Category: China

It was time to face the Great Wall and find out if it was a ruin like I found in Abhayagiri, tainted by the past or the future like in Xi’an, or something worse. What if it was a true wonder, choked by a ceaseless tourist torrent? Deluged by a wretched wave. Drowned of any possibility for enjoyment or appreciation.

I should, by now, have become accustomed to China making it all of these things at once and simultaneously none. Yin and Yang. Death and darkness. Light and beauty.

Foundations of Bone

There in the foundations of the wall lay the bones of a million slaves. Worked to death, their backs splintered like the heavy wooden joists that levered each stone block into place in this impossible jigsaw.

Yet there on the windswept peaks of Badaling, away from the tourist torrent, very little imagination is needed to see that jigsaw complete in your minds eye.

Before you the spine of the world is laid out, snaking at unbelievable angles, defiant to the forces of nature.

Invading Mongols, enthused by how easily they had traversed China’s mountains to the north then faced this. Such obstinance in the face of its surrounds must have given them pause.

Warning Song

Even now, at sunrise, 1100 metres up, the wall it seems, is not undefended. For a second I hear singing, as if a thousand men call to tempt their enemy’s courage. Perhaps it was some sound echoed from the mountains, or wind whipping up through the battlements. Or maybe those countless soldiers who served their seven year service for the rest of their lives, still patrol that ancient wall. They call to all as a warning, even the rising sun.

Now the wall falls silent again. The rising sun turns the higher towers a soft red rose colour. The trees already bare for the coming winter, leave nothing but these great bones as far as the eye can see. Its design is a mystery, engineering unfathomable, it fills you with wonder.

Greatness

I’m reminded about our guide Luna’s story at the bottom of the wall. Three things she said made the Great Wall great. At over 8000km for just the Ming dynasty sections, the wall is truly great in length. All the slaves and soldiers for which it is a tomb make it one of China’s greatest tragedies. Finally, with over 2000 years of construction it is a great example of the ingenuity of man.

For me though, none of these say what the Great Wall was and still is today. It is a great wonder, that – staring out over the misty peaks – is impossible not to feel. Like so much of China and indeed myself, it was not light nor dark. It was all things at once and through it all amazing to me. A reminder that not all the world is there to be understood, but sometimes just experienced instead.

The wind chilled my bones as the sun finally crested the peaks to the east. I picked up my bag and scrambled the steps back toward the coach. My time in China was at an end I realised, but I didn’t look back at the wall again. That I knew would be coming with me wherever I went in life from here.

I’d gone to China with the hope to understand it. My feeling was that growing tensions in the West over a threat from a pariah nation in the East were somewhat exaggerated. I’d hoped to find a side to the story equal and opposite. A tale of an inherently good but complex people at conflict mostly because of history and bad politics.

Instead I found a paradoxical mix of light and dark. China’s famous Yin and Yang. The more I saw of China, the more I realised it exists inside ourselves as well as this place.

A Warning

Personally, I have a love for all things alive. I once rescued a fly from the sink and dried out its wings with cotton buds. So if you feel the same or similar, please beware. This post will be hard to read, just as it has been to write.

Meat

The hanging dogs bereft of their fur are completely motionless. Their jowls hooked and expressions fixed in rigor, each the same as the last. A cloned visage of their sudden ending.

Crates upon crates of live ducks and chickens form towers of clamor and panic. They stare out at me accusingly but I don’t help. I just walk right by them.

The concept of Yin and Yang make sense to me. No light without darkness, good without evil. If darkness is the absence of light and evil the ignorance of good, then one cannot exist without the other. They are merely the ends of single spectra, not atoms in their own right.

What’s harder to understand is that those two stark and separate extremes exist inside you simultaneously.

You are not good while some other person is evil. You are inherently both at the same time and that is somehow necessary to make you who you are.

This is what I’d started to realise as I’d begun to pass by the meat in the Yangshuo market. Those horrible images had not yet jarred me as I thought they would. And then one lone cat looked up at me from her cage.

Her kin already gone, she lay patiently in a classic feline curl. Her eyes however belied the comfort of her posture. One upwards glance, without the courage to lift her head, stopped me in my tracks.

It was not a look that begged for help, she somehow knew that was not coming. Instead her eyes asked just one question, “Is it my turn now?”

I knew that look would never leave me and that it made me good and her captors evil. But was I good to care for the cat or evil to care less for the ducks and chickens?

China’s rural poor have long suffered from lack of food. From problems of motivation to farm under extreme communist rule, to classic capitalist problems of a developing country’s rich leaving its poor behind.

So is it really wrong for a nation who will industriously use every morsel of an animal to save itself? Or is it wrong for a wasteful nation to select which life has value based on how cute or tame it is?

The answer I fear is both and neither. Throughout China I would find glimpses of its atomic parts. When viewed so close they could seem malignant. With context they might seem necessary. In reality I find them to be both at the same time.

The Iron Claw

In Chengdu, a city of some 17 million, I’d expected a dooming smog to smother a sea of sullen faces. Instead I’d found thriving markets feeding fresh food to happy people. The youth were enthused and individual. Beautiful creatures were sheltered and fed.

Yet still you might simply disappear if you were to protest against the building of a chemical plant near the city’s water supply. It was like a pearl in the grip of an iron claw. The blue sky could still be seen in between those powerful talons – mostly.

Did it in fact make the city safe from such calamity as the London protests in 2011? Is it better to defer opinion to your government to avoid things like Brexit? Or is it impossible to be free under such an unrelenting grasp?

The stories our guides had given about their own tangles with the iron claw had not given much of an answer. They themselves seem happy despite.

Only China’s future would give the answer. Looking back to the past only left me with more questions.

There are so many threads woven into the fabric of China that understanding it seemed just out of reach. Something, like us, that was both light and dark at the same time.