Chapter 7. Hanfu and broken spokes in Luoyang 郑州 - 嵩山 - 洛阳

The heat of Zhengzhou followed me to the sacred mountain of Songshan (嵩山) and so did the crowds, since it was the ‘Golden Week’ public holiday of May 1. 

Wearing my new summer cycling outfit of shorts and trainers, I weaved through the busy traffic leaving Zhengzhou and endured a few ‘near misses’ on the highway as it snaked up and around the hills that rose to the west of the city. I passed coal mines and roadside stalls selling cherries on the way to Dengfeng (登封). The hilly streets of this small town some 75kilometres southwest of Zhengzhou had the air of a mountain resort or health spa. And it was a holiday town - people came here from all over China either to hike up Songshan or to improve themselves through the powers of Qi Gong at the nearby Shaolin temple.

I found a nice guesthouse at the top of town next to the ancient Songyang Academy (嵩阳书院). The bewildered lady manager soon gave up on trying to fill in the online police registration form and invited me to do it myself. I stepped behind the counter and typed in the details that had become embedded in my daily routine after almost two weeks of checking into hotels.



My hotel was overlooked by the southern slopes of Songshan, which was one of China's five great sacred mountains.  Because of its geographical location as the ‘central sacred mountain’, Songshan was considered the "Center of Heaven and Earth”, and for 2000 years was the place where emperors would ascend to perform rituals and offer sacrifices to reinforce their divine mandate to rule ‘all under heaven’. 

The Songshan area was like the centre of the universe for Chinese civilisation, and became a focus for three of China’s main co-existing beliefs. Its ‘central sacred mountain’ status was most important in Taoism, where the temple named literally after Central Sacred Mountain - Zhongyue - was one of the oldest Taoist places of worship in China, and a place devoted to paying tribute to the central mountain deity.

For Buddhism, the nearby Shaolin Temple was the birthplace of Zen (Chan) Buddhism and also of course the famous schools of martial arts. Songshan was also a centre for Confucianism, with the Songyang Academy established in the 11th century.

Because of this divine status, Songshan was also a place of pilgrimage and worship for many Chinese, who would walk to the summit and visit the temples as a personal act of seeking blessing from the mountain deities and paying respect to the area’s spiritual and scholarly tradition. I had originally planned to walk to the summit of  Songshan myself, but was put off when I saw the huge crowds of tourists wielding walking poles at the entrance to the mountain trail at the Songyang Academy. 

I had been hoping for a bit of quiet walking in nature after the crowds at Taishan, but Songshan really seemed like the centre of the universe visitor-wise on this busy national holiday weekend. The weather was also uncomfortably hot and the risk of heatstroke while hiking added to my decision to give up on plans to hike up to the summit. 

The local visitor sites were also congested because of Golden Week, but I managed to get to the Songyang Academy early the next morning before the crowds arrived. With ancient cypress trees marking the entrance gate, Songyang Academy looked old, but as a centre of learning for Confucianism it was relatively young by Chinese standards. 

The site had originally been a Buddhist monastery dating back to before 500AD and  evolved into a Taoist temple during the Tang dynasty, It became a place of Confucian scholarship after 1035 AD, and was the  centre of the revival of Neo-Confucianism As one of the four great academies of China, Songshan was a place where many of the country’s greatest scholars such as Sima Guang came to visit and teach. It was like the Oxford or Harvard of the imperial Chinese education system, one of the places of higher learning where teaching in the Confucian classics and philosophy prepared students for government service.

On my visit I found the academy to be surprisingly compact for such a great centre of learning. There were old lecture halls, residential and study rooms for Confucian scholars, temples containing likenesses of the Confucian great sages and an ancient library, all  surrounded by courtyards in which stood stone steles bearing inscriptions dating back to Taoist times. It was a beautiful ‘campus’ of small canals, traditional bridges, round gateways and more gnarled old cypress trees, like the two dubbed ‘generals’ by an ancient emperor. 

And yet it was still a working place of study and worship, with modern-day Confucian scholars in traditional dress re-enacting rituals and orchestras conducting musical recitals in the grounds of the Academy. Many visitors were burning incense offerings at the shrines to the ancient ancestor sages, and there were living sages in blue gowns with long beards offering blessings and instruction on keeping virtue alive.

Meanwhile, outside the Academy the Buddhists were flexing their muscles, literally. Along the road were stages on which there were athletic displays of choreographed martial arts moves being staged by groups of young students from some of the town’s many ‘Shaolin’ Kung Fu training centres. Dengfeng was home to many such commercial schools that claimed affiliation or adherence to the Shaolin ‘way’ of martial arts.

