Have finally crossed the border into Gansu province today. On the road towards 兰州(Lanzhou), the capital of Gansu, I stopped at Maiji Mountain 麦积山 where there is a very interesting set of grottoes with buddhist cave paintings and mountain sculptures. Maiji means "wheat stack" and so called because the mountain resembles a wheatstack. The cave paintings and sculptures date from the Northern Wei period and many of them are amazingly well kept.
As some of you know, other than mausoleums (and dead communist dictators' embalmed bodies), I am particularly interested in cave grottoes. After viewing the Ajanta and Ellora caves in India, I have been looking forward to visiting the grottes in China. Maiji Mountain is the first one on this trip.
A warning - not for those with vertigo! I was warned before that the only way to see the site is to climb up a precarious network of narrow wooden stairs that are nailed to the face of the mountain. Which turned out all to be true. But I decided to just focus on the beautiful buddhist images and it turned out to be all fine. Another lesson for me - I tend to overthink most things (typical trait of Water Goats). Sometimes best to just take a deep breath and GO!
A couple of hours away from Maiji Mountain is Tianshui 天水. Nothing special about it (another one-horse town) except for the Fuxi 伏羲 Temple and it turns out now is the time for the annual "welcome autumn" rituals. Fuxi (digging back into my memory of chinese history lessons at age 13) is the guy who lived in pre-dynastic times and supposedly invented the Taichi (太极), tying knots to make records, music etc. Not sure at all I believe all this, but the autumn ritual was quite charming. Nice that the whole town got together to celebrate the coming of autumn and the harvest. I also stayed to watch their Fuxi autumn village performance (a combination of painted faces and comedy) and tried their sweet glutinous rice dumplings 甜粽 (RMB2 off the street). A nice change from the sophisticated arts scene in cities.
Time for bed! Another 7:30am start tomorrow.
PS. Lanzhou has the world's worst traffic jams!
