view for hundreds of miles downwind. Rain doesn’t seem to clear it from the the air. Spring winds bring out the most loess, and in a bad year, people in Korea see a few months of XiAn sky. It’s exactly the same color.

“Not a lot of blue-sky days in XiAn,” observed one taxi driver as we passed through an area that smelt like a tire-burning party. Visibility was poor in the city and the surrounding countryside, and the air had a sting to it. Atmospheric conditions were much better when I returned to XiAn a few weeks later; the sky was blue up in the middle, the air much fresher.

The old train station in XiAn is plastered with fine dirt. People must spend a lot of time sweeping and dusting; when I bought a souvenir, I took it back to the hotel and washed the grit out of the little statue’s ears.

While loess is a problem for housekeeping and breathing, I later discovered a few uses for the stuff in in it’s silty, palpable form. If your hands are oily or greasy, for example, and you don’t want to touch your camera, rub some loess on them. It works better than a towel. If you have been scratched by a particularly vicious desert plant, smear the wound with wet loess, which makes a fine salve.

People cover brick homes with loess as a form of insulation. Emperors had the stuff piled into huge mounds for their tombs. It makes walls for farm fields. Parts of the Great Wall of China were constructed from it. The soil is just easy to dig in.Traveling between Gansu and XiAn by bus, we passed thousands of handmade caves, some of which have windows, doors, courtyards–even addresses. There are societies carved into the dirt by the train tracks, with manmade craters for orchards, gardens, fields and homesteads. Terraces run up to the tops of the hills. They dig deep valleys for roads. They dig canals and conduits for irrigation and transportation. People have been altering the landscape intensively for ages, and it shows.

When the climate was more beneveolent, the loess plateau was good for farming. It used to be one of the most prosperous regions, one of the places where culture originally flourished. Partly as a result of human activity, the climate and growing conditions changed, after which the center of Chinese culture moved to the lush south, and people of the loess plateau turned to terraces, irrigation and water conservation. My former boss, a card-carrying Communist who majored in Chinese, told me that just before I left.

A Loess Plateau tour is also a climate-change tour!

I didn’t sleep well on the train, and I taught sniffling children who had summer colds for a few weeks before the trip–kids love learning about viruses, as it strengthens their immune systems, right? After a day in XiAn, I came down with a cold and decided to leave the city early. When I got to Ningxia Province, much higher up on the plateau, a place downwind only from desert and grasslands, the air was dry but clear, the sky was blue, the night had stars, and, thanks to altitude, temperatures were ideal every day. Seriously, you will not find a more comfortable summer climate than in Ningxia or eastern Gansu.

With loess, less is best.

It was a painless sort of cold, the only problem being that it caused ridiculous congestion problems in the passages through which I like to transmit air in a process known as breathing.

My original itinerary included an area near the source of the Yellow River, high up on the Qinghai Plateau, where the base of a mountain might be as high as 3000 meters and the peaks routinely reach 5000 meters, not an oxygen-rich environment. The residents are nearly all Tibetans (if you want to see real Tibetan culture the easy way, go to Sichuan, Gansu or Qinghai–so much closer and more accessible than Lhasa). This would have added two days of trains and two days of old buses on bad roads.

Then I read online about travelers headed for Tibetan areas who were literally escorted off of buses, the authorities telling them that there were safety concerns.

Since I couldn’t confirm that this area was open to visitors, and I didn’t want to be the nose-blowing foreigner enclosed with innocents on a small bus, the double plateau tour became a loess plateau tour, which was just a crying shame. Qinghai would have been great. But things worked out, as Ningxia had a beautiful mountain range with surprisingly abundant wildlife, prehistoric rock carvings and vestiges of a kingdom that made the mistake of pissing off Ghengis Khan, of all people.

Air was clean, weather was perfect (go there if you have a cold and still want to have a good time), prices were very low, even in the provincial capital of Yinchuan.

Yinchuan is more interesting than Suzhou, Hangzhou, Wuxi, Guangzhou, Shanghai, Nanjing, Xiamen, Shenzhen, Wuhan, QIngdao…but I only saw one other foreigner there (and only two foreigners in all of Ningxia Province). There were lots of Chinese travelers, but not enough to drive up prices or make you feel crowded anywhere you went.

Back when most tourists in China were foreigners, our tour groups would arrive at the terra cotta army exhibit, the local guide would tell people not to take pictures, and 99% would obey, making it easier for the guards to focus on the few rule-breakers; if the guards saw or heard you take a picture, they would take your camera, open the back and expose the offending section of film.

Now, everywhere you go, the vast majority of tourists are Chinese, and when 200 Chinese tourists walk into the terra cotta warrior pits, nearly all of them whip out their cameras and camcorders and cell phone cams, overwhelming the guards with a display of Gandhian resistance. It’s a spontaneous team effort.

So here are 5 scenes that I hope you are not tired of seeing — 2 from Han JingDi’s tomb, 1 from a pagoda, 2 from the terra cotta warrior exhibit.