 These martial arts academies attracted students from around China and across the world through their association with the legendary temple up the road. They advertised their programmes, with most seeming to offer residential training programs for kung fu, tai chi, qi gong and kickboxing. Some focused on the use of traditional weapons in martial arts, while others were more about self defence and cultivating the mind and spirit.   

When I was growing up in England in the 1970s, ‘kung fu’ was associated with fighting and physical violence. The Wing Chun physical style of martial arts had just become popular through the films of Bruce Lee, such as Way of the Dragon and Fist of Fury. As a teenager, there was always one ‘tough kid’ who boasted of being an expert in kung fu who could use his fighting skills to beat opponents who were much bigger and stronger than he was. 

It was a Hollywood style of martial arts that used cartoon violence  to portray in a cheesy, patronising way and relying on some kind of exotic Oriental wisdom and inscrutable ‘otherness’ that we westerners could never understand. The violent appeal was emphasised in a 1974 song Kung Fu Fighting by Carl Douglas whose lyrics reinforced all the silly stereotypes:

There were funky China men from funky Chinatown
They were chopping them up, they were chopping them down
It's an ancient Chinese art, and everybody knew their part
There was funky Billy Chin, and little Sammy Chung
He said, "Here comes the big boss, let's get it on"

As a result Kung Fu was often ridiculed, even by other Hollywood stars, such as the comedian Eddie Murphy playing a small-time fraudster who pretended to have amazing kung fu skills when put in a prison cell, to try and impress the serious criminals. 

But the young Chinese males I saw practising their acrobatic jumps, thrusts and cries in the courtyards of Dengfeng did not look like they were joking.

For me, the question was how did a fighting tradition arise from a religion that was otherwise thought to be about tranquility, compassion, harmony and meditation?

According to the history books, Shaolin Temple was founded as a Buddhist monastery in 495 AD, where residents were engaged in study of scripture, meditation and performing ceremonies and rituals of worship.

Over time, however, the monks also developed skills such as breathing control, balance, concentration, resilience and channelling ‘qi’ energy’ that could be adapted for use in the martial arts. Over time they learned to use these ‘transferable skills’ for practical effect in the world outside the monastery. The self defence skills could be used for protecting the monastery from bandits and escorting valuable goods.

Within a few hundred years the Shaolin monks had become famous for their fighting ability. One traditional story tells of how Shaolin monks aided the future Emperor Taizong of Tang during a military conflict  and there is historical evidence that Shaolin monks sometimes took part in warfare on behalf of the state.

In more recent times, ‘wu shu’ Kung Fu has become officially approved as a traditional skill and recognised as part of the country's intangible cultural heritage, along with tai chi.

I didn’t visit Shaolin temple on my first day, but across town there was also a holiday weekend carnival atmosphere at the Taoist Zhongyue Temple (中岳庙). A fairground had been set up in front of the temple, with more martial art displays, food stalls, gift shops and even a Taoist version of a ghost train ride. 

If Songshan Academy was a campus for Confucians, Zhongyue Temple was an imperial arena for the Taoist worship ceremonies of the mountain and heaven. Songshan was the ‘earth’ branch of the five sacred mountains - the other being elements such as gold, wood, fire and water. The ancient entrance building represented the gateway to what was effectively the centre of the earthly universe, and its walls were covered in figures of guardian such as dragons and sakes, as well as ancient deities.

The Zhongyuan temple was built on a linear scale of a palace and resembled Tiananmen ‘Forbidden City’ in Beijing, with a central axis along which many famous emperors would have strolled, surrounded by high officials, on their way to the main temple to make offerings to the mountains and heaven to maintain harmony on earth. In a grand series of rituals, the visiting emperors would make two sacrifices: the Feng at an altar on the mountain summit, as an offering to Heaven. The Shan was performed in this temple at the foot of the mountain, to show equal respect to the Earth deity.

These were symbolic sacrifices of things like oxen and jade, not the human variety. The humane values of Confucianism and Taoism had replaced the animist beliefs of earlier ages.
The huge main temple made of wood, was defended by literal Iron Men - giant metal statues weighing several tons depicting warriors who would once have held fearsome swords in their muscular arms. Their armour had been rubbed smooth by generations of young men who had come to try rub off some of the iron strength as their own.

Despite its importance in historical and cultural terms, Zhongyue temple itself was relatively peaceful and uncrowded compared to its famous Shaolin neighbour, perhaps due to the high admission fee (but free for me, being over 60). 

With the belief that Songshan was the centre of the universe, it was a logical step to think that it would be the best place to monitor the movements of heaven and the stars and planets. And that’s how it became the home of one of the first astronomical observatories.

