Leaving Zhangye (张掖) with a goodbye wave to Marco Polo. Yes, there is a statue of the man in the centre of town. Apparently he lived in Zhangye for almost a year whilst waiting for permission to enter China proper. See - another bit of evidence for my pasta theory (see previous blog)....
But before passing by Marco Polo, I first stopped at the Big Buddha Temple 大佛寺. Like the Big Goose Pagoda/Temple at Xian, this is another temple that was commissioned by royalty. The famous sight is the reclining buddha. The temple described how they built the reclining buddha hundreds of years ago (a wooden frame which was then covered in clay). The temple also contains many well-kept Buddhist sutras, written in beautiful calligraphy (which made me a bit sorry at not working harder at chinese calligraphy when I was younger).
Then we stopped at a museum which is devoted to artifacts from the Xixia dynasty (西夏）。 This dynasty lasted for less than 200 years and existed somewhere in between the Tang and Yuan dynasties (sorry, my chinese history is hazy), a bit more than 1000 years ago. This was a mysterious bunch of people, not originally of Han origin but they were very supportive of Buddhism and Han culture. Particularly found their style of calligraphy interesting, sort of a cross between pictographs and the brushstrokes we know of now. It is a very exhaustive museum given the niche topic and peaceful too with not too many tourists (perfect for a work conference call... well, it is only week 1 of the holiday).
From Zhangye, it was another 3-4 hour ride to Jiayuguan 嘉峪关, with a stop at the Shandan 山丹 Plains where the Chinese emperors used to keep their horses. The Plains are beautiful: vast gentle rolling green hills dotted with golden wheat and corn fields. Today, however, horses are nowhere to be found anywhere on the plains and on close questioning of the locals, it seems that horses are no longer even used for farming - but instead are farmed for their blood! Naively, I was expecting there to be farms breeding horses from the ancient royal stock for shipping all over the world for racing etc, but in fact, the horses are bred (and beaten it seems - see photo) to culture an element from their blood which is apparently used for children's vaccinations. On this warm sunny saturday afternoon, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go punctuated my thoughts with a shiver.
Next stop Jiayuguan 嘉峪关 - the end of the world as far as the Ming dynasty was concerned.