To finish my day in Songshan I cycled over the hill to see the old observatory at Gaocheng (登封观星台). It had been founded by a locally trained Buddhist monk, Yi Xing (一行), who in the 8th century AD was an adviser to the Emperor Xuanzang. Unlike Aristotle who was trying to fathom how the universe worked and stars moved, the Chinese astronomer was preoccupied with more practical matters - by measuring shadows he was working on a more accurate calendar and predictor of celestial events for the emperor. 

As an adjunct to his Buddhist teaching, Yi Xing came up with an epic programme to set up a series of 13 solar observation sites stretching from modern-day Siberia down to Vietnam. The site was later used by a more scientific astronomer, Guo Shoujing, who developed the current stone observatory. In the 13th century he was able to develop the most accurate calendars of the medieval era and calculate the precise length of a year, accurate to 26 seconds: an astounding feat without telescopes or modern clocks.

I found the observatory site hidden down a side street. It was a placid and well-preserved example of a late Yuan dynasty stone observatory tower arranged on a north-south axis within a large circle. The only blemish was a large chunk of stone blown out of one side of the tower, which an inscription stated had been caused by Japanese shelling of the monument during their invasion of China in the 1930s.

While Shaolin is the reason most foreigners know about Songshan, it was a place that I skipped because of the massive crowds there during the Golden Week holiday period.  My absence was kind of ironic because this place, the third of Songshang’s great sites, owed its existence to a foreigner. According to legend, an Indian Buddhist monk called Bodhidharma came to China in the sixth century. His message was very different from the Confucians preaching self improvement through scholarship and the Taoists conducting rituals to the deities of heaven and earth.  

The emperor Wu of Liang, was already a devout Buddhist, but when he asked this foreign monk how he should acquire merit, he was told it would not come from building temples, studying scriptures or ritual chantings and offerings to the deities. Bodhidharma told him the answer was not from outward acts alone, but to look inward and seek awakening and understanding through meditation.

And that is what Bodhidharma did when he came to Shaolin. He is reputed to have spent nine years in meditation facing a wall in a cave above where the temple is now located. That may just be legend, along with him supposedly inventing the idea of kung fu techniques as a remedy for the bodily weakness induced by long periods of meditation. But what is known for sure is that the form of meditation-focused Buddhism developed by ‘Damo’ as he was known as Shaolin, became the Chan or Zen school that spread through East Asia.

I did not have to meditate long on the question of visiting Shaolin when I pedalled past the entrance up in the hills above Dengfeng town. There were so many tourists that the roads had been blocked off to cars, and large crowds disgorged by coaches were pouring towards the main gate. I decided to seek enlightenment elsewhere and continued pedalling up to a ‘pass’, beyond which I could see the plain stretching to the Yellow River. The ancient city of Luoyang lay beyond.

It should have been an easy ride downhill all the way after that, but mechanical problems struck again. After freewheeling down the switchback road I heard the dreaded twanging sound from the rear wheel. Two more broken spokes, and others were worryingly loose. I taped the spokes up as much as I could and started off again nervously, to try to complete the 50kilometres road to the big city with a wonky wheel. 

Travelling slowly and cautiously, I had plenty of time to mull over my prospects for onward travel with the failure-prone Dahon and decided that a more robust bike would be needed for the next stage of my Yellow River trip northward towards Inner Mongolia.

Thankfully, I finally made it into Luoyang without further breakdowns. I had to cross two tributaries of the Yellow River to reach my hostel that lay within the rebuilt walls of the old city. It might have been called ‘Hanfu City’ because so many young people were out on the street in costume role-playing as mythical figures from China’s past. 

There was a holiday weekend atmosphere with mothers and daughters in Hanfu riding on motor scooters, students in costume posing for selfies, boys striding the streets as princes and some boys even made up as princesses. After checking into the hostel located in the busy ‘entertainment precinct’ of bars and cafes I bought myself a crepe-like jianbing (煎饼) from a street stall and just sat to do a bit of people-watching.

The next morning I took my bike down to a Dahon store to see if they could fix the broken spokes. After an eight-kilometre ride to the south side of the city, my heart sank when I arrived to find the shop closed and undergoing renovation. But I was saved by the kindness of the female owner who came out when she saw me standing outside with my Dahon. When I told her about my long-term trip along the Yellow River, and the mechanical problems I’d had, she told me to bring the bike back later in the morning when her husband— a bike mechanic— would be there and could take a look at it.

My spirits rose, and they were not diminished despite me then making the mistake of visiting a Chinese national monument on a public holiday. The Longmen Grottoes were just down the road, and it was my ambition to visit and see the thousands of statues of Buddha images carved in caves and niches in the limestone cliffs along the banks of the river south of Luoyang.

The construction of these Buddha statues had started in the Northern Wei dynasty around 493AD and peaked under the patronage of the Tang dynasty emperors Gaozong & Empress Wu Zetian in the seventh century.  The statues were made as an expression of Buddhist faith, in which it was believed that commissioning an image of Buddha would create positive energy to spread compassion, ease suffering and transfer merit to others.

 The grandest of the statues had been commissioned by emperors and high officials, but the Longmen site allowed people from all walks of life to sponsor their own caves, statues, and inscriptions, a practice that continued for over four centuries.

But when I visited Longmen that busy weekend the crowds of people were so numerous that it felt like I would have to stand in line for years to catch just a brief glimpse of the statues. As soon as the entrance gates opened at 9am, a surge of visitors poured through the entrance gates like a crowd going to a football match. 

I should have turned back there and then, but having already bought my Seniors Discount ticket, I was swept along by the momentum of the crowd into a human gridlock on the riverside road that led past the Grottoes. I then endured a one-kilometre shoulder-to-shoulder shuffle along the road, unable to see much of anything on the cliff above me. I did not even attempt to join the greater squeeze of people lining up behind barriers to go up the stairs to see the rock images up close. I just had to ‘go with the flow’ until I got a chance to escape via a bridge across the river. 

An hour later, I’d managed to extricate myself from the Longmen melee, retrieve my bike from a mass of parked electric scooters, and returned to the Dahon shop.

As promised, the bike mechanic showed up and he quickly set to work fixing my bike on the pavement outside the shop. Within 40 minutes it was repaired and ran smoothly and strongly - wonderful! I chatted with the owner about my Yellow River trip and our shared enthusiasm for Dahon bikes. He charged me only a modest fee for the work, and I couldn't thank him enough. 

 

Luoyang was one of those northern Chinese cities that I had imagined to be industrial, polluted and characterless. It was a pleasant surprise therefore to find that my hostel was located in the heart of the ancient city, surrounded by buildings that looked like they came from the imperial era. The atmosphere was one that recalled Luoyang’s past as a former imperial capital - especially when I went for a stroll in the clear warm evening in search of something to eat.

I found myself at the Yingtian Gate, which was known as the "First Gate of the Sui and Tang Dynasties”. This was the place where Empress Wu Zetian ascended the throne and where many emperors held ceremonies and received foreign envoys. Luoyang had served as a capital city for various periods, often alternating with with nearby Xi’an (then known as Chang’an), until the end of the Tang dynasty, when China’s economic and political centre of gravity shifted to the east with the development of the Grand Canal and the ports of the east coast. 

Much of the ancient city was reconstructed, and for a good reason. I hadn’t realised that Luoyang was yet another Chinese city that had been destroyed when attacked and occupied by Japanese forces in the Second World War. The ancient city streets and lanes around me had been the site of brutal hand-to-hand fighting between Chinese and Japanese armies in 1944, which along with heavy bombing left the centre of the old town in ruins. 

This all happened in the same month of May 1944 that my father had been a British soldier involved in a similar battle in Italy. The wartime destruction of the ancient town of Monte Cassino is well known in the west, but none of us have heard of the similar destruction of the ancient town of Luoyang that occurred at the same time, with a similar level of casualties.

Another aspect of Luoyang that I knew nothing about was its role as the birthplace of Buddhism in East Asia. On my ‘rest day’ I took my newly-repaired bike on a test drive out into the eastern suburbs of Luoyang to see the White Horse temple on the north bank of the Luo river.

The white horse statue at the gate was said to represent a pair of horses that brought two Buddhist monks from India almost 2000 years ago. Invited to China by the Ming emperor, they brought with them sacred scriptures that when translated became the basis of China’s first Buddhist place of worship at Luoyang. This sprawling complex was the place where Buddhism was transformed from the Indian origins into the forms that would subsequently spread across the rest of Asia. This international hub role was recognised by a series of recently built additional Buddhist temples built in the architectural styles of Thailand, Burma, India and Sri Lanka.

My favourite part of the complex was the old Qiyun pagoda, which reminded me of the pagodas I saw in Dali. It was said to be the oldest Buddhist pagoda in China and I wondered if this was why I saw a man clapping loudly in front of it. In fact this was supposed to be because the shape of the pagoda produces a unique echo that is said to sound like the croaking of a frog, but to be honest I could not hear it. 

Route map: Zhengzhou to Luoyang via Songshan (click on image to enlarge)